If you use a whacky domain name suffix I dunno what else you expect.
Act unconventional and you’ll encounter various inconveniences for doing so, which applies to the real world, too.
Google Workspace thinks my domain is an email provider (2025)
71–80 of 163 posts
Re: Google Workspace thinks my domain is an email provider (2025)
#72>write an entire blog post ranting about how the company that runs the product doesn't give a shit and has terrible support
>signs up for it anyway
Why?
Re: Google Workspace thinks my domain is an email provider (2025)
#73Google has a computer making decisions that affect humans, and then they then have humans defending the decisions a computer did. We live in a dystopia. I hope "Karen" sees the irony in the day job she is doing.
A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE. THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION.
—IBM, 1979
Re: Google Workspace thinks my domain is an email provider (2025)
#74The end is really hilarious. Google had a stupid frontend-only validation, it seems.
This seems like something more intended to avoid a bunch of pointless attempted signups from people who don't understand what having a domain means who then won't be able to do the later step where you verify that you actually own it.
A client-side check's not so unreasonable for that kind of thing.
Of course then you still want the list to be accurate and/or actually have some working support flow that results in an overzealous filter getting fixed. The code suggests that they do or did have a process at some point: the list of specific domains is an override that allows domains that would otherwise match one of the regexes and get blocked.
Re: Google Workspace thinks my domain is an email provider (2025)
#75This was a fun read. Absolutely baffling behaviour from Google.
Not baffling at all. Google could not care less about individual users. (lots of horror stories about account getting disabled here and on reddit.) They only care about large enterprise customers. Not even the smaller ones, only the largest. Speaking from first hand experience.
A division of the Ukranian government seems to come pretty close to a "large enterprise".
Maybe there are politics involved, but fixing a broken regex seems well worth the time to convince a foreign government to rely on your tech.
Of course, the support request never reached anyone who knows what a regex is, so bugs get confused for policy and nobody cares to fix it.
Re: Google Workspace thinks my domain is an email provider (2025)
#76I'd recommend not coming up with inventive fixes like this. There's a non-zero chance that check is in some server-side validation that you can't work around, and one day something you rely on becomes unrecoverable. Take it as a sign that it won't always work
Re: Google Workspace thinks my domain is an email provider (2025)
#77I can only presume this regex is there because Google had to block various scammers trying to use email hosting donain names when novel TLDs came onto the market. You can try to manage gmail.zip or outlook.mov but Google will probably flag you as a scammer if you try to email from them. Just because web.de isn't well-known outside of German circles doesn't mean the risk doesn't exist. These email providers, especially the ones hosted by Microsoft, have a history of buying multiple TLDs to offer users a localised email domain.
Blocking a second level domain like the Ukranians tried to use is surprising, though. I guess it's to prevent domains like outlook.co.uk or something like that?
These regexes were put there for a reason so I doubt they'll get removed, but if they fix their frontend-only detection script you're going to be locked out of your domain some day if you force your way through their checks. Seems awfully risky.
Re: Google Workspace thinks my domain is an email provider (2025)
#78My business Workspace account got suspended recently, no reason given, can’t even login to contact support. I’m a solo user so I only had one admin account and that was the one locked out. There was just one text field to submit an appeal, so I did. I never got any email confirmation or tracking number for my appeal, it’s been a week now with no contact from Google. This happened about a week after they charged my cr…
I got into self hosting in 2021. A cheap 2.5Gb how from racknerd, $20-22/year, + domain. It's been as smooth sailing as any other email provider. Very satisfied. Try it
How do you back up? What stack are you using?
Re: Google Workspace thinks my domain is an email provider (2025)
#79This was a fun read. Absolutely baffling behaviour from Google.
I get it, they want to stop scammeers to sign up with domains that look close like a real email provider. In this case web.de
Re: Google Workspace thinks my domain is an email provider (2025)
#80One time in college I bypassed client-side validation to order a burrito in a slightly earlier pickup window. More recently, I unhid html elements for features that were "disabled" on an ISP provided router.
You can query an LLM for "a bookmarklet to show hidden elements and enable disabled inputs".