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You can contact support by signing in as the domain admin to admin.google.com and clicking on the question mark in the upper right. Do you have sales people? E

by mike_d 6y ago

You can contact support by signing in as the domain admin to admin.google.com and clicking on the question mark in the upper right. Do you have sales people? Enable any "mail merge" or "customer contact" apps lately? Google rarely shuts down Gsuite domains without a good reason. If they really aren't telling you the reason - it is abuse related. (Former Googler, opinions are my own, etc etc)

jamesrcole 6y ago
> You can contact support by... It sounds like they've already contacted support. They said "Google support is refusing to let us know what happened" and "no one is providing us any answers or providing support".
raverbashing 6y ago
Whereas "abuse" might mean anything they don't like, like a picture on your drive, or a misconfiguration, etc > Do you have sales people? Enable any "mail merge" or "customer contact" apps lately? Cool so Google does not like what I do to my mailbox? I know, some of those apps are crap, but banning an entire org because of that? Good to know that even paying customers are treated by Google as the product
- na85 6y ago
  >Cool so Google does not like what I do to my mailbox? It's not your mailbox with Google.
- loosescrews 6y ago
  I think the implication is that the sales people may have been sending spam email outside of the organization.
- mike_d 6y ago
  No, Google absolutely does not care what you do in your mailbox. They care when you shit in other peoples mailboxes. I won't get in to specifics, but the first few times the user will get spanked. If you keep reenabling accounts that send spam, eventually the domain as a whole gets spanked.
  - gzipped 6y ago
    what i don’t get is why a terms of service violation default response is to lock the whole account down, rather than just restricting the account - for example stopping outbound email or moving to read only mode to limit the damage to people and their businesses.
    - mike_hearn 6y ago
      I used to work on this stuff, years ago. It seems arbitrary and harsh but makes sense in cold engineering terms. The purpose of an account lockout is either: 1. Stop a clear abuser from trashing the network, e.g. by sending spam that will get Google IPs blacklisted (yes this happens, there are no special breaks for Google). 2. Challenge an account in such a way that false positives have a chance to 'clear their name' by doing things that serial abusers have difficulty with, like passing phone verification or in the good old days, solving CAPTCHAs. Virtually all responses to service violations in the consumer world are (2). They're automated, people pass the challenge when they log in and never think about it again so you just don't hear about it. Corporate services pose special problems. Companies expect to be able to automatically create large numbers of accounts using APIs, which is something not allowed for consumer accounts. The latter are carefully monitored, throttled, and ultimately the services may just refuse to let you create an account. Tough cookies. That doesn't work for GSuite domains where the administration is devolved, so what happens when spammers notice this and create such domains then add lots of users at once? Yes they're meant to pay, but some abusers can get past CC fraud checks and other mechanisms that would otherwise make this approach too expensive. Unfortunately the rapid, automated nature of abuse means that the response also has to be rapid and automated. It's not as easy as saying, hmm, foobar.com looks suspicious, let's get a trained expert to mount an investigation. By the time the specialist has woken up and got into the office the attack is over already and you sent 10 million spams or hosted 50,000 phishing sites. That's the flip side of very scalable systems with convenient signup, in which the admins don't suffer any consequences of abuse they proxy or allow (i.e. when you buy GSuite part of what you're buying is Google's spam reputation). That's also why these stories so often resolve with an ending like "A googler got in touch and we're back in now". This creates the impression that the only way to get support is to flag it up on Hacker News or Twitter. That's sometimes true for consumer services where getting people to look at your case is harder but for companies with support contracts, it's often just due to the time lag involved between someone doing a manual investigation and resolving it.
lsiebert 6y ago
You know, if I was providing support, I'd consider it a point to make it as easy for customers as possible to know what to do. Like if I banned them I'd include how to appeal/fix and how to get more info.
- adimitrov 6y ago
  This is just a conjecture: If it is indeed abuse related (whether there was any abuse or Google's algorithm just decided there was some abuse) then telling the abuser what got them banned is counterproductive from Google's PoV. Same reason reddit does vote fudging.
  - easyas101110110 6y ago
    This is a dangerous equivocation of the guilty with the innocent, and throws away completely the notion of "Better X Guilty Persons Escape than that One Innocent Suffer." Do schools or parents not teach philosophy or ethics to these FAANG employees?
    - Asooka 6y ago
      >Do schools [...] not teach You haven't been to school this century, have you.
      - koheripbal 6y ago
        Not even this millennia.
        ganafagol 6y ago
        In the previous one they used to teach that the singular form is "millenium".
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    And if it's not abuse related a Google employee could just take a look at it and lift the automated ban if it was unwarranted. Too bad Google doesn't like having employees for anything that an AI can do with 50% success rate.
Rastonbury 6y ago
As a paying customer I think at least a reason should be given so that the customer can remedy it? Honest mistake or not
throwaway3699 6y ago
This is the correct answer OP.
veeti 6y ago
> If they really aren't telling you the reason - it is abuse related. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial
- easyas101110110 6y ago
  That's absolutely, most definitely not Kafkaesque at all! ;)
koheripbal 6y ago
Even if it was abuse related - it shouldn't just turn into the nuclear option of total and immediate company-wide shutdown. It's amazing that Google doesn't get sued in a case like this, regardless of what's in the ToS. If one of my employees did something bad, I would want warnings and ultimately a "hey, since your employees cannot behave, we're shutting your account as of <date> and have limited <functions> until then so you can migrate your company to another service. This sort of binary response is why I will never commit to Google, and am increasingly evaluate the likelihood of ban when selecting cloud services. Particularly since these bans are immediate, summary, and often based on algos, not humans. ...and this isn't just unfounded fear. We've had our Google My Business listings suspended when we had issues with our 2FA/recovery details. That was 4 months ago, and support also said they could do nothing, and My Business support never responded.
ameyv 6y ago
But they are not telling us what went wrong...So we are in dark. I have shared details with One Googler who is willing to help out. Will keep you posted here

by mike_d 6y ago

jamesrcole 6y ago

> You can contact support by... It sounds like they've already contacted support. They said "Google support is refusing to let us know what happened" and "no one is providing us any answers or providing support".

raverbashing 6y ago

Whereas "abuse" might mean anything they don't like, like a picture on your drive, or a misconfiguration, etc > Do you have sales people? Enable any "mail merge" or "customer contact" apps lately? Cool so Google does not like what I do to my mailbox? I know, some of those apps are crap, but banning an entire org because of that? Good to know that even paying customers are treated by Google as the product

na85 6y ago
>Cool so Google does not like what I do to my mailbox? It's not your mailbox with Google.
loosescrews 6y ago
I think the implication is that the sales people may have been sending spam email outside of the organization.
mike_d 6y ago
No, Google absolutely does not care what you do in your mailbox. They care when you shit in other peoples mailboxes. I won't get in to specifics, but the first few times the user will get spanked. If you keep reenabling accounts that send spam, eventually the domain as a whole gets spanked.
- gzipped 6y ago
  what i don’t get is why a terms of service violation default response is to lock the whole account down, rather than just restricting the account - for example stopping outbound email or moving to read only mode to limit the damage to people and their businesses.
  - mike_hearn 6y ago
    I used to work on this stuff, years ago. It seems arbitrary and harsh but makes sense in cold engineering terms. The purpose of an account lockout is either: 1. Stop a clear abuser from trashing the network, e.g. by sending spam that will get Google IPs blacklisted (yes this happens, there are no special breaks for Google). 2. Challenge an account in such a way that false positives have a chance to 'clear their name' by doing things that serial abusers have difficulty with, like passing phone verification or in the good old days, solving CAPTCHAs. Virtually all responses to service violations in the consumer world are (2). They're automated, people pass the challenge when they log in and never think about it again so you just don't hear about it. Corporate services pose special problems. Companies expect to be able to automatically create large numbers of accounts using APIs, which is something not allowed for consumer accounts. The latter are carefully monitored, throttled, and ultimately the services may just refuse to let you create an account. Tough cookies. That doesn't work for GSuite domains where the administration is devolved, so what happens when spammers notice this and create such domains then add lots of users at once? Yes they're meant to pay, but some abusers can get past CC fraud checks and other mechanisms that would otherwise make this approach too expensive. Unfortunately the rapid, automated nature of abuse means that the response also has to be rapid and automated. It's not as easy as saying, hmm, foobar.com looks suspicious, let's get a trained expert to mount an investigation. By the time the specialist has woken up and got into the office the attack is over already and you sent 10 million spams or hosted 50,000 phishing sites. That's the flip side of very scalable systems with convenient signup, in which the admins don't suffer any consequences of abuse they proxy or allow (i.e. when you buy GSuite part of what you're buying is Google's spam reputation). That's also why these stories so often resolve with an ending like "A googler got in touch and we're back in now". This creates the impression that the only way to get support is to flag it up on Hacker News or Twitter. That's sometimes true for consumer services where getting people to look at your case is harder but for companies with support contracts, it's often just due to the time lag involved between someone doing a manual investigation and resolving it.

lsiebert 6y ago

You know, if I was providing support, I'd consider it a point to make it as easy for customers as possible to know what to do. Like if I banned them I'd include how to appeal/fix and how to get more info.

adimitrov 6y ago
This is just a conjecture: If it is indeed abuse related (whether there was any abuse or Google's algorithm just decided there was some abuse) then telling the abuser what got them banned is counterproductive from Google's PoV. Same reason reddit does vote fudging.
- easyas101110110 6y ago
  This is a dangerous equivocation of the guilty with the innocent, and throws away completely the notion of "Better X Guilty Persons Escape than that One Innocent Suffer." Do schools or parents not teach philosophy or ethics to these FAANG employees?
  - Asooka 6y ago
    >Do schools [...] not teach You haven't been to school this century, have you.
    - koheripbal 6y ago
      Not even this millennia.
      - ganafagol 6y ago
        In the previous one they used to teach that the singular form is "millenium".
- alpaca128 6y ago
  And if it's not abuse related a Google employee could just take a look at it and lift the automated ban if it was unwarranted. Too bad Google doesn't like having employees for anything that an AI can do with 50% success rate.

Rastonbury 6y ago

As a paying customer I think at least a reason should be given so that the customer can remedy it? Honest mistake or not

throwaway3699 6y ago

This is the correct answer OP.

veeti 6y ago

> If they really aren't telling you the reason - it is abuse related. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial

easyas101110110 6y ago
That's absolutely, most definitely not Kafkaesque at all! ;)

koheripbal 6y ago

Even if it was abuse related - it shouldn't just turn into the nuclear option of total and immediate company-wide shutdown. It's amazing that Google doesn't get sued in a case like this, regardless of what's in the ToS. If one of my employees did something bad, I would want warnings and ultimately a "hey, since your employees cannot behave, we're shutting your account as of <date> and have limited <functions> until then so you can migrate your company to another service. This sort of binary response is why I will never commit to Google, and am increasingly evaluate the likelihood of ban when selecting cloud services. Particularly since these bans are immediate, summary, and often based on algos, not humans. ...and this isn't just unfounded fear. We've had our Google My Business listings suspended when we had issues with our 2FA/recovery details. That was 4 months ago, and support also said they could do nothing, and My Business support never responded.

ameyv 6y ago

But they are not telling us what went wrong...So we are in dark. I have shared details with One Googler who is willing to help out. Will keep you posted here