11 ms·

Google Apps Disabled My Domain

132 points by vectorbunny 14y ago

Spearchucker 14y ago
I use Office 365 (Exchange Online) and made the mistake of using my own email address as the primary Exchange Online address. I was unable to access my email for close to two weeks. Other than that they've been better that expected. What I'm saying is that unless you do it yourself these things will happen. A service level agreement can only be viewed as "this is what we promise as our best endeavour", but when it goes south it goes south, and you're at the provider's mercy. I made the mistake of regarding"the cloud" as this "machine" that's impervious to human error.
- jeremyjh 14y ago
  Actually there are businesses who support their customers.
- aneth4 14y ago
  These things will happen, by usually businesses care about their customers and make humans available to fix the problem. Google is notoriously awful at this.
lambada 14y ago
Are people still surprised by Google's lack of support? I think one of the messages here is to take note of any support codes (account #'s or PINs in this case) and store them outside of the service that requires them.
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  > I think one of the messages here is to take note of any support codes (account #'s or PINs in this case) and store them outside of the service that requires them. These codes "will be updated periodically", so there's no guarantee you'll have the correct one if/when you need it.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
ftwinnovations 14y ago
TL;DR A bug in Google's internal systems took his Apps account offline for a week. Slow customer service upset him greatly. To be fair to Google, this was hardly an assassination...
- kordless 14y ago
  > What could I do to restore email? Migrate the MX entries to another provider? Yes.
  - spindritf 14y ago
    It gets better, even if you change the MX entries, there is no guarantee that GMail will deliver mail to those new servers because the domain may still exist in their system. So you may remian cut off from a significant number of people.
    - aes256 14y ago
      I'm no expert on email, but surely once the MX entries are changed, Google are completely cut out of the equation? Obviously any email sent in the interim will be lost, but any email delivered after the MX record change should just be sent to the new provider.
      - citricsquid 14y ago
        I believe spindritf is indicating that google doesn't use the "open internet" for gmail <-> gapps, it's all routed internally. If they find your domain registered within their system they skip the lookup.
      - sdfjkl 14y ago
        No, spindritf has a point. If a MTA is configured to consider a domain as "local" it will route emails internally instead of doing MX lookups. It's likely more complex in this case, but essentially it can mean that any emails routed through Google's systems (Gmail and Google Apps for Domains) will keep bouncing as long as the domain is configured, even if you've changed MX records to a different MTA.
gojomo 14y ago
Remember, to receive prompt support for failing Google services, you need to contact Google via a story at a famous blog, a major social news site, or (ideally) The New York Times.
- bobgourley 14y ago
  Ok this is just so true.
- capo 14y ago
  Or just store the account PIN outside the affected service.
  - Jamiecon 14y ago
    I have been a paying GAFYD user for ~ two years and wasn't even aware there was an 'account PIN'! I fear for most people this simple solution may come with the benefit of hindsight.
    - kroger 14y ago
      I didn't know about the account PIN either. Here's how to find yours: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60233 http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6...
    - chimeracoder 14y ago
      Well, this is not very reassuring: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60233 http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6... Nope, no "PIN" for me under "Support". Worse, > "Please note that for your security, your Customer PIN will be updated periodically. So even if I find it now and write it down, there's a chance that I still won't be able to access support at some point down the road if/when I need it.
      - irq 14y ago
        Only paid accounts and government/education accounts have a "customer PIN", apparently.
luser001 14y ago
I am currently unable to login to one of my domains on Google Apps (i.e., www.google.com/a/example.com returns an error). When I try to register it, it says the domain is already registered. Fun. It isn't my primary domain, so I haven't bothered to pester one of my Googler friends to see if they can do something about it.
- pdwetz 14y ago
  Similar thing happened to me; it turns out someone else had somehow setup an account a couple years ago with my domain (I've owned it since 2000 or so). I was able to get control of the google apps settings for it (they give a couple options, such as adding a DNS entry). However, it was useless because the previous person had set it up in Russian and I couldn't find a way to change it.
  - mikebracco 14y ago
    I had the same issue and contacted Google Apps support using PIN of another account I already had. I told them the issue and they basically cleared out all the internal Apps data of the previous domain owner. After 48 hours I was able to set it up as new with Apps.
mattwdelong 14y ago
Just for my own personal curiosity, has any company made a reasonable attempt at competing with Google apps core services? I know Microsoft offers similar services, but it's not that well "put together" the last time I looked. You're probably not going to be able to compete with Google Drive integration, but if someone put together a well designed integration of inbox, calendar, and contacts with an API, they would do well.
- ommunist 14y ago
  Dropbox is moving that way. Apple tried and failed.
  - uxp 14y ago
    > Apple tried and failed. I've been using Apple's Server.app (Formerly OS X Server) for quite some time now at my home. Its definitely a bit of work to maintain, specifically on the CalDAV and CardDAV integration. But failure is something I would hardly attribute to the setup. It's certainly not any worse to use than configuring and maintaining Postfix/Dovecot/Roundcube and CalendarServer individually. In what way would you suggest Apple's Server.app has failed (outside of the obvious hardware compatibility)?
    - ommunist 14y ago
      I referred to MobileMe solution when pointed about Apple failure. You are quite right on your opinion, but the question was whether is a viable alternative to Google Apps somewhere. And yet there is nothing on horizon except some distant plumes from Dropbox, and now I must add Podio and box.net.
- meaty 14y ago
  Yeah buy a file server and office. Seriously.
  - derekp7 14y ago
    Does anyone have a current best-of-breed list of web enabled applications (preferably open source) that you could run on your own server? Ideally, I'd like to put together a kit that is easy to install, either on your own server or on any hosted provider. Bonus points if the kit includes replication tools built in so that you can use multiple web hosts, and have your own redundant cloud.
ams6110 14y ago
Filed under Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
- Dylan16807 14y ago
  The main issue here is email. That is one egg. You're misfiling.
  - mylittlepony 14y ago
    What are you talking about? "No App services – Calendar, Docs, Drive, and all Google App services are completely blocked. These are not critical for this domain in particular, but would be high impact if denied for some of my other domains." Email is the only thing that got broken AND mattered. And having all your eggs in the same basket has the implication that the owner of the basket can take your eggs as hostages, so you better be careful when you talk to them. Also, remember to carefully read the ToS every day because they can change without notice and f*ck you up.
    - Dylan16807 14y ago
      Right, only one egg mattered. It doesn't matter what happened to the rest of the eggs. If Google only had the email egg, it would have been just as bad. It was not a problem of centralizing the eggs. Google had to take just one hostage to cause major problems. Unless you have a suggestion of how to split the email egg into multiple baskets?
edgls 14y ago
Yet another great example proving google's bad customer support. What is google trying to prove by such pathetic customer service? I have heard complain about almost every google service: admob, adsense, google app ....
- jff 14y ago
  I haven't had any experience with Google customer support, but here's an experiment. Go on Yelp, look up some highly-rated restaurants and shops in your area. You'll still find that many of them have one or two reviews about how terrible the service was, and how the product was awful, and the owner was a dick about providing a refund. Sometimes things go really wrong, and even the best will in the world can't fix it quickly. Only those stories make it to HN, because we all love a dogpile, and because people seem to have realized that bitching publicly is one of the best ways to get their problem solved quickest... although sometimes it's like faking a heart attack so you can see a doctor immediately, then asking him to take a look at a rash.
  - 3825 14y ago
    This will result in the doctor writing a note in Elaine's medical history saying the patient had been `difficult`. Source: The Package https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Package_%28Seinfeld%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Package_%28Seinfeld%29
  - Dylan16807 14y ago
    There's a big difference between a company providing bad service on one occasion, and a company actively blocking someone for days or weeks. Don't imagine a restaurant providing the wrong food, burnt, and still charging full price. Imagine a restaurant taking the customer's iphone and keeping it in a safe for a month, employees ignoring them and telling them to leave. Are you really going to see many stories like that on Yelp?
    - devost 14y ago
      Agreed. My biggest issue wasn't that an error occurred, but the fact that there was no recourse available in a timely manner. I tried to be patient and follow recommended support procedures (post to the forums, etc) but losing email for over a week because Google has an internal issue and couldn't be bothered to resolve it didn't sit well with me (thus the post to CTOVision).
ommunist 14y ago
Not being a part of the Google ecosystem is always a good thing for business. I grief with the author for the loss, and really encourage to use Rackspace, which has more than enough human support options.
meaty 14y ago
Good. The more this happens, the more people will realise that contracting out your critical services to a company with virtually no support and a false reputation isn't a good idea. It also undermines "the cloud" which is a good thing IMHO. Sorry but I have little sympathy and I don't want to hear the "well it works for me excuses" and the financial advantage crap.
- kin3tic 14y ago
  This is an annoying stupid comment. Yeah, let's ignore the success stories and the financial benefits because it what is sort of a race scenario, Google's support failed. This seems like a bug and resolvable as noted by others in the thread. You have a really obvious chip on your shoulder.
  - meaty 14y ago
    No I'm just well versed in business risk assessment and sound engineering decisions. If we were to deploy google apps and that happen we'd be down approximately £120,000 a day (we actually make money).
    - ditojim 14y ago
      And can you point to a single case of this happening, ever?
      - meaty 14y ago
        Yes we lost a couple of servers and associated data in a fire thanks to no DR policy and it caused the loss of a major contract worth 1.4m GBP a year. That's when they employed me to fix it all and make sure that it was engineered properly and that there was a DR policy in place. You can't have a DR policy in place for functionality that cannot be moved from the cloud so imagine the above with no hope of recovery.
    - moe 14y ago
      If you're so well versed in business risk assessment then you surely have heard of the advanced concept called having a backup plan.
donniezazen 14y ago
Google has similar attitude on providing customer support for all its services. A quick example, I have integrated my Sprint number to Google Voice, all my messages and phone calls go through Google Voice, for past few months I have stopped receiving text messages on my phone. I only get them through Google Voice. There is no support, Sprint has no idea, and Google is not reachable.
pjmlp 14y ago
Don't bet your productivity tools into the "Cloud" propaganda.
jiggy2011 14y ago
I don't understand why people use google apps for something as important as email in the first place. Is making a marginal cost saving really that much more important than having actual support?
- maratd 14y ago
  The reason is fairly simple. As a small business, I need my email to work. When I do it myself or outsource it to a small company, it works most of the time ... but not always. I can't afford that.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    As the article indicates the same is not always going to be the case with google. With my email I spent about 6-8 hours setting it up a few years ago and haven't had to touch it since. Never had issues with spam or deliverability. Any decent hosting company should be able to provide the same, might cost more than google though.
  - Mahn 14y ago
    Also it simply makes no sense spending time setting up, configuring and maintaining email servers as a business owner when there are more important things to put your time in.
    - gruuby 14y ago
      Installing dovecot is not much harder then setting up a domain in Google Apps. It works great for small set-ups and you own the data.
      - maratd 14y ago
        This is unbelievably not true. Installing dovecot or similar is super easy. There are many options. Unfortunately, setting things up to the point where your email isn't instantly tagged as SPAM by Google's, Yahoo's, and Microsoft's servers which handle the bulk of the email you want delivered ... is a monumental feat of engineering. Frequently, they just mark it as SPAM when it doesn't come from one of the big boy's servers. What's the point of sending an email if the recipient will never have a chance to read it?
aneth4 14y ago
I've been looking for a functionally equivalent alternative to gmail largely because I fear ending up in a similar situation. I'd like to host my email with a company that has remotely competent and caring support. What are the best services? And no thanks to cloud haters - I will not be setting up my own imap servers.
- tijs 14y ago
  I'm quite happy with Fastmail.fm, there are not that many options out there i'm afraid.
  - aneth4 14y ago
    I used to use fastmail but switched to google as their interface fell behind the times and I wanted features they didn't have. Perhaps I should look again.
- fratis 14y ago
  When I was doing IT consulting before starting my company, we used to contract a great Florida-based company called AppRiver for hosted exchange (plus IMAP and POP, naturally) for some of our clients. The service was excellent, and their customer support was even better -- always extremely friendly and very responsive.
- DenisM 14y ago
  Fastmail. Their support answered at night and fixed my problem in their code in a couple of hours.
  - stevekemp 14y ago
    Fastmail recently reworked their whole user-interface, hiding and removing many good options in the process. Their support queue is backed up days, to due to dissatisfied customers.
- dangrossman 14y ago
  Rackspace Email (formerly MailTrust). The service itself is excellent (IMAP/POP/Exchange hosting, spam filtering as good as Google's, a 100% uptime SLA, daily backups), and it comes with Rackspace's well-known 24x7x365 phone, chat and ticket support. I've hosted my mail there for 7 domains for years.
ditojim 14y ago
im not suggesting every google apps customer should do this, but if you had purchased google apps through a reseller, said reseller could have helped resolve this issue within a couple of hours, most likely. without a PIN. also, why wait so long to use another domain's PIN to contact support? why not do that on day 1? lastly, if you change your MX records away from google apps, your mail will route to wherever you point it. google looks up MX like everyone else, for each domain. every time you send an email to or from a google apps account, it goes outside of google and then if it is an apps/gmail account and mx is pointed to google's mx, it goes back into apps. only then. could support be better on google's end for normal paying customers? yes. so could every company's IT support. just go through a premier reseller next time. most charge the same price ($50/yser) and include support, especially for issues like this.
mylittlepony 14y ago
Good, now you can join the club of people who don't depend on google and its bullshit. You are gonna like it here.
robomartin 14y ago
Just stop using these services. Don't use any service provider that does not align well with what is important for your business. If this includes guaranteed service availability and solid customer service and the company in question just can't provide these guarantees, well, don't use them. It really is that simple. I have not touched anything Google except for Search and Analytics for probably three years. I learned early-on where my business needs did not align with their offerings and we don't use those services. I couldn't be happier. From my perspective Google is a great company. There are other approaches to all of the other services. We host our own email for a number of domains on different private servers. Easy. A license of MS Office on every machine isn't a problem if you have a real business, just like a license of the appropriate Adobe suite is almost a must. Tools like GoToMyPC, for the technically challenged are a no-brainer and they are cheap. There are a multitude of cloud storage solutions. And, frankly, for a lot of stuff, there's nothing wrong with hosting your own access-controlled FTP site to share files with your team (although a paid Dropbox account is oh-so-simple). So, yeah, Google is a good company. Just stick to the stuff that works the way you need it to and you'll be fine.
- kami8845 14y ago
  >We host our own email for a number of domains on different private servers. Easy. From what I've heard other people say, running your own mail servers can be described with a lot of colorful vocabulary, though "easy" not being one of them. Do you know how much it costs you guys to run your own mail servers (both in actual "server has power" as well as technical ops cost) compared to using Google Apps? I've heard numbers in the 10x - 100x range.
  - akkartik 14y ago
    Who cares what the multiplier is. If GA costs $1/yr and your own mail server costs $100/yr (just making up these numbers), it's still worth getting right. Just focus on the bottomline cost to yourself, and figure out if it makes sense.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    You don't have to run it yourself if you don't want to. Plenty of people will take that work of your hands for a reasonable price. Oh and they will give you an actual phone number you can call.
capo 14y ago
To recap: In order to receive support from a human being for Google Apps the account holder needs her account associated PIN, but since this guy was locked out of his account he didn't have it available to take advantage of the phone support. So after a week and by using some trickery he got hold of someone on the phone and the issue was resolved. I’d argues that Google Apps has reasonable support (bigger accounts, I assume, have direct support lines) and these occurrences are relatively rare considering the user base, but they get amplified rather loudly, especially when there are plenty of cloud haters, and Google haters (and competitors) ready to pounce. There might be some risks or trade-offs involved but they’re much less pronounced than some of the comments on any “Google support sux” thread lead you to believe. I haven't had an issue with my personal Apps account but my case is statistically insignificant, same as the case discussed here.
- the_bear 14y ago
  I don't agree that their experience is equally as statistically insignificant as yours. To me, a company should be providing an acceptable level of service to all of their customers, and they must have systems in place to make sure that huge blunders don't happen, even in rare cases. Your experience doesn't prove that Google always offers good support. The occasional stories we hear about Google are enough to prove that they sometimes offer terrible support.
markokocic 14y ago
I haven't read the article. First thing that I saw when visiting this blog/site whatever was a long pageover list with checkboxes and email input fields asking me to subscribe to something. There was no close button immediately visible, so I just closed the tab instead of proceeding. Sorry, but if you really want your story visible, please stop treating your visitors like that.
- mappu 14y ago
  I couldn't find the close button either. The first thing i did? Right-click the black background, choose Inspect element, untick "display:block". If the web developer isn't going to respect the user, then i refuse to respect their layout (and event handlers, and plugins, and...)
  - zizee 14y ago
    I didn't have this problem in Chrome, perhaps s/he has fixed it?
    - markokocic 14y ago
      Yes, he moved it to the right side of the blog. Glad that the complaint worked ;)
  - markokocic 14y ago
    Of course you could do that, I also do that sometimes, but after being welcomed in such an unrespectful way I just didn't want to bother, since I assumed the quality of the article is the same as "welcome" message.
- bobgourley 14y ago
  markokocic I run the CTOvision site and I apologize for that horrid popup. I was experimenting with a new plugin that did not work right and I really screwed it up. But I pulled it down as soon as I saw that.
gingerlime 14y ago
I wasn't aware of this PIN either. Even if you do change your MX record, and move your email elsewhere, you still get locked out of access to your old email, which can be important. I have a (free) google apps account for my domain, but I configured it so it actually still goes through my own MX server. It took a bit of trickery, because google wants you to use theirs, but I managed to get around it. It works well for a couple of years now. My email always goes first through my own MX, and then to google. I would still be pretty upset if they blocked me though. But I guess I can't expect much from a free service.
px1999 14y ago
Google has a well documented history of it being next to impossible to talk to a real person unless you have an $X0,000 hardware search appliance or similar. As an individual, if you're not internet famous, you're taking your business into your hands using Google for critical services like these. That said, not everyone looks at the level of support provided before they choose a service. So, if you get blindsided with this type of thing, you do a quick search to see if it'll get resolved quickly, realise it won't, change your MX records and learn your lesson / plan for a migration out of the service if/when you get your account back. Just like with any problem of this nature. Usually it's just worth paying for something more expensive (and often less featured) for which you know that there's someone you can call when the service goes down in the middle of the night or you get locked out for some random reason. edit: I'm really only being overly harsh because the guy who wrote the article is the CEO of a cyber risk management and security company, and should know better.
bobgourley 14y ago
This whole discussion (post was written by my friend) and my personal experience says to be very cautious about dependencies on any service provider. A simple smart hack would be to auto forward 100% of emails to a different account just for backup, then have the domain registered at a non-google DNS so a fast change to an MX record could be made.
mevodig 14y ago
Something similar happened at a company I work for; the account of the CEO suddenly becomes "temporarily unavailable". I take their word for it and 12 hours pass and the account is still inaccessible. We're a paying customer, so I open up a ticket and it is eventually passed on to the "technical team". I give them a call but they cannot offer any additional details nor any timeframe whatsoever when this will be resolved. Another 20 hours pass and my requests for any update go unanswered. Finally, after a total of 48 hours the account is available again. Still no update from Google. Having been completely cut off for two working days, the CEO is now (correctly) questioning their use of Google Apps so I update my original ticket requesting any additional information they have that could assist me in justifying staying with the service. They tell me this will be forthcoming. A week passes, no update. I reiterate my request and 10 hours later I'm told that the cause was a "server issue"...
- kami8845 14y ago
  Yup. It seems Google really cannot be arsed to do Customer Service. For them this was a "bug" and it is now marked as "fixed". Case closed.
devost 14y ago
Appreciate all the interest in this story. As I mentioned in the follow-on comments, no service is perfect but I think Google needs to try harder for instances like this. The account was disabled and was also the Google Apps admin account. In that instance, I think Google is at least obligated to kick-off an email to the Google Apps back-up email address and alert to the issue with a time-expiring form that triggers a support request with a slightly higher priority. This could all be automated I would think. I realize Google is huge and they provide critical services to many of us (I continue to use Google Apps for several domains) but the "can't be bothered" customer service attitude can have a significant impact on operations and I wanted to generate some awareness about that. Looks like we succeeded on the awareness front.

132 points by vectorbunny 14y ago

I use Office 365 (Exchange Online) and made the mistake of using my own email address as the primary Exchange Online address. I was unable to access my email for close to two weeks. Other than that they've been better that expected. What I'm saying is that unless you do it yourself these things will happen. A service level agreement can only be viewed as "this is what we promise as our best endeavour", but when it goes south it goes south, and you're at the provider's mercy. I made the mistake of regarding"the cloud" as this "machine" that's impervious to human error.

jeremyjh 14y ago
Actually there are businesses who support their customers.
aneth4 14y ago
These things will happen, by usually businesses care about their customers and make humans available to fix the problem. Google is notoriously awful at this.

lambada 14y ago

Are people still surprised by Google's lack of support? I think one of the messages here is to take note of any support codes (account #'s or PINs in this case) and store them outside of the service that requires them.

chimeracoder 14y ago
> I think one of the messages here is to take note of any support codes (account #'s or PINs in this case) and store them outside of the service that requires them. These codes "will be updated periodically", so there's no guarantee you'll have the correct one if/when you need it.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

ftwinnovations 14y ago

TL;DR A bug in Google's internal systems took his Apps account offline for a week. Slow customer service upset him greatly. To be fair to Google, this was hardly an assassination...

kordless 14y ago
> What could I do to restore email? Migrate the MX entries to another provider? Yes.
- spindritf 14y ago
  It gets better, even if you change the MX entries, there is no guarantee that GMail will deliver mail to those new servers because the domain may still exist in their system. So you may remian cut off from a significant number of people.
  - aes256 14y ago
    I'm no expert on email, but surely once the MX entries are changed, Google are completely cut out of the equation? Obviously any email sent in the interim will be lost, but any email delivered after the MX record change should just be sent to the new provider.
    - citricsquid 14y ago
      I believe spindritf is indicating that google doesn't use the "open internet" for gmail <-> gapps, it's all routed internally. If they find your domain registered within their system they skip the lookup.
    - sdfjkl 14y ago
      No, spindritf has a point. If a MTA is configured to consider a domain as "local" it will route emails internally instead of doing MX lookups. It's likely more complex in this case, but essentially it can mean that any emails routed through Google's systems (Gmail and Google Apps for Domains) will keep bouncing as long as the domain is configured, even if you've changed MX records to a different MTA.

gojomo 14y ago

Remember, to receive prompt support for failing Google services, you need to contact Google via a story at a famous blog, a major social news site, or (ideally) The New York Times.

bobgourley 14y ago
Ok this is just so true.
capo 14y ago
Or just store the account PIN outside the affected service.
- Jamiecon 14y ago
  I have been a paying GAFYD user for ~ two years and wasn't even aware there was an 'account PIN'! I fear for most people this simple solution may come with the benefit of hindsight.
  - kroger 14y ago
    I didn't know about the account PIN either. Here's how to find yours: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60233 http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6...
  - chimeracoder 14y ago
    Well, this is not very reassuring: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60233 http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6... Nope, no "PIN" for me under "Support". Worse, > "Please note that for your security, your Customer PIN will be updated periodically. So even if I find it now and write it down, there's a chance that I still won't be able to access support at some point down the road if/when I need it.
    - irq 14y ago
      Only paid accounts and government/education accounts have a "customer PIN", apparently.

luser001 14y ago

I am currently unable to login to one of my domains on Google Apps (i.e., www.google.com/a/example.com returns an error). When I try to register it, it says the domain is already registered. Fun. It isn't my primary domain, so I haven't bothered to pester one of my Googler friends to see if they can do something about it.

pdwetz 14y ago
Similar thing happened to me; it turns out someone else had somehow setup an account a couple years ago with my domain (I've owned it since 2000 or so). I was able to get control of the google apps settings for it (they give a couple options, such as adding a DNS entry). However, it was useless because the previous person had set it up in Russian and I couldn't find a way to change it.
- mikebracco 14y ago
  I had the same issue and contacted Google Apps support using PIN of another account I already had. I told them the issue and they basically cleared out all the internal Apps data of the previous domain owner. After 48 hours I was able to set it up as new with Apps.

mattwdelong 14y ago

Just for my own personal curiosity, has any company made a reasonable attempt at competing with Google apps core services? I know Microsoft offers similar services, but it's not that well "put together" the last time I looked. You're probably not going to be able to compete with Google Drive integration, but if someone put together a well designed integration of inbox, calendar, and contacts with an API, they would do well.

ommunist 14y ago
Dropbox is moving that way. Apple tried and failed.
- uxp 14y ago
  > Apple tried and failed. I've been using Apple's Server.app (Formerly OS X Server) for quite some time now at my home. Its definitely a bit of work to maintain, specifically on the CalDAV and CardDAV integration. But failure is something I would hardly attribute to the setup. It's certainly not any worse to use than configuring and maintaining Postfix/Dovecot/Roundcube and CalendarServer individually. In what way would you suggest Apple's Server.app has failed (outside of the obvious hardware compatibility)?
  - ommunist 14y ago
    I referred to MobileMe solution when pointed about Apple failure. You are quite right on your opinion, but the question was whether is a viable alternative to Google Apps somewhere. And yet there is nothing on horizon except some distant plumes from Dropbox, and now I must add Podio and box.net.
meaty 14y ago
Yeah buy a file server and office. Seriously.
- derekp7 14y ago
  Does anyone have a current best-of-breed list of web enabled applications (preferably open source) that you could run on your own server? Ideally, I'd like to put together a kit that is easy to install, either on your own server or on any hosted provider. Bonus points if the kit includes replication tools built in so that you can use multiple web hosts, and have your own redundant cloud.

ams6110 14y ago

Filed under Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Dylan16807 14y ago
The main issue here is email. That is one egg. You're misfiling.
- mylittlepony 14y ago
  What are you talking about? "No App services – Calendar, Docs, Drive, and all Google App services are completely blocked. These are not critical for this domain in particular, but would be high impact if denied for some of my other domains." Email is the only thing that got broken AND mattered. And having all your eggs in the same basket has the implication that the owner of the basket can take your eggs as hostages, so you better be careful when you talk to them. Also, remember to carefully read the ToS every day because they can change without notice and f*ck you up.
  - Dylan16807 14y ago
    Right, only one egg mattered. It doesn't matter what happened to the rest of the eggs. If Google only had the email egg, it would have been just as bad. It was not a problem of centralizing the eggs. Google had to take just one hostage to cause major problems. Unless you have a suggestion of how to split the email egg into multiple baskets?

edgls 14y ago

Yet another great example proving google's bad customer support. What is google trying to prove by such pathetic customer service? I have heard complain about almost every google service: admob, adsense, google app ....

jff 14y ago
I haven't had any experience with Google customer support, but here's an experiment. Go on Yelp, look up some highly-rated restaurants and shops in your area. You'll still find that many of them have one or two reviews about how terrible the service was, and how the product was awful, and the owner was a dick about providing a refund. Sometimes things go really wrong, and even the best will in the world can't fix it quickly. Only those stories make it to HN, because we all love a dogpile, and because people seem to have realized that bitching publicly is one of the best ways to get their problem solved quickest... although sometimes it's like faking a heart attack so you can see a doctor immediately, then asking him to take a look at a rash.
- 3825 14y ago
  This will result in the doctor writing a note in Elaine's medical history saying the patient had been `difficult`. Source: The Package https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Package_%28Seinfeld%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Package_%28Seinfeld%29
- Dylan16807 14y ago
  There's a big difference between a company providing bad service on one occasion, and a company actively blocking someone for days or weeks. Don't imagine a restaurant providing the wrong food, burnt, and still charging full price. Imagine a restaurant taking the customer's iphone and keeping it in a safe for a month, employees ignoring them and telling them to leave. Are you really going to see many stories like that on Yelp?
  - devost 14y ago
    Agreed. My biggest issue wasn't that an error occurred, but the fact that there was no recourse available in a timely manner. I tried to be patient and follow recommended support procedures (post to the forums, etc) but losing email for over a week because Google has an internal issue and couldn't be bothered to resolve it didn't sit well with me (thus the post to CTOVision).

ommunist 14y ago

Not being a part of the Google ecosystem is always a good thing for business. I grief with the author for the loss, and really encourage to use Rackspace, which has more than enough human support options.

meaty 14y ago

Good. The more this happens, the more people will realise that contracting out your critical services to a company with virtually no support and a false reputation isn't a good idea. It also undermines "the cloud" which is a good thing IMHO. Sorry but I have little sympathy and I don't want to hear the "well it works for me excuses" and the financial advantage crap.

kin3tic 14y ago
This is an annoying stupid comment. Yeah, let's ignore the success stories and the financial benefits because it what is sort of a race scenario, Google's support failed. This seems like a bug and resolvable as noted by others in the thread. You have a really obvious chip on your shoulder.
- meaty 14y ago
  No I'm just well versed in business risk assessment and sound engineering decisions. If we were to deploy google apps and that happen we'd be down approximately £120,000 a day (we actually make money).
  - ditojim 14y ago
    And can you point to a single case of this happening, ever?
    - meaty 14y ago
      Yes we lost a couple of servers and associated data in a fire thanks to no DR policy and it caused the loss of a major contract worth 1.4m GBP a year. That's when they employed me to fix it all and make sure that it was engineered properly and that there was a DR policy in place. You can't have a DR policy in place for functionality that cannot be moved from the cloud so imagine the above with no hope of recovery.
  - moe 14y ago
    If you're so well versed in business risk assessment then you surely have heard of the advanced concept called having a backup plan.

donniezazen 14y ago

Google has similar attitude on providing customer support for all its services. A quick example, I have integrated my Sprint number to Google Voice, all my messages and phone calls go through Google Voice, for past few months I have stopped receiving text messages on my phone. I only get them through Google Voice. There is no support, Sprint has no idea, and Google is not reachable.

pjmlp 14y ago

Don't bet your productivity tools into the "Cloud" propaganda.

jiggy2011 14y ago

I don't understand why people use google apps for something as important as email in the first place. Is making a marginal cost saving really that much more important than having actual support?

maratd 14y ago
The reason is fairly simple. As a small business, I need my email to work. When I do it myself or outsource it to a small company, it works most of the time ... but not always. I can't afford that.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  As the article indicates the same is not always going to be the case with google. With my email I spent about 6-8 hours setting it up a few years ago and haven't had to touch it since. Never had issues with spam or deliverability. Any decent hosting company should be able to provide the same, might cost more than google though.
- Mahn 14y ago
  Also it simply makes no sense spending time setting up, configuring and maintaining email servers as a business owner when there are more important things to put your time in.
  - gruuby 14y ago
    Installing dovecot is not much harder then setting up a domain in Google Apps. It works great for small set-ups and you own the data.
    - maratd 14y ago
      This is unbelievably not true. Installing dovecot or similar is super easy. There are many options. Unfortunately, setting things up to the point where your email isn't instantly tagged as SPAM by Google's, Yahoo's, and Microsoft's servers which handle the bulk of the email you want delivered ... is a monumental feat of engineering. Frequently, they just mark it as SPAM when it doesn't come from one of the big boy's servers. What's the point of sending an email if the recipient will never have a chance to read it?

aneth4 14y ago

I've been looking for a functionally equivalent alternative to gmail largely because I fear ending up in a similar situation. I'd like to host my email with a company that has remotely competent and caring support. What are the best services? And no thanks to cloud haters - I will not be setting up my own imap servers.

tijs 14y ago
I'm quite happy with Fastmail.fm, there are not that many options out there i'm afraid.
- aneth4 14y ago
  I used to use fastmail but switched to google as their interface fell behind the times and I wanted features they didn't have. Perhaps I should look again.
fratis 14y ago
When I was doing IT consulting before starting my company, we used to contract a great Florida-based company called AppRiver for hosted exchange (plus IMAP and POP, naturally) for some of our clients. The service was excellent, and their customer support was even better -- always extremely friendly and very responsive.
DenisM 14y ago
Fastmail. Their support answered at night and fixed my problem in their code in a couple of hours.
- stevekemp 14y ago
  Fastmail recently reworked their whole user-interface, hiding and removing many good options in the process. Their support queue is backed up days, to due to dissatisfied customers.
dangrossman 14y ago
Rackspace Email (formerly MailTrust). The service itself is excellent (IMAP/POP/Exchange hosting, spam filtering as good as Google's, a 100% uptime SLA, daily backups), and it comes with Rackspace's well-known 24x7x365 phone, chat and ticket support. I've hosted my mail there for 7 domains for years.

ditojim 14y ago

im not suggesting every google apps customer should do this, but if you had purchased google apps through a reseller, said reseller could have helped resolve this issue within a couple of hours, most likely. without a PIN. also, why wait so long to use another domain's PIN to contact support? why not do that on day 1? lastly, if you change your MX records away from google apps, your mail will route to wherever you point it. google looks up MX like everyone else, for each domain. every time you send an email to or from a google apps account, it goes outside of google and then if it is an apps/gmail account and mx is pointed to google's mx, it goes back into apps. only then. could support be better on google's end for normal paying customers? yes. so could every company's IT support. just go through a premier reseller next time. most charge the same price ($50/yser) and include support, especially for issues like this.

mylittlepony 14y ago

Good, now you can join the club of people who don't depend on google and its bullshit. You are gonna like it here.

robomartin 14y ago

Just stop using these services. Don't use any service provider that does not align well with what is important for your business. If this includes guaranteed service availability and solid customer service and the company in question just can't provide these guarantees, well, don't use them. It really is that simple. I have not touched anything Google except for Search and Analytics for probably three years. I learned early-on where my business needs did not align with their offerings and we don't use those services. I couldn't be happier. From my perspective Google is a great company. There are other approaches to all of the other services. We host our own email for a number of domains on different private servers. Easy. A license of MS Office on every machine isn't a problem if you have a real business, just like a license of the appropriate Adobe suite is almost a must. Tools like GoToMyPC, for the technically challenged are a no-brainer and they are cheap. There are a multitude of cloud storage solutions. And, frankly, for a lot of stuff, there's nothing wrong with hosting your own access-controlled FTP site to share files with your team (although a paid Dropbox account is oh-so-simple). So, yeah, Google is a good company. Just stick to the stuff that works the way you need it to and you'll be fine.

kami8845 14y ago
>We host our own email for a number of domains on different private servers. Easy. From what I've heard other people say, running your own mail servers can be described with a lot of colorful vocabulary, though "easy" not being one of them. Do you know how much it costs you guys to run your own mail servers (both in actual "server has power" as well as technical ops cost) compared to using Google Apps? I've heard numbers in the 10x - 100x range.
- akkartik 14y ago
  Who cares what the multiplier is. If GA costs $1/yr and your own mail server costs $100/yr (just making up these numbers), it's still worth getting right. Just focus on the bottomline cost to yourself, and figure out if it makes sense.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  You don't have to run it yourself if you don't want to. Plenty of people will take that work of your hands for a reasonable price. Oh and they will give you an actual phone number you can call.

capo 14y ago

To recap: In order to receive support from a human being for Google Apps the account holder needs her account associated PIN, but since this guy was locked out of his account he didn't have it available to take advantage of the phone support. So after a week and by using some trickery he got hold of someone on the phone and the issue was resolved. I’d argues that Google Apps has reasonable support (bigger accounts, I assume, have direct support lines) and these occurrences are relatively rare considering the user base, but they get amplified rather loudly, especially when there are plenty of cloud haters, and Google haters (and competitors) ready to pounce. There might be some risks or trade-offs involved but they’re much less pronounced than some of the comments on any “Google support sux” thread lead you to believe. I haven't had an issue with my personal Apps account but my case is statistically insignificant, same as the case discussed here.

the_bear 14y ago
I don't agree that their experience is equally as statistically insignificant as yours. To me, a company should be providing an acceptable level of service to all of their customers, and they must have systems in place to make sure that huge blunders don't happen, even in rare cases. Your experience doesn't prove that Google always offers good support. The occasional stories we hear about Google are enough to prove that they sometimes offer terrible support.

markokocic 14y ago

I haven't read the article. First thing that I saw when visiting this blog/site whatever was a long pageover list with checkboxes and email input fields asking me to subscribe to something. There was no close button immediately visible, so I just closed the tab instead of proceeding. Sorry, but if you really want your story visible, please stop treating your visitors like that.

mappu 14y ago
I couldn't find the close button either. The first thing i did? Right-click the black background, choose Inspect element, untick "display:block". If the web developer isn't going to respect the user, then i refuse to respect their layout (and event handlers, and plugins, and...)
- zizee 14y ago
  I didn't have this problem in Chrome, perhaps s/he has fixed it?
  - markokocic 14y ago
    Yes, he moved it to the right side of the blog. Glad that the complaint worked ;)
- markokocic 14y ago
  Of course you could do that, I also do that sometimes, but after being welcomed in such an unrespectful way I just didn't want to bother, since I assumed the quality of the article is the same as "welcome" message.
bobgourley 14y ago
markokocic I run the CTOvision site and I apologize for that horrid popup. I was experimenting with a new plugin that did not work right and I really screwed it up. But I pulled it down as soon as I saw that.

gingerlime 14y ago

I wasn't aware of this PIN either. Even if you do change your MX record, and move your email elsewhere, you still get locked out of access to your old email, which can be important. I have a (free) google apps account for my domain, but I configured it so it actually still goes through my own MX server. It took a bit of trickery, because google wants you to use theirs, but I managed to get around it. It works well for a couple of years now. My email always goes first through my own MX, and then to google. I would still be pretty upset if they blocked me though. But I guess I can't expect much from a free service.

px1999 14y ago

Google has a well documented history of it being next to impossible to talk to a real person unless you have an $X0,000 hardware search appliance or similar. As an individual, if you're not internet famous, you're taking your business into your hands using Google for critical services like these. That said, not everyone looks at the level of support provided before they choose a service. So, if you get blindsided with this type of thing, you do a quick search to see if it'll get resolved quickly, realise it won't, change your MX records and learn your lesson / plan for a migration out of the service if/when you get your account back. Just like with any problem of this nature. Usually it's just worth paying for something more expensive (and often less featured) for which you know that there's someone you can call when the service goes down in the middle of the night or you get locked out for some random reason. edit: I'm really only being overly harsh because the guy who wrote the article is the CEO of a cyber risk management and security company, and should know better.

bobgourley 14y ago

This whole discussion (post was written by my friend) and my personal experience says to be very cautious about dependencies on any service provider. A simple smart hack would be to auto forward 100% of emails to a different account just for backup, then have the domain registered at a non-google DNS so a fast change to an MX record could be made.

mevodig 14y ago

Something similar happened at a company I work for; the account of the CEO suddenly becomes "temporarily unavailable". I take their word for it and 12 hours pass and the account is still inaccessible. We're a paying customer, so I open up a ticket and it is eventually passed on to the "technical team". I give them a call but they cannot offer any additional details nor any timeframe whatsoever when this will be resolved. Another 20 hours pass and my requests for any update go unanswered. Finally, after a total of 48 hours the account is available again. Still no update from Google. Having been completely cut off for two working days, the CEO is now (correctly) questioning their use of Google Apps so I update my original ticket requesting any additional information they have that could assist me in justifying staying with the service. They tell me this will be forthcoming. A week passes, no update. I reiterate my request and 10 hours later I'm told that the cause was a "server issue"...

kami8845 14y ago
Yup. It seems Google really cannot be arsed to do Customer Service. For them this was a "bug" and it is now marked as "fixed". Case closed.

devost 14y ago

Appreciate all the interest in this story. As I mentioned in the follow-on comments, no service is perfect but I think Google needs to try harder for instances like this. The account was disabled and was also the Google Apps admin account. In that instance, I think Google is at least obligated to kick-off an email to the Google Apps back-up email address and alert to the issue with a time-expiring form that triggers a support request with a slightly higher priority. This could all be automated I would think. I realize Google is huge and they provide critical services to many of us (I continue to use Google Apps for several domains) but the "can't be bothered" customer service attitude can have a significant impact on operations and I wanted to generate some awareness about that. Looks like we succeeded on the awareness front.