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Google Workspace thinks my domain is an email provider (2025)
- spl757 1mo agothat's a trip. nice catch!
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- sam_lowry_ 1mo agoThe end is really hilarious. Google had a stupid frontend-only validation, it seems.
- chmod775 1mo agoSince Google themselves claim that's a security check, there's a bug bounty here. The author of that article missed their chance making Google eat their words.
- tzs 1mo agoOr he missed the chance to get Google to move that check to the back end and then when it is time to renew find out that he cannot, if he’s lucky enough for it to not break earlier.
- pigbearpig 1mo agoI was under the impression Google engineers went through a rigorous hiring process, yet this is the sort of thing you get from lowest bidder consultants who have inexperienced devs.
- anon48293 1mo agoNah Google and Microsoft have been offshoring to India for years. And sorry, but the developers there suck.
- twostorytower 1mo agoAll that leetcode, whiteboarding, and Googly-style interview questions just to put front-end validation for security.
- zerocrates 1mo agoThis 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.
- chadgpt3 1mo agoYeah but they said it was important security.
- bonzini 1mo agoalice.it is indeed an email provider's domain; based on the code snippet it seems like they are active in other countries. alice.app however isn't registered anywhere.
- t0mas88 1mo agoI would hope that somewhere at Google there is a policy that says you can't do anti-fraud and security checks in frontend only...
- mikey_p 1mo agoBut isn't the web so much better now that everything is client side instead of server side? I still think client side JS apps are the biggest mistake this industry ever made.
- sikozu 1mo agoThis was a fun read. Absolutely baffling behaviour from Google.
- fg137 1mo agoNot 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.
- jeroenhd 1mo agoA 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.
- Mashimo 1mo agoI 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
- cube00 1mo agoIf you could just change your company's domain name that'd be swell! Surprising Google is happy to lose a paying company over this. Although the author is taking quite the risk bypassing Google's validation like that. Not sure I'd be risking my company's workspace to do it in case Google wakes up ban hammer happy one morning.
- ValentineC 1mo agoGoogle would rather cheap out on offshore support than waste their engineers' time talking to real customers. Plus, any entity large enough probably has some kind of account manager or contact in Google that could hopefully escalate to the right person.
- mpalczewski 1mo agoI wonder how this list ended up being created anyway. Was it a long standing issue, or just some ai slop? web.com, web.org, web.net don't look like an email provider.
- mh- 1mo agoweb.net, at least, absolutely is an email provider.
- mpalczewski 1mo agofair enough. at least not primarily an email provider. so if they offer any email.
- 0x073 1mo agoweb.de is also a big email provider in Germany.
- brewmarche 1mo agoYes and gmx (listed next to it) as well, and I’m pretty sure that gmx offered/offers multiples TLDs (gmx.net, gmx.de, gmx.at, …) I think the same goes for Alice (big ISP, offering mail addresses, in multiple countries) It looks like some of these wildcards are for mail providers who use multiple TLDs.
- layer8 1mo agoThe rationale probably was that end users primarily identify the email provider by the subdomain, not the TLD, and therefore to prevent spoofing they block all domains where the subdomain corresponds to an email provider, regardless of the TLD. Like, they don’t want to allow gmail.<anything>, and the same for all other email providers they know of.
- nom 1mo agoscroll through a list of known email providers and you will notice they registered tlds for the countries they operate in, very typical for the old ones like yahoo yandex Freemail Hotmail etcpp web.de is an oldschool German provider, as is gmx.de (and .at, .fr, .com, ...) the regex smells like an inexperienced developer trying to be clever
- petepete 1mo agoJust wait for someone at Google to read this post and then block the domain retrospectively.
- llacb47 1mo agoAnd ban their entire Google account
- qingcharles 1mo agoAnd delete all their data.
- sunaookami 1mo ago*make it hidden, they will of course keep the data for themselves :)
- ivan_gammel 1mo agoSmells like „product engineering“. So a product or an engineering lead gets a task to reduce risks of specific abuse by preventing someone from sending email from yahoo or web.de clone. As a quick solution they add this filter without „overthinking“ it. The impact is low, a few customers in a million, so its stupidity gets unnoticed and, once first complaint reaches them, quietly deprioritized to death. Removing it is cheap: the justification for taking that work is likely the show stopper. Google is an old large corp that hires and fires at a scale. Owning removal of abuse filter to increase revenue by Planck-sized amount is an impossible thing.
- dmd 1mo agoI get this sort of thing constantly because my domain, 3e.org, which I have had for 30 years, is apparently impossible. It's either too short to be real, or starts with a number (obviously impossible). And like the author, 90% of the time I can just disable their front-end validation and go on my merry way.
- jofzar 1mo agoMy friend has a short last name, and they still have many websites be like "must be longer then 3 letter"
- dprkh 1mo agoHas your friend tried clearing their cookies?
- eco 1mo agoI was trying to activate Zelle with my bank and since Zelle is used for scams so often I had to do a bunch of identity verification steps while on the phone with my bank. One of them was to submit a photo of my drivers license. After I did that it OCRed out some details and prepopulated a form with my information. Hitting submit gave me an error saying to use my full middle name, not an initial. My full middle name is a single letter though. The person on the phone with my bank had no idea what to do and just kept asking me try again. I busted out my elite hacker skills though and added a space to the end of the middle name field and was able to steal my own identity.
- debugnik 1mo ago> My full middle name is a single letter though. I guess you could follow the Simpsons joke and spell the letter's name. I'm adding this one to my personal list of falsehoods programmers believe about names.
- sebmellen 1mo agoSuper cool website btw.. cheers!
- qingcharles 1mo agoI use a .one for a project where it makes perfect sense. Brevo, who are a huge email delivery platform, told me they don't support signing up with a .one domain. Fortunately, after a couple of weeks going back-and-forth one of their developers eventually saw sense and fixed it. Sadly, with Google, I don't think you'll ever get the issue that far up the chain.
- hkt 1mo agoI've got a .email domain which various UK based retailers insist isn't a real domain from which email can be sent. I've been trying to convince Argos that it is real for about seven years. To their credit, my building society actually took it all on board and fixed their system within a few months. To my incredible surprise, so did a major insurer.
- dannyw 1mo agoIt probably made its way onto a Jira backlog somewhere, and some engineer thankfully took it as a 1 story point task.
- corint 1mo agoI wonder whether you could use GDPR to force compliance with this. You have the right to correct the record, after all.
- hkt 1mo agoSomehow I suspect GDPR isn't engaged there as they forbid the creation of an account in the first place, so they don't store the data. Maybe I could create an account with a different email address and try it then.
- yieldcrv 1mo agoooof that's bad, all levels of support missed the frontend validation and blamed you and an opaque non-existent process instead
- dutchCourage 1mo agoSince the author asked about Alice: it was an Internet provider in France in the early 2000's. Some domains in that list are truly ancient. That was a trip down memory lane.
- kome 1mo agosame in italy btw, it was an italian provider with some european presence, since then they rebranded (several times actually)
- fillthegap 1mo agoI think ditching google would've been a better choice.
- necovek 1mo agoWell, if the alternative was going to be Microsoft 365... not so sure :)
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- soraminazuki 1mo agoOr just ditch both. These companies have nothing but contempt for their users and signing up for their services is just asking for trouble. There are alternatives for email and whatever else is needed from these services.
- TLDRisk 1mo ago> Just for context, this is a premium domain with a very high premium renewal fee, no history of abuse obviously. The registry premium domains on the new TLDs have several issues. The biggest IMO is a lack of price protection. Non-premium domains at least get the cohort based protection from section 2.10c of the registry agreement. So, in addition to being treated as a 2nd rate domain, there’s nothing stopping the registry from cranking up the price if a domain gets popular. I don’t think it’s ever happened, but have never found contractual terms that forbid it. I made a website about it a while ago after a registry reclassified one of my domains from standard to premium. https://tldrisk.com/beyond-basics/premium-domains/ https://tldrisk.com/beyond-basics/premium-domains/
- sebmellen 1mo agoDo you have a list of TLDs that don’t charge for premium domains? E.g. I have never seen a Registry Premium .com domain.
- TLDRisk 1mo agoBoth .com and .net are price controlled. I think for the rest of the gTLDs it would be allowed. There’s a lot of nuance to it. The registry agreement never mentions premium domains, only pricing rules, so being accurate about the rules takes a long explanation. That’s why I made the site I linked.
- chadgpt3 1mo agoWe really need to replace ICANN.
- dannyw 1mo agoAll more reason to stick with standard TLDs like .com, .org, .net, and your country’s TLD when you can.
- sandeepkd 1mo agothe last paragraph was probably most important one here, and the lesson is If you truly want to enforce a validation then it has to be in the backend, the client side validation is just additional luxury if you can afford it. On a different note, the validations were added for genuine reasons and most likely there would be some discussions/debate on the scope/cost/benefits. I would imagine if some one were to do it a a business seriously then they would have some way to override it on use case basis.
- alibarber 1mo agoIn this case I think the validation is the next step when they ask you to set up a DNS record on the domain you typed in, and have their system match it. Obviously if you typed Outlook.com this would be a challenge for you. Unfortunately that may mean a support ticket and explanation and whatnot, and wasted time. Charitably, it might even mean the customer experiencing friction and going to another provider. So in this case, front ending it seems to make a bit of sense, it’s just really clumsily done.
- Elliott-Diy 1mo agoCrazy that .one gets locked, but .arpa is fully okay.
- soraminazuki 1mo agoThat's not going to pass the domain ownership validation though.
- matteason 1mo agoNot unless you happen to own 0.9.2.e164.arpa, 6.4.2.e164.arpa, and 7.4.2.e164.arpa: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49387570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49387570
- an0malous 1mo agoMy 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 credit card for the subscription. I’m now in the process of switching to Fastmail. Google doesn’t give a shit about anything besides for their golden goose, I would encourage everyone to move away from their services before they just screw you with no warning or recourse just because they can.
- pnw 1mo agoI ditched Google Workspace for Proton earlier this year and haven't looked back. Yes, the Proton apps don't integrate with everything and E2E encrypted data isn't as accessible as the data held in Google apps, but that's a bonus at this point.
- nha1 1mo agoI learned recently that there is controversy around Proton and (surprisingly to me) far-right. Previous HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446899
- copper-float 1mo agoSome people understand that there is naunce in the world. This is literally just the view of a single sponsor. The way everyone gets so up-in-arms about the political views of a person three levels detached from the company is insane. "Oh no, an individual with different views than me offhandedly mentioned Proton, the horror! I can't possibly differentiate between the views of a company and a separate individual! Let's go grandstand about canceling our service and discouraging others from signing up because a random person thinks differently than me, and talked about the company."
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- xyst 1mo agoThe engineer that implemented this probably used it to justify promotion. "Reduced fraudulent signups by <made up metric>. Reduce business risk exposure." Google engineering has certainly taken a nosedive.
- soraminazuki 1mo agoAs usual, this is more than just an honest mistake from Google. Not only is the given justification complete gibberish, it has AI written all over it. They have zero respect for users and it shows.
- tomasphan 1mo agoUser != customer
- fg137 1mo ago> I was about to ditch Google completely and head over to Microsoft That is the obvious thing to do. Don't understand why you even waste time there. You are digging a deeper hole for yourself. If they cannot even provide proper support for sign up, what will happen when your account gets disabled for no obvious reason, and you potentially lose years of emails?
- jd3 1mo agoGoogle Workspace has one of the most perplexing interfaces I've ever had the displeasure of getting to know and use. Namely, it seems impossible to archive users despite the fact that we have a business account and have already archived numerous former employees.
- wodenokoto 1mo agoI was about to say that the response was pretty clear, e.g, “your domain sounds like spam”, and you can’t give a more clear reasoning for “exactly why” than any other spam filter can give you an “exactly why reason”. But then I saw the work around at it turned out it was just incompetence compounding.
- CGamesPlay 1mo ago> 3.) Fictitious Domain Considerations: As you may know, domains that has ".web" have faced issues related to fictitious domain name usage. While ".one" is not ".web" the combination of the subdomain and TLD triggers similar security protocols. This is an LLM response. It's the classic pattern where the LLM says something completely unrelated to the topic at hand, realizes that it doesn't have a backspace key, and tries to hedge it in.
- natpalmer1776 1mo agoThere needs to be a Hanlon’s razor but for suspecting something is LLM generated. The typo and grammar mistakes in the response lead me to think it’s a human, but no way to really know.
- Matheus28 1mo agoI GUARANTEE that was written by AI. This type of slop is unmistakable
- embedding-shape 1mo ago> The typo and grammar mistakes in the response lead me to think it’s a human People using LLMs to "spam" slop already caught up on this sentiment and are purposefully introducing grammar and spelling mistakes in the outputs now. I'm not saying yay/nay in this particular case, just sharing what I've seen in the wild. If a company get complaints that customer support is too robotic after starting to use LLMs for it, making it more concise and introducing subtle mistakes are two surefire approaches they'd get recommended.
- neuroticnews25 1mo agoI refuse to believe there are actual human beings so blatantly splitting a single concept into three artificial points.
- lbriner 1mo agoBeen happening for years. You are not talking to a Developer but someone employed to do "support" who 1) might not know much or 2) think they know a lot but they don't 3) can't tell you the actual reason so try and BS an answer that will make you go away.
- avazhi 1mo agoIf 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.
- sethaurus 1mo agoGoogle sells (and also owns) domains with exotic TLDs. It's reasonable to expect them to get handled gracefully. And as the article explains, it was the prefix (web.*) and not the suffix (one.*) which turned out to be tripping their validation rules.
- Doctor_Fegg 1mo agoThat’s right, you should do the conventional thing by using gmail, and then you’ll never encounter any difficulties because Google never make capricious decisions like (checks notes) blocking access from certain paying customers using a half-arsed regex.
- samlinnfer 1mo ago>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?
- anilakar 1mo agoGoogle 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
- Maxion 1mo agoTechnically not allowed in the EU. Will probably take several more years before they get fined a few hundred million again.
- anilakar 1mo agoGoogle will present multipe bogus reasons, such as: 1) it is not automated 2) the user consented 3) subjecting oneself to automated processing is a hard requirement while in reality 1) a human rubberstamping the decision does not make it non-automated 2) coerced or forced consent via ToS and a checkbox is not consent 3) automated processing is not a requirement, just a business decision.
- f4c39012 1mo agoI'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
- jeroenhd 1mo agoI 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.
- chinathrow 1mo agoThw regex on the frontend only makes zero sense though.
- manarth 1mo ago> "gmail.zip or outlook.mov" will probably flag you as a spammer > "web.de isn't well-known outside of German circles" I'm not sure that "gmail" or "outlook" would cause people to think that the sender was in some way "authoritative", but I can understand the organisations wanting to discourage potential pretexting (plus the trademark violation). I'm not sure how "web.de" or "web.one" would be perceived as especially trustworthy though. "It must be genuine, it's from the official Web"?
- pvillano 1mo agoOne 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".
- xlmnxp 1mo agoBetter then my email invalidate most email checks because it 5 characters wide
- mdrzn 1mo ago"I was curious what would happen if I disabled this function, so I did, and I was happy to find out that once disabled, I was able to continue the sign-up process for my domain successfully. That means that this was only a frontend validation, not a server-side one." This is so stupid.
- lr0 1mo agoI had a similar experience with Google's support this year when I logged to my older Google account from a new device, and I was automatically logged out from everywhere, when I was trying to login again it asked me to provide an OTP, when I asked the form to send me the OTP, it said that I've done so many attempts. Later, I learnt that this is actually very common problem, if you see the "Me too" count on the Google Community Help, it's about 20K (https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/52598991/my-gmail-can-t-been-recovered-due-to-too-many-failed-attempts-i-have-tried-after-24-hours-same?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/52598991/my-gmail...) users, that's a huge amount of false positives that Google refuses to care enough about to make a change in their automated account process, which they keep bringing up when users complain, they say the process is automated and nothing could be done about it (well, you are a tech company, can't you like change the code or something?). Unironically I had to wait uncertainly for a week then try, which did not work (same too many attempts), then after two weeks, then after couple of months, until I just gave up and created a new account. After 4 months I was able to finally login again.
- chadgpt3 1mo agoSince "me too" begins with "me", support staff couldn't see it, and assumed it was just one product (human) having the issue.
- FireBeyond 1mo agoI'm now at the point where I cannot create a new Google account as my phone number "has been used too many times".
- baptistemicl 1mo ago[flagged]
- anon48293 1mo agoWith how many products Google suddenly retires, and how they often just ban or remove accounts without any sort of support, it’s mind boggling to me that anybody still considers to use any Google service honestly. Well, apart from search and advertisement, maybe.
- Hitish 1mo agoAsking all those hard dsa questions, only to end up skipping server-side validation in one of their most-used products, is honestly unbelievable.
- otto23 1mo agoAlice once was one of Germany's biggest DSL providers started 1995. Haven't heard of that brand for about a decade. A quick websearch leads to an obviously still existing webmail service.
- mikey_p 1mo agoStuff like this is why I migrated all my services away from Google. I don't do business with people that treat me like shit.
- suzuki_yuya 1mo ago[dead]
- torh 1mo agoI love client side validation.
- raver1975 1mo agoBypassing the gate is probably against the law, you're a hacker.
- 7bit 1mo ago> I was curious what would happen if I disabled this function, so I did, and I was happy to find out that once disabled, I was able to continue the sign-up process for my domain successfully. Bro is asking for other issues that could potentially take down the entire company. I would NEVER EVER move company critical services to Google or any other provider if they legitimately don't care or don't have the qualification to fix an issue at the sign up stage.