Google Workspace thinks my domain is an email provider

(blog.elis.cc)

72 points | by el1s7 3 hours ago

14 comments

  • dmd 25 minutes ago
    I 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.

  • ivan_gammel 29 minutes ago
    Smells 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.
  • qingcharles 19 minutes ago
    I 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.

  • sam_lowry_ 1 hour ago
    The end is really hilarious. Google had a stupid frontend-only validation, it seems.
    • chmod775 26 minutes ago
      Since 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.

  • petepete 38 minutes ago
    Just wait for someone at Google to read this post and then block the domain retrospectively.
    • llacb47 29 minutes ago
      And ban their entire Google account
      • qingcharles 19 minutes ago
        And delete all their data.
        • sunaookami 7 minutes ago
          *make it hidden, they will of course keep the data for themselves :)
  • dutchCourage 12 minutes ago
    Since 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.

  • fillthegap 7 minutes ago
    I think ditching google would've been a better choice.
  • bonzini 57 minutes ago
    alice.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.

  • sikozu 56 minutes ago
    This was a fun read. Absolutely baffling behaviour from Google.
  • cube00 46 minutes ago
    If 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.

  • t0mas88 56 minutes ago
    I would hope that somewhere at Google there is a policy that says you can't do anti-fraud and security checks in frontend only...
  • yieldcrv 16 minutes ago
    ooof that's bad, all levels of support missed the frontend validation and blamed you and an opaque non-existent process instead
  • mpalczewski 42 minutes ago
    I 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- 31 minutes ago
      web.net, at least, absolutely is an email provider.
      • 0x073 7 minutes ago
        web.de is also a big email provider in Germany.
      • mpalczewski 29 minutes ago
        fair enough. at least not primarily an email provider. so if they offer any email.