> 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.
There 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.
My 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.
I’m also worried that this is just the future of SaaS where everything is a Kafkaesque nightmare of automated processes no one even understands anymore, and even these incidents are lost in so much complexity the businesses either don’t care or don’t even know it’s happening.
It already is, that’s why I prefer companies I can physically visit. My hosting, email, payments for my company are now places I can reach within hours and just have a chat. In person, people are a lot less nasty and they cannot yet (…) fob me off with an AI.
I 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.
Some 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."
I believe when the views of that person who has influence on the product, and it does not align with the services they say they desire to provide, it’s an issue.
It also can purely be choosing to not support an organization that doesn’t align with your world view. The money in our pockets is the power to change things.
If I’m reading this right, it was a failure at due diligence before sponsoring a YouTube channel. That doesn’t sound at all like what you wrote so maybe you could expand on what the controversy was?
I have the same issue but just for Google Cloud thankfully. Never got a response when I filled in the text field. When I contacted support they kept asking me do go to things in the Google Cloud dashboard (that I was banned from). Then eventually the person said they'd escalate and I'd get an email but I never got anything. Maybe I'll try calling a sales number.
Yea I really resonated with the messaging and mission of Migadu. Super reliable hosting. Have had it for nearly 5 years now. (of course now that I recommend it, I bet they're going to have an outage...)
I switched over to Zoho, has a lot of the same tools (mail/users/office) but UI is much more tech-y / old-school it e.g. more dense. Gets to the point.
I also use it with my own domain registered outside Zoho, so Zoho cannot actually lock me out of my email ever, only the data they host, though this is true for external domains in Google Workspace also.
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.
I 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.
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.
Google 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.
> 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.
This seems like something more intended to avoid a bunch of pointless attempted signups from people who don't understand what having a domain means who then won't be able to do the later step where you verify that you actually own it.
A client-side check's not so unreasonable for that kind of thing.
Of course then you still want the list to be accurate and/or actually have some working support flow that results in an overzealous filter getting fixed. The code suggests that they do or did have a process at some point: the list of specific domains is an override that allows domains that would otherwise match one of the regexes and get blocked.
I 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.
I 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.
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.
I'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.
One 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".
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.
I'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
As 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.
I 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.
Or 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.
> 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?
the 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.
In 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.
Not baffling at all. Google could not care less about individual users. (lots of horror stories about account getting disabled here and on reddit.) They only care about large enterprise customers. Not even the smaller ones, only the largest. Speaking from first hand experience.
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.
The 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.
scroll 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
> 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.
There 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.
I GUARANTEE that was written by AI. This type of slop is unmistakable
This doesn't make sense, even if the LLM had access to the source code
But yeah I kinda understand why would they want to block stuff with 'web'
My 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.
I’m also worried that this is just the future of SaaS where everything is a Kafkaesque nightmare of automated processes no one even understands anymore, and even these incidents are lost in so much complexity the businesses either don’t care or don’t even know it’s happening.
It already is, that’s why I prefer companies I can physically visit. My hosting, email, payments for my company are now places I can reach within hours and just have a chat. In person, people are a lot less nasty and they cannot yet (…) fob me off with an AI.
That's pretty much the way the work did now if you're dealing with the "right" companies. The future isn't evenly distributed.
I 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.
I learned recently that there is controversy around Proton and (surprisingly to me) far-right. Previous HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446899
Some 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."
I believe when the views of that person who has influence on the product, and it does not align with the services they say they desire to provide, it’s an issue.
It also can purely be choosing to not support an organization that doesn’t align with your world view. The money in our pockets is the power to change things.
If I’m reading this right, it was a failure at due diligence before sponsoring a YouTube channel. That doesn’t sound at all like what you wrote so maybe you could expand on what the controversy was?
I have the same issue but just for Google Cloud thankfully. Never got a response when I filled in the text field. When I contacted support they kept asking me do go to things in the Google Cloud dashboard (that I was banned from). Then eventually the person said they'd escalate and I'd get an email but I never got anything. Maybe I'll try calling a sales number.
Yea I really resonated with the messaging and mission of Migadu. Super reliable hosting. Have had it for nearly 5 years now. (of course now that I recommend it, I bet they're going to have an outage...)
Dispute the credit card charge and you might be able to get in touch with someone.
I switched over to Zoho, has a lot of the same tools (mail/users/office) but UI is much more tech-y / old-school it e.g. more dense. Gets to the point.
I also use it with my own domain registered outside Zoho, so Zoho cannot actually lock me out of my email ever, only the data they host, though this is true for external domains in Google Workspace also.
I got into self hosting in 2021.
A cheap 2.5Gb how from racknerd, $20-22/year, + domain.
It's been as smooth sailing as any other email provider.
Very satisfied.
Try it
How do you back up? What stack are you using?
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.
My friend has a short last name, and they still have many websites be like "must be longer then 3 letter"
I 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.
Has your friend tried clearing their cookies?
Super cool website btw.. cheers!
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.
Google 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
Technically not allowed in the EU. Will probably take several more years before they get fined a few hundred million again.
> 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/
All more reason to stick with standard TLDs like .com, .org, .net, and your country’s TLD when you can.
Do you have a list of TLDs that don’t charge for premium domains? E.g. I have never seen a Registry Premium .com domain.
The end is really hilarious. Google had a stupid frontend-only validation, it seems.
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.
This seems like something more intended to avoid a bunch of pointless attempted signups from people who don't understand what having a domain means who then won't be able to do the later step where you verify that you actually own it.
A client-side check's not so unreasonable for that kind of thing.
Of course then you still want the list to be accurate and/or actually have some working support flow that results in an overzealous filter getting fixed. The code suggests that they do or did have a process at some point: the list of specific domains is an override that allows domains that would otherwise match one of the regexes and get blocked.
I 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.
Nah Google and Microsoft have been offshoring to India for years. And sorry, but the developers there suck.
All that leetcode, whiteboarding, and Googly-style interview questions just to put front-end validation for security.
I 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.
Thw regex on the frontend only makes zero sense though.
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.
I'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.
It probably made its way onto a Jira backlog somewhere, and some engineer thankfully took it as a 1 story point task.
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.
same in italy btw, it was an italian provider with some european presence, since then they rebranded (several times actually)
Just wait for someone at Google to read this post and then block the domain retrospectively.
And ban their entire Google account
And delete all their data.
*make it hidden, they will of course keep the data for themselves :)
>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?
One 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".
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.
Google 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.
I'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
As 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.
User != customer
I 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.
I think ditching google would've been a better choice.
Well, if the alternative was going to be Microsoft 365... not so sure :)
Or 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.
> 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?
the 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.
In 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.
This was a fun read. Absolutely baffling behaviour from Google.
Not baffling at all. Google could not care less about individual users. (lots of horror stories about account getting disabled here and on reddit.) They only care about large enterprise customers. Not even the smaller ones, only the largest. Speaking from first hand experience.
A division of the Ukranian government seems to come pretty close to a "large enterprise".
Maybe there are politics involved, but fixing a broken regex seems well worth the time to convince a foreign government to rely on your tech.
Of course, the support request never reached anyone who knows what a regex is, so bugs get confused for policy and nobody cares to fix it.
I get it, they want to stop scammeers to sign up with domains that look close like a real email provider. In this case web.de
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.
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...
Crazy that .one gets locked, but .arpa is fully okay.
That's not going to pass the domain ownership validation though.
Not 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
Google 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.
ooof that's bad, all levels of support missed the frontend validation and blamed you and an opaque non-existent process instead
If you use a whacky domain name suffix I dunno what else you expect.
Act unconventional and you’ll encounter various inconveniences for doing so, which applies to the real world, too.
The 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.
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.
The 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.
web.net, at least, absolutely is an email provider.
web.de is also a big email provider in Germany.
Yes 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.
fair enough. at least not primarily an email provider. so if they offer any email.
scroll 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
Or an pretty old regex from before all those new TLDs
that's a trip. nice catch!