

How can we get Google Support? - fabpot

The Symfony project, an Open-Source project (http://symfony.com/), uses Google Groups to host its mailing-lists. The service is free and we really appreciate it, but for no reasons, Google closed our access to one of our mailing-lists (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/symfony2).<p>That happened a few weeks ago and thanks to some inside people at Google, the mailing-list reappeared. As the admin of the list, I received no email about the closing of the mailing-list, no explanations, and not even an email when the mailing-list reopened after a few days of black-out.<p>I was not happy with this situation but I thought it was just a glitch. But then, some days ago, they did it again. The mailing-list is not accessible anymore, not even by me (the admin).<p>There is no way to get support, no way to get in touch with someone at Google. This is really frustrating. Of course, this is a free service and Google can do whatever they want, but I would at least expect a way to get some kind of support (hell, I'm even ready to pay fot it)... or at least, some kind of email (even an automatic one) telling me what we did wrong (and I doubt that we did anything wrong as the mailing-list is moderated and we are only talking about yet another PHP framework).<p>HELP! How can I get in touch with someone at Google? How can we get by our mailing-list?
======
edent
They actively don't want to support you. Google have an official explanation -
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU0Z_HAzO3I>

It boils down to the fact that even if every customer needed 1 minute of
support every 2 years that would mean they'd have to employ 6 trillion people
(or some rubbish).

As I said earlier this year, Google have total contempt for their customers -
yes, even their _paying_ customers. [http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/googles-
customer-contempt-co...](http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/googles-customer-
contempt-conundrum/)

Self host. Don't rely on Google. Sadly, that's the only way to do it.

~~~
albertzeyer
He talks about 1 billion people needing 10 minutes every 3 years would need
20,000 support people.

And Google could setup the fee for the support in such way that it is
financially self-hosting.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Google can afford to provide support and not charge for it, Google makes
plenty of profit.

The guy in the video acts as if hiring 40,000 people is ludicrous and unheard
of. In reality, it's not even a large workforce compared to companies like
Wal*Mart (2.1 million employees), Foxconn (1.2 employees) and Volkswagen
(500k, employees).

Every decent company has customer support, Google couldn't care less. It
doesn't even provide human support to advertisers, its source of income.

~~~
nathan_long
Whether Google should offer support, I don't know. But I'm not convinced by
your argument.

The companies you name generally have low-skilled workers. Google support
would have to be high-skilled and expensive.

Also, this is not just greed vs empathy. Everything has an opportunity cost.
Google can spend $X staffing support lines for Gmail, or it can spend that
money on developing features and bugfixes. This is a strategic business
decision; either answer may be better for Google and its users.

Of course, they _can_ spend the support savings on Olympic-sized swimming
pools full of pudding. But you seem to be _assuming_ they're doing that.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
_“Google can spend $X staffing support lines for Gmail, or it can spend that
money on developing features and bugfixes.”_

Or it can do both, because its budget is basically unlimited. Besides, you
can't create features or bugfixes simply by adding more developers to a
project. If that were true, Apple would be hiring developers by the truck
load. Instead, they work with small teams, even though the company is raking
in cash.

 _“Google support would have to be high-skilled and expensive.”_

Let's compare Google with IBM, which has 470,000 employees. I would say that
many of those employees are highly skilled and expensive. IBM has twice as
much revenue as Google, makes more profit than Google, while employing ten
times as many people.

~~~
wtvanhest
A lot of IBM's employees are consultants. They are not cost centers for IBM,
they are revenue/profit centers.

Each consultant employee that IBM hires adds to their revenue and profit.

Adding call center employees to google would not add to revenue or profit
unless they had some method of allowing them to capture more rev. Adding
purely customer support people would not benefit google.

~~~
fusiongyro
By that reasoning, nobody should have customer support. Yet people do, because
burning your customers is not a sustainable business practice. Support is not
a profit center, but in the long term profits go down without it. If people's
only loyalty to Google is that their service is free, they won't be hard to
woo away.

~~~
wtvanhest
I am talking about Google specifically rather than a hypothetical company that
may need phone support to keep their customers.

 _If people's only loyalty to Google is that their service is free, they won't
be hard to woo away._

People's other loyalty to google is that their service works pretty much
perfectly. There is no free or even cost based product that I know of that
beats gmail, google maps, google docs.

Before you list a bunch of startups no one outside of the tech community has
heard of, remember that in order for the public to know about these products,
those companies have to pay google to advertise. In addition to having to
offer an insanely superior service, anyone entering the field must also know
how to monetize which is challenging.

If a true competitor arises, they can be acquihired and integrated in to
google which further limits google's need to spend millions of dollars a year
on call centers.

------
swombat
I'm paying for our company's google email accounts. I did that solely so I
could get access to their support.

The support experience was outstanding. There was a smart, informed person
handling the case. It was a tricky case, there were a number of emails
exchanged and several lengthy phone calls, and it turned out not to be
Google's fault at all (it was Rackspace's fault), and yet they were courteous,
helpful, intelligent, informed, hands on.

One of the best support experiences I've had - but it only happened after we
started paying for our email accounts.

~~~
Serow225
This is an aside, but does anyone know if there's a way to get Google Apps but
keep using your gmail address? I'd be happy to pay the Google Apps
subscription rate, but I don't want to go through the pain of switching my
email address to a new custom domain. I'm guessing that you can set up a
forwarding rule from the gmail account to the new one, and then use the Send
As feature in the new account, but that seems pretty kludgy. Is there a better
way?

~~~
Navarr
As a Google Apps user, you do NOT want to do this.

You are well advised to host your email elsewhere and have it relayed to your
normal Google account (and add the email address as a Google identity and a
send-as in gmail).

I'll tell you why:

\+ Google Apps users are the LAST group of people to get access to new google
products (Google+ for example) \+ You can NOT add new emails to your identity
information \+ There is no appropriate way to transfer your identity

~~~
Serow225
Thanks for the first hand feedback. What do you mean about 'not add new emails
to your identity information'? I'm OK with missing out on the latest &
greatest features/products. I also don't really care about Google+, if that's
what your third point was talking about?

------
scardine
I'm a Google Apps authorized reseller. Even for me it is very hard to get
support.

Recently we had a problem concerning the Gmail IMAP API and the X-GM_RAW
extension.

\- [https://developers.google.com/google-
apps/gmail/imap_extensi...](https://developers.google.com/google-
apps/gmail/imap_extensions#extension_of_the_search_command_x-gm-raw)

Quoting from the docs: "Arguments passed along with the X-GM-RAW attribute
when executing the SEARCH or UID SEARCH commands will be interpreted in the
same manner as in the Gmail web interface"

But this is not true. For example, the in:anywhere filter will not work in the
same manner as in the Gmail web interface. In fact, it is ignored. We opened a
support ticket at the "enterprise support" portal
(<https://enterprise.google.com/supportcenter/>), and after 2 weeks dealing
with some entity that could very well be a chat bot, no solution.

By trial and error we discovered that in order to get the same result as
"in:anywhere" you have to issue an IMAP select to the folder "[Gmail]/All
Mail" - which has a different name depending on the user Gmail language
settings - for example, its "[Gmail]/Todos" in Spanish (you have to list all
folders and look for a folder with the "\All" flag).

The document is still incorrect today. Having a billion users is not an excuse
for crappy support. Seems like the whole experience is designed to be opaque
and frustrating, to make you feel like you were the character of "The Trial"
from Kafka.

------
atirip
What support? There is no support at Google and this is by design. If they had
support it would not be possible to offer what Google offers. You are shut
down by robot and that decision is final. There is no support. And robots do
not tell what you did wrong because this would be knowledge on how to play
robots.

I seriously wonder how long such a begging - please Google, good Google - will
finally end.

~~~
zoul
He’s willing to pay for the support. Just as most people in similar positions.
Doesn’t that change the feasibility?

~~~
reuven
No, probably not. Think of how much Google earns per employee. Now think of
how much they would earn per support employee. The numbers are probably not
even even the same order of magnitude.

Moreover, Google makes money from each mailing list (for example) by
displaying ads. The revenue that they bring in from each list is pretty small;
the key to their income is the huge number of lists that they support. So
losing even 100 lists every week, I have to imagine, wouldn't put much of a
dent in their income.

By contrast, the overhead and cost associated with hiring, training, paying
(salary + benefits), and supporting an employee are pretty high, particularly
when you're offering a commodity product competing with other commodity (and
free) products.

From a user's perspective, it seems insane for Google to ignore the business
opportunity associated with support. But I have to believe that they've run
the math, and that ticking off a number of their customers is cheaper than
charging them for decent support.

~~~
evolve2k
If you can't afford to support it you can't afford to run it.

~~~
reuven
I'm not saying that this is a desirable situation for users. But I also think
it's clear that Google has made a calculated decision -- they want to offer
their products for free to as many people as possible, and then avoid
supporting them.

I would think that the lesson here isn't that Google should be supporting its
products, but rather that people should think twice before using unsupported,
free products.

I believe that it was Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine, who said that
if you aren't paying for a product, then _you're_ the product. And indeed,
that's what we see with Google: They give away their products in order to sell
your eyeballs to advertisers.

This doesn't make them an evil company (although perhaps other things do).
They have a legitimate business model that seems to work for many people.

Complaining that Google isn't willing to offer support, free or paid, is an
indication that your interests and Google's aren't aligned. They're not about
to change, so perhaps you shouldn't run your service on their system.

------
ChuckMcM
I like how this has 366 up votes in the last 8 hrs and is at spot 15 as I
write this. Perhaps there is a strong bias against whining about free services
not having support.

Short answer: In order to get in touch with someone to talk to at Google,
first talk to a sales rep for Google Apps and buy the product, ask the Sales
rep to put you in touch with your assigned support engineer. Your costs are
going to go up quite a bit.

Longer answer: These services aren't "free", they cost money and resources to
run. Everyone knows this of course but for some reason it sort of doesn't sink
in. You have exactly two choices here, one you can use someone else's "free"
service and periodically get bitten in the balls when it either fails, decides
to shut down, or randomly disables your access. Or you can build your own
version of the service for your organization where you end up spending someone
on your staff's "free" time to maintain it and some of your excess budget to
"host" it. The good news is that nearly all the groups that might currently be
doing this can get away with a single "business" class IP service with 1
dedicated IP address. So figure $60 - $100 a month depending on your location.

Seriously, that is it. Those are your choices. So suggestions:

1) First exfitrate all your meta data you currently use for Google Groups.
Which is to say download all the email addresses and membership lists.

2) Second start looking around for an alternative solution (check in your
organization perhaps someone already has a machine "hosted" somewhere they can
donate to your cause)

3) Third, I really would talk to the sales guy (or gal) at Google to get
pricing and while you are at it you can mention your having troubles and they
may be able to contact someone inside who will help you out.

------
mablae
This is simple: Don't use google Services, if you do not pay for it. (EDIT:
Search is not meant)

GoogleReader is best example, Google has actually become evil.

@fabpot Did you take a look at Discourse?

~~~
nickporter
Shutting down a free service that they own... evil?

~~~
gnaffle
If Starbucks invaded your city and used their cash pile to give away free
coffee for years until there were no more independent coffee bars left, and
then suddenly decided to close up shop leaving you with no decent coffee bars,
would that make them evil? At least it would make them careless and
insensitive.

A better option would be to a) charge a price and compete fairly in the first
place, or b) open source or sell off the product so it could live on.

~~~
icebraining
Assuming Starbucks coffee wasn't the crap it is, I'd be glad if they did so.
New coffee bars can and would be opened once they left anyway, and until then,
we'd get free coffee. Seems like an excellent deal to me.

In any case, "Starbucks" didn't prevent me from having some good homemade
coffee for a few months now.

~~~
dugmartin
The problem is that after so many years of free coffee almost nobody will want
to pay for it again.

~~~
gnaffle
Not only that, but people would probably be wary of investing too much in a
new coffee shop. After all, if Starbucks changed their mind so suddenly,
what's to keep them from changing their mind again?

~~~
icebraining
Why do you consider it a sudden change of mind? They announced the "spring
cleaning"[1] in 2011 and have been gradually closing services since then.

[1]: <http://googleblog.blogspot.pt/2011/09/fall-spring-clean.html>

------
ry0ohki
The key is to find the Google people on the Groups team on Twitter. This is
how I finally got an Analytics issue resolved that had been going on for
months. Google employees generally want to help, there is just no way into the
wall.

~~~
k3n
Sadly, public shaming on social media seems to be the most efficient way of
getting issues resolved these days.

------
almost
This is why I'm working on a mailing list service to replace Google Groups.
We're just finishing off things at the moment but maybe we can help you? We're
planning on giving free accounts for open source software projects. Email me
if you're interested: tom@almostobsolete.net

~~~
reustle
Unless you're doing something awesome, it's going to be hard to compete with a
paid mailing list.

------
rayj
You can't unless you submit it to techcrunch and Google’s pr sees it...

    
    
      I just spent a couple hours figuring out how to get blogger custom domains to play nicely with google apps.  
    

It pains me to say this (CISPA, Elephant hunting et al) but Godaddy actually
has decent customer support and last time I used it, it was based in the USA.
Hell even Comcast has an office down the road.

------
BenoitEssiambre
You're supposed to use g+ communities now. Have you not been following? E-mail
based lists you say? pfffff, didn't you hear they're shutting down email and
replacing it with 'Babble'?

~~~
hamax
This is the second most upvoted comment in this thread? Wow. I had to double
check I'm not reading Reddit.

~~~
robfitz
[HN Meta] Comments aren't ranked by upvotes. The stuff at the top has a
combination of upvotes, recency, and a poster with a high average comment
rating (discounting their most recent X comments). So if someone who is
typically insightful posts something inane, it will still appear near the top.

(Edit: not that I actually think the original comment was inane. Forgot
context when I wrote this -- sorry!)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>"[HN Meta] Comments aren't ranked by upvotes." //

How do you know? I've been told on several occasions that rank is by vote
difference (ie up - down).

------
jpalomaki
If people are willing to pay for support, then why do they stick with company
that does not offer paid support? Why not simply switch some other company
that has adequate support plans available?

I see also positive side in Google not catering all possible needs. This
leaves space for smaller companies to cover these needs and make some money
while doing it.

------
mablae
Looks like @ianbarber fixed the issue..

[1]: <https://twitter.com/ianbarber/status/321942852823289856>

~~~
lylejohnson
As of this writing, there's still no explanation as to why this Google Group
was shut down. Google may shut it down again later today. I hope OP moves
quickly to archive the list's contents and get that mailing list hosted
elsewhere!

------
songgao
I think the problem here is not only about Google providing support or not.
The problem is when they are not providing support, how they make it possible
for users to solve problems themselves.

If you are gonna close a user's account, either by human or by a robot, you
should notify the user before you do it, so that the user can fix the
violation if there's any, or find/migrate to an alternative.

Mailing-lists might not be the worst. I mean if you have a backup list
including every members email address, you can email them about switching to
an alternative. But imagine your Google Apps free account is closed without
any prior notification. You suddenly cannot use your email. You decide that
you can't have your email address dead knowing that emails sent to it just
sink, so you sign up another custom-domain email provider (or build your own
on ec2), and tweak with the configurations, which takes an hour. Then you go
to your DNS provider and update MX records. Oops, DNS updates can take several
hours even one day to synchronize. That's up to a day that you are worrying
about missing important emails.

And it did happen before: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4825445>

~~~
lnanek2
> If you are gonna close a user's account, either by human or by a robot, you
> should notify the user before you do it, so that the user can fix the
> violation if there's any, or find/migrate to an alternative.

Google is not providing support to save costs. If Google implemented warning
emails and some sort of compliance check or communication to indicate issues
have been addressed, that would add costs as well.

------
anuraj
Google Support - isn't it an oxymoron?

------
Kiro
This could be an idea for a startup. A middleman support service for
contacting Google.

~~~
btipling
That's a terrible idea. You couldn't help those people as you don't have
access to anything.

~~~
Kiro
It's not terrible. You specialize by building up relationships with people at
Google and when you're big enough they will have no coice but to listen to you
and your clients. It will be a movement.

------
fedir
It looks like Google underestimate consequences of such fatalistic behavior.

------
jpswade
Try mailman. It's pretty old, but it's pretty widely used for mailing lists.

~~~
MichaelApproved
The point is that he probably has many people already subscribed to this list
which he will lose without getting it turned back on.

~~~
jpswade
No. that's not the point.

Besides, you can download your subscribers from Google Groups.

~~~
MichaelApproved
I don't think you can download your subscribers if your group has been
deleted, can you?

~~~
jpswade
Of course not, but every good sysadmin knows to take backups periodically,
right?

------
sgdesign
What are some good alternatives to Google Groups then? Seems like it'd be good
territory for a startup?

~~~
mratzloff
It seems like good territory for a hobby project, not a startup.

------
ceautery
I have no evidence for this, but my guess is your group's name (Symfony2)
fails a heuristics challenge, and was disabled by a bot. Perhaps other groups
with variants on "phony" or ending with a number have been used for ill
purpose by others.

(Yes, I realize Symfony is a software framework, but my hypothetical bot may
be using name-matching alone.)

------
mndrix
Google should auction off customer support, like it does AdWords.

Hire as many support staff per product as Google deems profitable. When
submitting a support request, I indicate how much I'm willing to pay to
receive an answer. The highest bids get answers, the rest don't (or get slower
answers depending on request volume and difficulty).

------
alcuadrado
Come on Github, just release the only feature you are lacking! mailing lists!

------
potatoman2
If you have a Google AdWords account and are spending a sizable amount of
money on it you'll have a dedicated Account Executive to help you manage your
relationship with Google. I once worked for a small firm that was spending
about $10,000 a month with Google and we had a dedicated rep we could call any
time with our problems. This was years ago though so things may have changed.

Biggest benefit we got out of it was early access to Gmail, which was a pretty
cool perk at the time.

~~~
josefresco
You must have been one of the lucky ones. We too managed an account (several
years back) with AdWords spending nearly twice that and never got any sort of
dedicated rep.

------
pkamb
A certain gmail Filter suddenly stopped working on February 25, 2013. I only
noticed a month later, after missing several important emails. The issue with
Filter on this particular string is confirmed with one other user, not just my
accounts.

If you happen to have followed the tip in this thread, you better check your
gmail aliases!

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4621666>

------
dbu
Really ridiculous. Makes we afraid, we host our company email service with
Google. What if that just goes away and they dont even care?

------
landland
Were you able to get in touch with somebody at Google? If not, Rand Fishkin of
SEOMoz has a tip: search for them in Google+. Since Google is making a huge
push for it, and since many of Google's employees' bonuses depend on the
success of it, a lot of Google employees are on it. Enter your search term,
then change to "People and pages" and voila. Good luck.

------
ChikkaChiChi
I just recently completed a survey with Google about my premier apps account.
They mentioned my dedicated account rep...I had to clean my keyboard so much
Pepsi came out of my nose.

Google needs to better support its paid services. If its free, support could
be charged per case. But for the love of everything PLEASE let us at least
talk to someone.

------
joetech
IMHO, Google should make support liaisons (more) available. They have people
who work closely with developers and then thousands of developers do the work
for free and just interface with liaisons. Support should be this way, too.
Give us easy access to some liaisons and provide a solid system for helpful
volunteers to support the family of products.

------
cupcake_death
I've managed to find a fax machine in the Mountain View offices that someone
_might_ be checking? Any use?

------
dleskov
Google apparently doesn't want (to help) me to pay for a renewal of Custom
Site Search. The payment status is "Pending" and our account has been
downgraded. Have I missed the news about the death of that service coming?

------
webwanderings
When it comes to mailing lists, there's only Google and Yahoo. The support is
extinct at both places but Yahoo has on and off development going with their
Yahoogroups and I find it better than Googlegroups.

------
tba-goog
Hi Fabpot,

Your Group should now be restored and accessible. Please let me know at tba
[at] google.com is it's not the case.

Thanks, Tzachi

------
tba-goog
Hi Fabpot,

I am with Google and will check what's going on / report back our resolution.
Sorry for this becoming an issue.

Tzachi

------
blowski
I work at Campus in London, which is owned by Google so there are quite a few
Google folks around. I'll see what I can do.

~~~
blowski
@fabpot How can I contact you? I'm @blowski on Twitter.

~~~
8ig8
One of these may help you get in contact:

<http://fabien.potencier.org/about>

<http://www.sensiolabs.co.uk/contact/contact.html>

------
TimSchumann
You should just open up a google apps account, I wanna say it's like
50/user/year.

They answer the phone in 5 minutes.

------
stevoski
Use a paid alternative. Money talks.

------
prg318
It seems to be up right now. Did someone at Google reach out to you?

------
rydgel
Maybe Google thinks that a PHP framework is kind of a threat somehow. You
know, PHP.

~~~
camus
I thoughts so , or maybe google dont like anything French ( i'm kidding of
course ,they bought sparrow ,didnt they ? ) , but strangely Haxe has been
trying to participate the google summer of code for years but was rejected
everytime.

I dont think it is a bot problem , there are a lot of unofficial symfony
groups on ggroups.

My 2 cents :

\- redirect people to stackoverflow in the mean time.

\- build your own Q&A. I know it's a bit of work , but why not build an open-
source symfony Q&A project ? i'm sure you could get support from any PAAS
provider for free to host the app. Make it accessible through RSS so people
can suscribe it.

~~~
mablae
Dedicated Stackoverflow Software based Q&A would be a option. Isn't there some
place to vote for new Sites? When they are used regularly they become part of
Stackoverflow network?

~~~
camus
true , good idea , basically a dedicated stackoverflow 'sub' site ? you'd need
to submit the idea to the SO team then it would need "backers" who would vote
for the project , but it might be a great idea , indeed.

~~~
blowski
There is a Symfony2 proposal on Area51. But I agree with the discussion at
<http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/36634/symfony-2> \- StackOverflow
itself is perfectly adequate, and having two separate subsites would be
unnecessarily confusing.

