

Ask HN: Locked out of Google Aps email with no recourse - advice? - labaraka

I&#x27;ve been locked out of my Google Apps email for over 24 hrs due to &quot;suspicious activity&quot;. I am the admin of the domain so &quot;contacting my admin&quot; is of no help. Filled Contact Us form and spoke to customer support lady who is unfortunately clueless and cannot help me at all.<p>Terrible experience for such a mission-critical service.<p>Anyone has suggestions on how to deal with this to restore access?<p>PS: I did not sent out any spam or do anything that goes against their ToS. Just a loyal customer for 7 years doing normal day to day emailing.
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akg_67
Email is a critical communication channel. Don't put up with this sort of crap
from any company. If you control your domain and have capability to modify
records. Buy mail service from another provider and redirect MX record to new
service. And if you can estimate approximate value lost due to this action and
you are in U.S., send a bill to Google, file a small court claim against
Google if unpaid for 30 days.

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labaraka
I totally agree with you for the medium term. My challenge right now is that I
don't have access to the DNS records and migrating to a new email service will
take days/weeks.

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akg_67
Migrating to new email service doesn't take days/weeks, at best a few hours as
long as you were prepared with existing email aliases (catch all can help
minimize the missing aliases) and configuration and access.

In the short term, you are at the mercy of Google. Next time you want to avoid
similar fiasco, when you purchase any service from a vendor, please consider
the whole offering from sales to support. If you don't see a quick resolution
pathway for situations when shit hits the fan, walk away from those vendors.

Personally, I have never bought or recommended others to purchase any "paid"
services from Google. They are incapable of and not setup for providing
enterprise level product, service and support.

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Lan
How long it takes to switch services depends on how long you have your TTL set
on your MX records. If he set it to expire after days or weeks, it would take
days or weeks to switch services. Usually the default is a much lower value,
but there are some legitimate reasons to want a high TTL (It could help
mitigate a domain hijacking for example).

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skurry
Probably not what you want to hear, but I'd avoid Google for any mission
critical things, and any business model that relies on Google products for
revenue (YouTube, AdMob, AdSense). Their automated "fraud detection"
algorithms frequently have false positives and ban innocent users, without
chance to appeal and have recourse. Terrible customer service.

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sumodirjo
Have you tried this :
[https://support.google.com/a/answer/33561?hl=en](https://support.google.com/a/answer/33561?hl=en)

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labaraka
Yes. I enter my credentials and it says my account is suspended.

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suyash
Were you on the free or the paid plan? I am guessing if you were on the paid
plan, you would have more recourse?

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labaraka
Unfortunately it's the same deal for free and paid.

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suyash
You didn't answer the question.

