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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

I'm usually one for blaming the big company and arcane processes, but this squarely your fault. You missed emails asking for verification, and had your account suspended because of it. This will happen to you again on AWS or any other provider.

Stadia was disappointing, but they refunded everyone everything they had ever spent. Short of keeping the service running for free forever I'm not sure what more they could have done.

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"You missed emails asking for verification"

Did you saw the title of the email? "Important Information for your Account". It reads more like an informational email. How many important emails you've received this week? Could've been worded "[Action Required]", "Account Suspension Notice" etc. And they didn't even drop a notification when my servers were shutdown.

"This will happen to you again on AWS or any other provider."

Can't really agree to this. I read all the horror stories and GCloud is the only one who would suspend you for something like this. I need to be very clear, the suspension is not due to fraudulent issue. It's due to "missing some paperwork". I've been paying using the same card for the past 4 yrs.

Then voila they choose to suddenly dropped you an informational email and suspend you 10 days later.

How many saas apps are you using? 10, 20? Imagine if everyone pulls up something like this would you even have time to run your business?

See similar horror stories below. AWS doesn't pull this shit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32547912

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33737577

And lastly, when something like this happens, the minimal they could do is to get my servers back asap. But you know what? I've been trying all my means to get them to it back at least temp but nobody there gives a fuck. It's all the "none of my business" attitude between their teams.

Here's one more thing that I didn't mentioned. I replied to their verification team 3 times within an hour last friday. You know what happened? Their support team told me "their verification team" already replied to ask for more details when they haven't even read my replies (done all checks on my end can 100% confirm my msg was the last one out). And they've been dead silence over 3 days already. They don't give a fuck about screwing you and don't understand or care about the criticalness of their role.

Your whole story boils down to you not properly reading an email that even says "Important Information". I don't understand how that part isn't your fault. They even tell you that your account will be suspended in the email. How do you not have a special filter to route emails from critical service providers? And I don't agree that GCP is "the only one that will suspend you for things like this". AWS can and has suspended accounts for arcane reasons though support was reasonably helpful enough

I sympathise with the abysmal support though obviously. GCP has horrid support and deserve to be called out. I wouldn't recommend GCP to anyone

> Your whole story boils down to you not properly reading an email that even says "Important Information".

Because 99% of emails labeled "Important Information for your Account" get discarded by spam filters including the one in your brain. In most cases it's nothing more than just another bad spam/CEO scam/phishing attempt.

Clear communication is important - a proper subject line would be "Your GCE account #XYZ is going to be terminated unless verified until 2023/01/01".

Again, how is it that an email, that came from your cloud service provider, titled "Important Information Regarding Your Google Account" was ignored because of the "spam filter in your brain"? Again, this really sounds like an excuse for not reading important emails from your provider. It doesn't even seem to have been marked as spam by Gmail and is from Google Payments which should already have sent off alarm bells. I'm not saying that responding to their mail would 100% have led to your account staying on cause GCP is generally pretty shit but this part of your article is basically handing all responsibility of poorly handling important communication off to someone else

I suggest once you move to AWS you filter and route all emails from these "special" senders to a separate tag that always notifies you on incoming emails so you don't miss them

> but this part of your article is basically handing all responsibility of poorly handling important communication off to someone else

I'm not the person you replied to. Anyway, I'd expect of a company like Google to not word their e-mails in the same way cyber-criminals do - and for what it's worth, many cyber-security training programs actually teach that vaguely worded but "important sounding" subjects are a key indicator of something being fishy.

Ah sorry I didn't notice you weren't the same person

While the subject line could be better, the subject is not the only indicator of the importance of the email. It is coming from "Google Payments" and as a customer of GCP, why wouldn't you treat every email that comes from Google with an equal amount of importance even if there are false positives? As I said, having a filter of email addresses routed to a specific tag, all marked important and notifications for every email that lands there is one of the most basic things you can do to not avoid important notices

I don't see the issue with the subject line. I get the general rule to not mark everything important but in this case the mail IS important

> I don't see the issue with the subject line. I get the general rule to not mark everything important but in this case the mail IS important

In a world where people get sometimes hundreds of emails a day, on top of a constant onslaught of spam, scam, phishing and otherwise malicious email, it is basic netiquette of summarizing what exactly you want from the receiver.

Additionally, a lot of people seem to have taken buzzfeed-style clickbait headlines as the role model for communication and that may be a factor here as well.

> It is coming from "Google Payments"

How do you know? Sender lines are faked all the time. If the subject line reads like spam, I'm not looking at who sent it. I just delete it out of pure muscle memory.

Again, not saying this is a good habit, but it is an understandable habit.

> How do you know? Sender lines are faked all the time.

by that logic, you shouldn't trust any email unless it's signed and you've verified the sender. If the sender is your cloud provider, you read the email and decide from there whether or not it's worthwhile.

Sure, unless the cloud provider uses a subject line indistinguishable from what scammers use.

> Your whole story boils down to you not properly reading an email that even says "Important Information".

I get a dozen on those a week, they are never actually important.

Doesn't matter. Not only does the title say "Important Notice...", the sender is Google Payments. Even if it is a false positive, why would you not pay attention to every email coming from Google when you're a customer of GCP?

I get “IMPORTANT!” in headings from products I brought online. They’re not important at all. You’re aware of this being normal misuse too, because you use the internet.

Suspension, banning or deletion warnings should be labelled clearly as such in the title. Procedures need to reflect the actual environment.

My work email is treated very different to my personal email though, and my work email with external organisations I work with is treated differently to email I receive internally.

"Important Information for your Account" is a marketing email 99% of the time. Emails which are actually important normally tell you why they're important in the subject.

> Did you saw the title of the email?

I did, and I saw who it was from. There's absolutely no way that I would ignore an email from my cloud provider like that.

> I need to be very clear, the suspension is not due to fraudulent issue. It's due to "missing some paperwork". I've been paying using the same card for the past 4 yrs.

You're putting words in my mouth here. I never said it was due to fraud, it's due to you not filling in the paperwork they asked you to do in a timeframe, where they clearly state what will happen if you don't follow the instructions. Again, many providers will ask for extra information (your bank for example), and if you don't follow the procedure, you'll have your services suspended.

> See similar horror stories below. AWS doesn't pull this shit.

One google search gives me https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/bjdgql/authentication_... - so yes, AWS does do this.

> And lastly, when something like this happens, the minimal they could do is to get my servers back asap.

I disagree - you were told what was going to happen if you didn't do it. It's not their fault you didn't read your email. The minimal _you_ can do is read the email from your cloud provider.

> And they've been dead silence over 3 days already.

3 days being a weekend. Do you pay for Support? https://cloud.google.com/support

In all honesty, spam has taught me to ignore any email that has a subject line like "Important information about your account". Not saying it's good, but it's deeply trained into me and automatic, like ignoring things that look like banner ads.

I want to add one more thing. Whether or not if it's my fault for the initial suspension isn't the main thing.

The main thing is how they "react" to help a customer get things back to normal when something goes wrong.

Verdict: Never ever trust Google Clown Platform with your business

Your next startup will be a ChatGPT administrative assistant that reads your emails and makes sure you never miss the actually important ones. And go!

Ok, so putting that aside, they haven't replied in 24 hours by time of us writing, because it's a weekend in between. Do you pay for support on Google cloud?

> Verdict: Never ever trust Google Clown Platform with your business

I would be more inclined to trust Google than people who make digs at their service providers publicly, to be honest.

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