Google Workspace thinks my domain is an email provider (2025) | Hacker News Reader

Google Workspace thinks my domain is an email provider (2025)

blog.elis.cc

391 pointsel1s7156 comments

> 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 refuse to believe there are actual human beings so blatantly splitting a single concept into three artificial points.

Has anyone ever tried giving LLMs a backspace? I have long wondered if their responses could be better if they had the ability to correct earlier parts of their text. Imagine how much harder it would be for us to write coherently with no backspace!

Yes, it was invented by an anonymous user on 4chan in the early 2020s, then sanitized by a Google paper some years later as CoT (chain of thought) or thinking tags, where the model iterates on its own before writing a final response.

All models do it now.

Thinking mode is exactly this. The LLM is allowed to dump thoughts, correcting itself along the way, and only surfaces the cleaned-up final answer to the user

It's not exactly this. It's something like it. But it's not a token that erases a previous token. Not that I know how that would work or how you'd get training data (edit histories of internet comments seem too few).

(You could have a token that hides previous tokens, but that'd be rather closer to CoT.)

Backtracking, of sorts. The LLM descends a seemingly fruitful path, and all of a sudden that path seems less so. So you backtrack a few tokens ("erasing"/"undoing") and resample the probability distribution a bit back in the stream.

Would it retain some memory of the fact that it backtracked? That path becoming less likely somehow?

Yeah that's what I was imagining. No idea how though, so this is just rambling on my part :)

ChatGPT does this. It will present an initial response, then change its mind partway through the thinking process and present a different response.

Oh wow, I'd like to see this. Any prompt which reliably triggers it? (Seahorse emoji comes to mind!)

It does it quite consistently on higher reasoning.

I believe they have made display answer a tool call so that it can keep updating its answer as it thinks, instead of doing all the reasoning up front, essentially inverting the usual flow. You can use this pattern with any model that supports tool calling.

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.

That's pretty much the way the work did now if you're dealing with the "right" companies. The future isn't evenly distributed.

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 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.

Super cool website btw.. cheers!

ahaha I still remember when 3com forced icann to allow leading numbers and that was some shitstorm

Huh? From RFC1123:

<quote>

2.1 Host Names and Numbers

      The syntax of a legal Internet host name was specified in RFC-952 [DNS:4].  One aspect of host name syntax is hereby changed: the restriction on the first character is relaxed to allow either a letter or a digit.  Host software MUST support this more liberal syntax.

</quote>

It's from 1989. ICANN was founded in 1998.

It's all ancient history, but before 3com domains with a leading digit 'just weren't done'. When they forced that through there was a general consternation on what crap internets are becoming.

I had a similar experience with Google's support this year when I logged to my older Google account from a new device, and I was automatically logged out from everywhere, when I was trying to login again it asked me to provide an OTP, when I asked the form to send me the OTP, it said that I've done so many attempts.

Later, I learnt that this is actually very common problem, if you see the "Me too" count on the Google Community Help, it's about 20K (https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/52598991/my-gmail...) users, that's a huge amount of false positives that Google refuses to care enough about to make a change in their automated account process, which they keep bringing up when users complain, they say the process is automated and nothing could be done about it (well, you are a tech company, can't you like change the code or something?). Unironically I had to wait uncertainly for a week then try, which did not work (same too many attempts), then after two weeks, then after couple of months, until I just gave up and created a new account. After 4 months I was able to finally login 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/

The end is really hilarious. Google had a stupid frontend-only validation, it seems.

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.

All that leetcode, whiteboarding, and Googly-style interview questions just to put front-end validation for security.

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

>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?

Notice how they were going to go to Microsoft next?

Clearly a masochist.

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

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.

  > "gmail.zip or outlook.mov" will probably flag you as a spammer
  > "web.de isn't well-known outside of German circles"

I'm not sure that "gmail" or "outlook" would cause people to think that the sender was in some way "authoritative", but I can understand the organisations wanting to discourage potential pretexting (plus the trademark violation).

I'm not sure how "web.de" or "web.one" would be perceived as especially trustworthy though.

"It must be genuine, it's from the official Web"?

Bypassing the gate is probably against the law, you're a hacker.

> I was curious what would happen if I disabled this function, so I did, and I was happy to find out that once disabled, I was able to continue the sign-up process for my domain successfully.

Bro is asking for other issues that could potentially take down the entire company.

I would NEVER EVER move company critical services to Google or any other provider if they legitimately don't care or don't have the qualification to fix an issue at the sign up stage.

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.

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