This article is directly related to a new customer that hit the HelpDesk this week with a fundamental issue. Their email wasn't working.
The company
Company A, a fairly well established civil engineering company had been using Google for email over the last 6 years, and now received numerous enquiries per day via this route. The company
had social media accounts, albeit fairly amateur that funnelled enquiries to this single gmail address, along with a vast directory of contacts from staff, suppliers and customers.
The Crisis
For some reason they were unable to login to this email account on Monday, receiving the message "Your account is disabled".
There was no option to 'appeal' the disablement, and since this was their only email, they wouldn't have received any email about the disablement.
Google will disable an account for a seemingly unending list of
Account hacking or hijacking
Automatic calls or messages
Breaking product policies
Child sexual abuse & exploitation
Creating a false identity to deceive people
Export or sanctions law violations
Harassment, bullying, & threats
Impersonation & misrepresentation of identity
Malware, phishing & other harmful activities
Non-consensual explicit imagery & sextortion
Sexually explicit content
Spamming
Terrorist content
Unqualified educational institution
Use of multiple accounts for abuse
Valid legal requests
But this is all done automatically, and of course they won't tell you under which item your account was disabled.
The Recovery
As Google are un-contactable in any way, the only option is account recovery, which is not a simple process. The mobile number supplied when the account was opened years ago is no longer in service, and no recovery email was set.
Regardless, we completed the awkward and lengthy recovery process, supplied business IDs and other information it requested and supplied an alternative email address.
The Response
After 3 days a seemingly automated email arrived at the alternative email we supplied during recovery, and guess what?
“unable to verify that you own the account”
Together with a clear statement that this is a final decision. Fantastic.
Moving Forward
The company should of course been using a proper commercial email service and not a free one, but some companies just don't consider this a need, especially smaller businesses.
The risk is of course exactly what we have here, missing out on leads and enquiries with absolutely no options or recourse.
Company A as a general rule would handle about 20 quotes per week, winning about 70% of those and averaging £18k, but here we are on Thursday and this is currently zero, and of course customers, agents, suppliers will all be getting non-delivery reports further damaging the clients reputation.
We set the company up with proper email, their own domain name, and a basic website with contact information, all for the grand cost of £15 a year. We then worked to update their social media, and online directories to use this new address. Now begins the process of trying to
contact all past customers, suppliers, and agents to update them and try and rescue the situation. We were able to extract past customers and suppliers from their accounts system for a bulk email, but existing and past quotes have unfortunately been lost forever.
Conclusion
Just don't use 'free' services for business use, and that includes icloud, outlook, hotmail, gmail, yahoo etc. Because you don't pay for them, you have absolutely no recourse or protection. This includes 'free' domain names, which you will almost never have any rights to.
It's cost this client approximately £18k in the first week and it will take them weeks to recover.
Use commercial domain and email solutions, which are only a nominal charge and use a company based in the UK with a UK staffed HelpDesk. If you have a 'problem', you have someone to call who will sort it out for you, unlike 'free' where you have no one to call or email or contact in any way.
We do of course provide these services, but we are just one of many so shop around and find an email provider that you've spoken to and are happy with because this should be a long term relationship.
8 Votes
Comments (1)
Alan Pearson
· 2025-01-31 10:16 UTC
I had something similar a few years ago. i had an outlook.com account for my business, had it on the van and my cards and one day all my email dissappeared. Then some people called me to say they had received emails with invoices from me which I hadnt sent. Then a day later I couldnt login to the email anymore. no one to call, no one to help, just totally shafted.
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