They are largely unaccountable and there's no real way to get a hold of a human being unless you shame them on social media and it gets enough traction.
The difficulty in this case is the people operating SMTP servers are not paying customers, the free Gmail users are not paying customers and the GSuite paying customers don't think it's their problem (after all, the spam filters works quite well these days and lots of people are on Gmail, making the problem very small in the receiving end of this situation).
It seems an external force will have to push Google in the right direction (of having systems in place to deal with the exceptions). If that's going to be public outcry, legislation, etc... We will see.
On the automation front, it seems Gmail could do a better job at tracking sender reputation over time (i.e. you haven't send spam in a while, we'll be more lenient with our spam rules).
Based on the number of hacker news posts from people who pay them money and are locked out of their accounts by automated systems with no recourse I'd say that's utterly false.
Maybe you meant to say "if you pay them enough money" which is true. But most people don't have that much money to pay them.
Have you had direct experience with Google support? My experience has been pretty regular but maybe I'm an outlier.
The process took a while (about a week) but we did get the account back.
Things have changed a little bit since Google just presented a wall for support requests to bounce off.
Doubt. We're paying ~$10k/month on ads. The Ads API is rate limited, but it's either broken or has arcane logic, so about every 4-6 weeks, the usual workload will trigger it and we're shut out for 12-24 hours. Can talk to ad support whenever I want, but all they are good for is optimizing campaigns and explaining the UI. No option to get to technical support, no option for ads support to escalate.
Of course, we might not be a large enough customer, but it certainly isn't about "paying".
It has become a bit of a rite of passage when somebody new arrives, they see the error ticket for the first time and are eager to dig into it and solve a long standing problem. It's like a trust fall, only the lesson is not to trust, and you learn that lesson by falling.
I may not be giving them money directly, but my use of their products contributes to their billions in ad revenue. Without us free users providing eyeballs for their ad network they would be significantly less rich.
It's upsetting that the default response to complaints about Google's terrible customer service is "if you don't pay them you aren't a customer." Most of their value comes from us, it most certainly isn't a one-way relationship.
It feels like Google hopes that you just give up on self-hosting your own email and simply move over to Gsuite. It certainly feels that way. Especially when it feels like Google/Gmail/Gsuite are commonly recommended nowadays.
b^)
Oh really? Then what is the mechanism by which an affected user can report an issue like this and receive individual, accountable response? Because that is what a company that cares about fixing issues does.
As far as I can tell, the only redress available for any issue like this with Google is 1) be a big enough name like Jamie Zawinksi (he has been posting about struggles with this exact issue for several months) that your blog post gets attention, or 2) hope your blog post makes the front page on a site like HN.