Edit: Ohhh. According to other posts it’s about gmail not pulling email from other servers via POP3, not about accessing gmail.
We? Did you share an account? That's way bigger a red flag than using IMAP.
I used to pay for Workspace and left because a good chunk of features across all Google products simply didn't work with Workspace accounts, or were held back for a year or more after free Google accounts got them. It's a mess. Then they kept increasing the price for good measure, and there's no off-ramp, if you stop paying then the account is left in a zombie state with even less functionality than a free one until you start paying again.
Do yourself a favour and use Fastmail or Proton or anything else for your vanity domain instead.
You cannot migrate a Workspace account into a regular Google account, you're stuck with Workspace forever unless you start over on a brand new account.
And yes I realise that an IoT alarm clock is ridiculous, but that's not the point.
I’m asking because I used to work adjacent to this area, and I know of only a few scenarios where an account becomes a workspace account after being a consumer account.
Workspace accounts come with their own compliance requirements and edge cases that products need to handle, but rather than do that and provide a consistent user experience most product teams don't answer to the relevant PAs and so don't care, and Workspace accounts are a small enough minority of users that nobody has to care.
I've often railed against a particular way of doing product that's really common in our industry, but I suppose it's been a while so I'll do it again:
We have a real problem with metrics-driven product development, where we exclusively care about the 95% use case and actively disdain the 5% use cases.
On paper it makes sense - you direct your energies towards the highest-payback activities. But the problem is that every user falls into some 5% use cases, so a product that is purely made up of 95% use cases ends up becoming a patchwork that is frustrating to every user, somehow.
Rather than "product works great for 95% of users" you get "100% of users cut themselves on some corner of the product".
Hugely frustrating - they penalize their paying customers. Can't attach Nest devices, can't use the YouTube family plan.
"Hey google remind me to call in sick tomorrow"
and it will put an entry into the calendar for me.
But if it is plugged into my car the same request will elicit an
"I'm sorry please talk to your system administrator to get this feature enabled"
This has gone on for years with google assistant and workspace accounts. There is always some random interlock in some byzantine permissions table that get's triggered at the most inconvenient moment and you can't do what yesterday you could do.
Stop being misleading, this is your assumption.
And while I agree that Google support generally sucks, you can actually contact real humans as a workspace customer easily.
This is only relative to the experience when you're a free google account user. Compared to alternatives like Fastmail contacting support - and actually getting a successful resolution - is still very difficult. I finally switched our org after many years when Google announced yet another price increase (nominally for things I don't want or need) and I really wish we'd gone sooner.
surely the user may knows that there is probably zillions (by that i mean a lot) of users using gmail via IMAP (at least the enterprise accounts) don't you think it's maybe something else you are doing that flags your account
WTF has happened to Google?
We're a supplier being onboarded. We've been in on-boarding hell for about 2 months now.
We've completed the job and are still being passed around teams in order to get paid.
As an aside, one of the scourges of modern business is Ariba. Google use Ariba along with many other large organisations and it SUCKS.
It feels like using Ariba forces big companies to map their bureaucracy around its structure rather than the other way around ... which means people getting bounced from team to team while different queries are raised and some random person somewhere raises another query, etc etc ... and even the internal staff struggle to make things happen.
Whatever happens, it feels like the bureaucratic structure and use of Ariba has imprisoned staff at Google. They can't get beyond their own system now.
The process was a real eye-opener as to what goes on when a firm becomes huge.
In my experience, once a company implements Ariba, it's over and they're just cash-cowing it.
The savings they make in automation are costs passed on to the consumer or supplier in the hassle factor of getting things done. I want to say "Never again", but that's not entirely my choice.
/rant
They're a publicly traded company, so the shareholders are the primary customer.
They're an advertising and data harvesting company with significant investment in free-to-consumer services, so users are viewed as products. That means user support looks like overhead.
They're extremely large and extremely diverse, so losing business is not a significant concern.
The problem is that they have too many incentives to not care about you at all, even at the rates you're paying.
IDK if Microsoft is better with onboarding or support but I'd be inclined to assume that given their longer history with Office and business customers.
They have several overlapping admin sites for absolutely everything, plus some hidden old sites from the early 2000s that support will guide you to use for some archaic settings that still influence how more modern stuff works.
In my experience, Microsoft support is good in the sense that they are easy to contact and keen to help. But working with them just took too much of my time. Their approach is to schedule a call to guide you through layers and layers of legacy stuff just to try things that often end up not working.
With Google Workspace I don't actually know if support is good or bad because we never needed support in the first place. Google's software is far simpler and less buggy.
We also use Proton now, which has been working pretty well so far. Better than expected.
Microsoft 365 is for companies that can afford to employ a full-time, specialised Microsoft 365 admin.
If you don't get paid for a contract, either repossess the work output, and/or file suit. That's the way to get paid for a contract when someone doesn't pay you for a contract. That's just how business is. A lot of businesses are out to get ahead by any means necessary.
BTW, if anyone works for Google here and can help me to get it back I'll pay you $100.
I can barely get replies from my Google Cloud rep and we’re paying them a lot more than $10 per month. Having reps on staff doesn’t mean they have time until things are escalated. When Google threw captchas up on Workspace accounts with integrations (which our product is) for 20ish minutes on Friday and everything was a panic we got responses from a few reps all at once, but mostly to hand wave away the outage.
If you want a fun example there’s a LegalEagle video where he details the difficulty in getting imposter accounts taken down from YouTube through his contacts. He’s not just a random YouTube user, he makes them money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEA0JzhpzPU&vl=en
And for what it’s worth, these experiences are what I have come to expect from everyone outside of the high tiers of AWS Premium Support and a couple other vendors where you pay what is essentially a timeshare agreement for a support team.
Citibank closed a 22 year account recently, via an algorithm, and I had to write an actual letter to get it reopened. And even then, the people on the other end were mostly useless, though they did reopen the account.
Haven’t you heard? The best way to contact gmail support is by posting about it on tech websites /s
It’s sad that I often see resolutions happen here after an engineer scrolls through the comments. I agree that not having backups and your own domain is asking for trouble the way things are currently structured with online mail.
I will say that I hosted my own servers for years, but it’s a lot of trouble and not for everyone (plus, I could never quite get the spam filtering tweaked how I wanted).
I personally experienced this while working for a charity that used Google workspace. After 8 years they suddenly froze the account. The freeze lasted 32 days. During this period they could not operate and Google was completely unresponsive for the first 2 weeks. Google then started demanding various forms of proof of incorporation, various employee government ID's, things like that. We provided all this information. After another week of silence they started asking for ID's of people that did not even work there. We told them we could not provide this information, because of that. Silence. Finally at week 4 we got a call from someone in India that told us there was nothing they could do and the response team would continue to investigate. We are not allowed any contact with the investigation team. Then 32 days after being locked out,the account was silently unlocked again with no explanation.
I cannot discourage people from using any google product for their business any more strongly than this story. They are a terrible company and do not care at all about their customers. They are too big to fail so they just stomp all over you.
Remember google has no way to contact them other than an email form. Which we filled out 2-5 per DAY, which went mostly un-responded to. In the painfully rare case that you do get someone one the phone they will just be someone in India that tells you sorry, nothing we can do.
There have been studies about what happens to business when this happens. They go out of business nearly without exception.
Google Developer account cost me $25. A few days go by and I get an e-mail asking for identification documents and a bill that shows that I live at the place I'm at. I send my passport and utility bill with my name on it, those get rejected with absolutely 0 reason the next day.
Zero explanation. I raised about 8 different support tickets and DMed several people on twitter and linkedin that worked for google and emailed a few higher up people.
At one point I got some communication from a completely different department that wasn't accessible to the support lines publicly available, and it looked like they were going to help me.
But in the end nothing.
This was a copy/paste response I saw for every support ticket:
Thanks for contacting the Google Play team.
As much as I'd like to help, I’m not able to provide any more information. Unfortunately, we are unable to verify the documents you provided and are unable to grant your appeal.
If you are located in the EU, you may have additional redress options. Learn more about those potential options in the EU Out-of-Court Dispute Resolution Help Center. Routing ID: ZLFS
Thanks again for your understanding.
My final response after a week of relentless effort:
I'll concede in understanding that:
No one has actually looked at my documents
No one wants to give me a reason why you won't help me
No one on your entire support team is capable of performing basic customer support tasks.
Thanks for treating me like some untouchable beggar when you were the ones that stole $25 from me.
Apple/iOS cost me $100 and my developer account was verified within two days with zero hassle.
The cloud is someone else's computer. Sometimes they don't want you on their computer, even if you're paying them to be there.
As a reminder, Google Takeout is your friend. We copy email off of gmail via IMAP, mostly so we can have a local backup. I use Takeout for my personal account. Had I thought google would freeze a paid account, I would have used Takeout every week or so to backup the few google apps docs I had up there.