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.
> 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.
Smells like „product engineering“. So a product or an engineering lead gets a task to reduce risks of specific abuse by preventing someone from sending email from yahoo or web.de clone. As a quick solution they add this filter without „overthinking“ it. The impact is low, a few customers in a million, so its stupidity gets unnoticed and, once first complaint reaches them, quietly deprioritized to death. Removing it is cheap: the justification for taking that work is likely the show stopper. Google is an old large corp that hires and fires at a scale. Owning removal of abuse filter to increase revenue by Planck-sized amount is an impossible thing.
I use a .one for a project where it makes perfect sense. Brevo, who are a huge email delivery platform, told me they don't support signing up with a .one domain. Fortunately, after a couple of weeks going back-and-forth one of their developers eventually saw sense and fixed it.
Sadly, with Google, I don't think you'll ever get the issue that far up the chain.
If you could just change your company's domain name that'd be swell!
Surprising Google is happy to lose a paying company over this.
Although the author is taking quite the risk bypassing Google's validation like that. Not sure I'd be risking my company's workspace to do it in case Google wakes up ban hammer happy one morning.
I wonder how this list ended up being created anyway. Was it a long standing issue, or just some ai slop? web.com, web.org, web.net don't look like an email provider.
The rationale probably was that end users primarily identify the email provider by the subdomain, not the TLD, and therefore to prevent spoofing they block all domains where the subdomain corresponds to an email provider, regardless of the TLD. Like, they don’t want to allow gmail.<anything>, and the same for all other email providers they know of.
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.
> 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/
Smells like „product engineering“. So a product or an engineering lead gets a task to reduce risks of specific abuse by preventing someone from sending email from yahoo or web.de clone. As a quick solution they add this filter without „overthinking“ it. The impact is low, a few customers in a million, so its stupidity gets unnoticed and, once first complaint reaches them, quietly deprioritized to death. Removing it is cheap: the justification for taking that work is likely the show stopper. Google is an old large corp that hires and fires at a scale. Owning removal of abuse filter to increase revenue by Planck-sized amount is an impossible thing.
I use a .one for a project where it makes perfect sense. Brevo, who are a huge email delivery platform, told me they don't support signing up with a .one domain. Fortunately, after a couple of weeks going back-and-forth one of their developers eventually saw sense and fixed it.
Sadly, with Google, I don't think you'll ever get the issue that far up the chain.
The end is really hilarious. Google had a stupid frontend-only validation, it seems.
Since Google themselves claim that's a security check, there's a bug bounty here.
The author of that article missed their chance making Google eat their words.
Since the author asked about Alice: it was an Internet provider in France in the early 2000's.
Some domains in that list are truly ancient. That was a trip down memory lane.
Just wait for someone at Google to read this post and then block the domain retrospectively.
And ban their entire Google account
And delete all their data.
*make it hidden, they will of course keep the data for themselves :)
alice.it is indeed an email provider's domain; based on the code snippet it seems like they are active in other countries.
alice.app however isn't registered anywhere.
This was a fun read. Absolutely baffling behaviour from Google.
If you could just change your company's domain name that'd be swell!
Surprising Google is happy to lose a paying company over this.
Although the author is taking quite the risk bypassing Google's validation like that. Not sure I'd be risking my company's workspace to do it in case Google wakes up ban hammer happy one morning.
I think ditching google would've been a better choice.
Well, if the alternative was going to be Microsoft 365... not so sure :)
I would hope that somewhere at Google there is a policy that says you can't do anti-fraud and security checks in frontend only...
ooof that's bad, all levels of support missed the frontend validation and blamed you and an opaque non-existent process instead
I wonder how this list ended up being created anyway. Was it a long standing issue, or just some ai slop? web.com, web.org, web.net don't look like an email provider.
The rationale probably was that end users primarily identify the email provider by the subdomain, not the TLD, and therefore to prevent spoofing they block all domains where the subdomain corresponds to an email provider, regardless of the TLD. Like, they don’t want to allow gmail.<anything>, and the same for all other email providers they know of.
web.net, at least, absolutely is an email provider.
web.de is also a big email provider in Germany.
fair enough. at least not primarily an email provider. so if they offer any email.