Hitting a dead-end with Google's customer service? ✓
Have an existing audience you can leverage to get some random Google employee's attention? ✓
Reach front page of Hacker News? ✓
Good news! You should have your problem fixed in 2-5 business days. The rest of us suckers relying on google services get to stare at our inboxes helplessly, waiting for a response to our support ticket (which will never come). I feel like it's almost a right of passage these days to rely heavily on a Google service, only to have something go wrong and be left out in the cold.
I've been backing up my Gmail with getmail [0], as I'm afraid that a day will come when I'll be locked out of my gmail account and will have no way to restore it. My long term solution is to migrate completely off of gmail, but for now this does the trick pretty nicely.
Not that you're complaining of bad service from Google. But anyone's long term solution should be to treat important things in life as important. In case of gmail, paying $60 a year ($50 for email account and $10 for domain) gets you a permanent address (so if you were to migrate, at least your email address stays the same), an SLA that gives you two weeks to move house should Google decide it doesn't like you (in contrast to immediate termination of gmail free accounts) and phone support from Google. The poorest of us can afford that—no excuses.
Take my advice - throw away every email older than 2 years. Not only will you never need them, but they're what the black hats will hang you by should they get the urge. You will feel a huge sense of relief - a weight lifted from your soul as you relinquish the crushing burden of carting about all those dead emails.
(Unless, of course, you work in an industry where longer retention times are mandated.)
Im not a lawyer so there may be subtle details I don't understand, but broadly in England and Wales, you can be sued within either 6 years or 12 years from the date of a breach of contract depending on type of contract, in Scotland 15 years. I don't know about the US or rest of EU, but think carefully about deleting all your old emails. You might have something in there which would be very useful to defend yourself if this ever happened. You would regret this if you had built the next Facebook and some old acquaintance decided to stake a claim based on some gmail conversation from 10 years ago. Better to archive to a redundant backup system I would say.
The MailPile page (https://www.mailpile.is/) mentions GMVault (http://gmvault.org/) as their method for backing up Gmail. I haven't heard of GMVault (or MailPile) until just now. Both look promising. I'm glad there is a push in this direction.
I've been using GMVault for the past month and I have really enjoyed it. I wrote a cron job to periodically pull down my latest emails and back them up (encrypted).
Does GMVault store your mail on your machine in a text-readable (I include XML in this) format? Because if it's a binary blob, it's not as useful as it could be.
All emails are stored individually as EML files which is just text. It can also export all your emails into the standard maildir or mbox format so you can easily import them elsewhere.
I am ... less than pleased with Google as a company and its policies of late (I came home a couple of weekends back to find the top 3 HN slots addressing issues with Google and the YT/Google+ integration, two of which were either links to or based on my posts there).
That said: I've found Google personnel highly responsive (though not always immediately so) to issues I've raised. Most recently with the Data Liberation Front's lead emailing me directly (after finding he couldn't reply to my G+ posts because I'd disabled interactions there) while on sabbatical to find out what's up.
Not to say that Google don't have their warts and have been highly insensitive to human-factors issues of late. But even some pretty testy and frustrated folk have found that there are contacts from deep within the machine.
Though JOOTSing -- jumping out of the (nominal support/ticket) system -- does seem to be rather too frequently required.
Yeah, they're responsive after negative stories draw peoples' attention. So if you can hit the top of HN or you're Jeff Jarvis (see dell hell) you'll get ok customer service. If not, google wants you to gfad.
I won't say I haven't been a thorn in Google's side (large or small I'm not entirely sure). But I've managed to develop some level of a relationship with some folks on the inside. I'm largely in the process of extricating myself from their services, but I had seen multiple positive responses.
I can only imagine it's similarly frustrating on the inside. Remember: they're trying to address the needs of hundreds of millions (or more) users with a pretty finite staff. It's the dual-lever challenge of automated systems: you can provide for the world with a staff of 40, but you're stuck with providing for the world with a staff of 40. Unless you come up with ways of 1) automating support 2) self-support and 3) very effective triage you're going to have horror stories.
they're trying to address the needs of hundreds of millions (or more) users with a pretty finite staff.
A problem of their own devising. I don't have any sympathy for them, they've intentionally built up their image of a company of geniuses who hire the best of the best, and they have made it a primary corporate goal to acquire those hundreds of millions of users.
I speculate that the reason they have effectively zero customer support is that to employ and train that number of people would require them to appear obviously as a clone of Walmart, GE, or AT&T (et al), which is necessary to become in order to deal with that kind of headcount.
Customer service is definitely non trivial, and it's actually something that needs to be part of company's culture and be driven from top management. I heard that at Amazon, Jeff Bezos asked all managers from from director level's up to do customer support one day a year in a call center (including Jeff himself). I can't imagine Larry or Sergei would pay any attention to that kind of things, and just ask why can't we automate that self-help page :)
A problem of their own devising. I don't have any sympathy for them
I actually made the comment more in the spirit of a "hey, you HN types looking at starting your own worldwide Web based service / company, heads-up, this is a problem you'll face."
That said: I've actually pretty much given your "they're Google, they're smart, they can figure this out" response when I've have noted weaknesses in Google's response / user support/service.
Though there are some companies / organizations which have gone a long way to building very-low-overhead organizations. Wikipedia and Craigslist both come to mind (and yes, they've had their problems).
Another story emerged out of the ACA/Obamacare rollout. One news item I heard concerning it noted that when Social Security rolled out, there were staffed offices located in cities and towns throughout the US where people could go for support. That's something which the online/automated world has largely done away with.
Though the thought occurs to me: what would the required infrastructure (and cost of development) be for producing a paper-record based application process for ACA? Would it not perhaps be simpler than the online version?
Response-by-mail, yes, though the latency is a drag.
Phone support might have been an option. Even if household phones were rare, most people could get to a location which had a phone. However 1-800 (toll-free) lines didn't exist yet (though you could reverse charges with operator assistance). Hrm ... I'd heard a tale that 800 toll-free service began as the result of a request from President Ford for some way for the White House to accept calls from citizens, though Wikipedia's history of toll-free service doesn't make any mention, might just be a red herring.
More to the point: the idea of individually staffing offices is now pretty much a non-starter. Though I wonder what the real economics are compared with creating a national-scale Web infrastructure.
Though the thought occurs to me: what would the required infrastructure (and cost of development) be for producing a paper-record based application process for ACA? Would it not perhaps be simpler than the online version?
I'd say that the base instance of something like this would be expanding Medicare instead of inventing ACA, but that seems to have been politically untenable. There are certainly problems there, as well as in the VA system, but the point remains...
I suspect in my case (I don't do FB or Twitter, both of which Klout depends on heavily) it had more to do with my being persistent in calling out issues, and working constructively to address them. Took a while to pound that message through but it eventually happened.
"I'll keep trying - maybe someone at Google could help?"
Doubtful. Getting support from Google is pretty much impossible (you do have slightly increased chances since you've put it on HN however).
If I were you, I'd initiate a domain transfer to a different registrar that will actually provide support when you need it before your domain expires.
Even if you're lucky enough to have Google resolve the issue this time, you may not be so lucky in the future and there are numerous domain registrars that would handle your domain better than Google will.
What are you talking about, I saw "The Internship." Google has enough phone support to tell grandmothers how to fix GMail problems. Likely a manager will be cut over this, just like the snooty guy who led the other team in the movie. /s
Snark all you like, but I think it's perfectly reasonable (if not required) to hold Google to the standards they paid Vince Vaughan to portray them having.
lol i was just thinking the same thing. as much as i know these comments do not help the OP, i cant help but think, as i sat there watching w my family, how their perception of googles help desk has been setup to be one of "OMG they're even amazing at help desk".
Yep. Follow nacs's advice. I ran into a similar problem when using Google Apps and registering a domain name.
Google often uses services like domainsbyproxy.com to reserve domains for users. Your DNS console is buried in something like that. It's janky and frustrating... but figure out your DNS access info, "unlock" your domain, and get it away from Google to avoid these sorts of problems.
From my friend at Google: "It looks like he used the wrong account to update his credit card. He has a Google Apps account connected to his Blogger/url purchase, this is the account he needs to update in Google Wallet."
A perfect example of what a complete screw up the whole multiple Google Account thing is.
I can't suggest a better solution, but wow - it sucks at the moment.
Edit: Would it be possible to find out from the friend at Google if they are doing anything to report this anomaly to users? The author can't be the only person this happened to, and given that Google knows this, perhaps it would be useful if the error message reflected what was going on?
Perhaps fixing that error message would be a better use of resources than trying to improve support?
Given that I haven't been pummelled with email about how Blogger is going to become "Google + compliant" I'm guessing that the answer is "No, they won't kill your blog." And they won't charge your credit card. And next spring they will announce that Blogger is being shut down and you can move your Blog over to your own Google+ page! And then you will get to decide what you want to do next.
But that is just a theory, my experience of late is that when Google stops talking about a service, and responses stop coming back, the reason is that the service is on the list to be killed off and anyone inside Google that was working on it, already knows that, and have already transferred to some other project.
When you updated your info did you update it in Google Wallet? Google Checkout was only very recently completely deprecated so make sure it is updated at http://wallet.google.com.
Also, do you have any communication from when you configured the account? That would be useful.
What may have happened is you set up a Google Apps For Your Domain account (which would have been free at the time of your registration). If that is the case you would need to login into Google Wallet with your Google Apps account - xxxx@calculatedriskblog.com and update the payment information for that account (as opposed to your normal Gmail).
Even if you use the recommended support channels such as Groups, your request goes nowhere.
I've run into this reporting issues for Google Now and Picasa Web. Moderators continually move or delete reports of issues. When you explain the situation and why X is more appropriate than Y you get radio silence.
Has anyone actually gotten real support from Google for paid applications? Is it limited to the Groups?
I once got an automated notice from the google app engine team that said at the end:
"If you have any questions about our Java 6 to Java 7 upgrade, you can reach us at google-appengine-java-6-to-7-migration@googlegroups.com"
when I sent an email to that address I got a bounce with the message:
"We're writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact (google-appengine-java-6-to-7-migration) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group."
---
Also Calculated Risk is a rather famous blog in certain circles, so it's kind of funny to see some of the comments here that imply it's an obscure blog whose blogmaster lucked into a front page HN post.
Picasa is now overrun with Chinese spammers using the "send to a friend"-type feature. I mark every incoming Picasa share message as spam and Gmail still lets them all through...
Feel free to ask an AdWords advertiser about their experiences before parroting this bit about Internet wisdom.
I'm told by contacts inside the Borg that things have gotten better in the last few years -- for example, now you can find a phone number to reach a call center that will /dev/null your ticket for you rather than having to /dev/null it yourself -- but the last few times I needed it having a $X0,000 a year account didn't rate a reply. I'm reliably told that $Y00,000 a month accounts didn't have a transformatively better experience, although, quote, "At least they'll lie to me. It's better than silence. If you collect enough lies you can triangulate off of them."
After having been in this industry for a bit more than 15 years, and having read a lot of history, I'm beginning to suspect that due to the economics of it, there is always going to be a Borg. IBM, Microsoft, Google, and so on.
Anecdotal, but I've had great experience with Google Apps paid support as well as support for our Adwords campaigns (we spend about $40k a year with them on Adwords).
This is the right answer. I managed an Adwords campaign that had a spend in the mid to high six figures a year, and we had standing meetings with support every week. I don't like the fact this this is how it works, but I understand the reality.
So what you're saying is he should contact the ad team to request a price quote for running an ad for "how do i avoid having google shut down my blog?" :)
This will get a response, not because you are trying to pay Google money, but because you are trying to use the word "google" in an ad. Had an ad for an App Engine related service blocked for a few days until a human could verify that the message containing the word "google" was appropriate.
I'm sure if an advertiser spends $10M a month on Google ads, they have someone's cell phone they can call anytime if there are any issue, and that person will "fix" whatever the problem is. These are the Google customers, not the guy who spends $50 a month advertising his self-published book.
The guy who spends $50 on Google's ads is a customer. As is the guy who gives Google page views instead of cash. They are certainly lower priority customers but they are still customers.
If Google wants to treat such low priority customers like non-entities, they are free to do so, but lets not pretend like they should act this way, because they shouldn't. It might be fine for them to do this in the short term, but in the long term it bleeds a lot of good will, which eventually catches up with every company no matter how big.
Google brought in $12.5B in advertising revenue in the third quarter of 2013, and only $1.2B in non-advertising revenue in the same period.
So, who spent 12 billion in Google ads in 3 months? divide that by 12,000 entities who spent 1 million each per quarter. Or 12,000,000 entities who spent a thousand dollars. Do you think there are enough geeks and small advertisers out there to add up to 4 billion dollars a month? Do you think there are enough small business people out there to make up that? It's the large consumer products that make up the bulk of Google's income: the Ford, GM, Toyota, Coca-Cola, Procter and Gamble, etc. These are Google's customers.
Google has locked horns with Facebook on getting these advertisers. Yahoo too gets a fair bit of that. These are the Google customers, nobody else. If these advertisers spurn Google, the company will spin out of control. That's in spite of of $56B in cash. They burn 10+ billion a quarter, so they don't have that long to live at full bore, or they would have to cut painfully. They are big enough with so much staff that there's very few sources of income that could replace $12.5 billion a quarter. So you bet they will, hum, accommodate, the Coca-Cola advertising executive's phone calls.
Even that's not true though. When I was consulting, and even now at my current company, I dealt with multiple people who were needed support for a number of reasons (ads not displaying being the biggest). They'd get absolutely nothing back, and then maybe a couple of months later things would just start working again.
I had the same problem with Google Cloud account (for API and App engine).
The problem is that changing CC number by following link in the email will not update your CC. You need to go to https://wallet.google.com and update your CC.
If Microsoft was smart this is where they would attack google, instead we have the "Scroogled" campaign. I think they're in the same position (in this department) as apple was when they made this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UZV7PDt8Lw
hmmmmm i know "i told you so"s are annoying but i wouldnt register a domain name with a service other than a full-on registrar. then you could always change hosting or even scrap the blog entirely but still keep your address (and hopefully traffic...)
I work at GoDaddy and recently our CEO read an email from a customer who had been encouraged by a son to use Google services for his small business, but when he couldn't figure out some issue with support ("they talked way over my head"), he called GoDaddy and found someone that worked to get his account setup.
Google probably, appropriately, calculates the cost of providing good customer support to hundreds of millions of people as way too high. But by doing so, they do leave open the door to smaller companies to compete, not on the product, but on the service and support.
Google could, at the very least, make sure that it provides sufficient support for all billing related issues. If a customer is paying for a product and there's a problem with their billing, they should be able to get a person on the phone or web chat to resolve it if the online tools are insufficient.
I've had some good experiences with GoDaddy support recently, including one case where a client's site had a custom php-mailer whose messages seemed to be disappearing into a black hole somewhere, and the front line support tech (not even tier 2) read the PHP code in question, determined it was fine, checked the mail queue, and verified there was a problem on their end.
"Surprised" doesn't quite capture my response to that.
I'm still not a fan of GoDaddy the company, GoDaddy the infrastructure, or GoDaddy the horrifyingly bad control panel "interface", but GoDaddy support could teach Google a lot.
Keeping aside Godaddy's ethical issues, their support is actually pretty good, definitely above industry average. The times I had to contact them in the past, they did go the extra mile to resolve the issue and even waived any invloved fees. Don't know why I feel this way but now a days getting phone support (especially 24/7) seems like a miracle. So apart from my moral compass going wonky, I have no real complaints about them.
Other services I tried:
Namecheap: Decent prices, great support, beware of domains with certain keywords (would require approval).
Gandi: Decent prices (Free Whois guard), poor support, beware of moral clause in TOS.
I've been using GoDaddy for twelve years, and have always had excellent results with their Tech. Support. They are knowledgeable and helpful. (Yes, their control panel feels like running through a gauntlet).
I honestly thought this was going be an article on probability: Given the frequency of Google shutting down its services, what is the likelihood of my blog service being terminated on December 6th?
been there - getting support for free accounts is almost impossible.
you might be able mitigate the problem by upgrading to a google apps business account and receive support through it. i've used their email support through a paid apps account several time, the problems were always resolved promptly.
Some years back I determined that Microsoft had a massive problem with spam transiting their network. I found a Sr. VP's name associated with the service, phoned the main switchboard, and asked for him.
He picked up his phone on the first ring.
I briefly described the issue (and how I'd determined it was a problem), he told me he'd have the appropriate manager get in touch with me later that day. I received that call 15 minutes later, and worked with the manager (submitting specific emails and identifying where on their network the problems were manifesting) for a couple of months during which time the spam volumes fell well over 90%.
Part of the trick is knowing how to navigate / manipulate the system, and finding a problem they acknowledge as theirs. But in that particular case (and a small handful of others) I found the company highly responsive.
Now, several years later when I'd bought both a shrinkwrap product and support contract to specifically resolve a data issue with a product of theirs, I got sandbagged. Demanded my money back for the contract.
And no, I'm not a fan of Microsoft. But they do (at times at least) know how to run a business.
I've emailed Scott Guthrie a couple of times with regard to a couple of ASP.NET issues I felt warranted his team's attention rather than use that "Connect" bug reporting crap. After three or four hours he forwarded my emails to "the right people" and cc'd me and I got to work with these folks resolving the issues at hand via email. Was a pretty good experience and Scott is a top bloke.
I briefly used Microsoft's Azure Bing custom search engine, or whatever they call it. I found the support to be extremely responsive and reasonably knowledgeable, even though I was only spending a few hundred a month. That said, the actual product features and terms of use were both significantly behind both Yahoo BOSS (which uses the same Bing index) and Google's search API. (One particularly terrible term was that you can't use it on pages with any advertising besides Yahoo/Bing ads.)
Twice I've been in contact, went well, at least compared to the radio silence Google has given me.
And when searching I actually end up finding a ticket/question in some MS system with an official response. With Google I far too often end up in a Google Group with tens of complaints but no solutions.
I have twice tried, and failed, to use support for Xbox live. Some idiot I don't know registered an Xbox account a while ago using my Gmail address by mistake. I ignored all the emails and figured they'd stop when a deadline ran out for confirming the email address or somesuch, but apparently not. Now his credit card has expired, so I tried to contact Microsoft to cancel the account and make the emails stop. According to their live help people there's no account registered to my Gmail address, and yet every month there's a new email that arrives from verified Microsoft servers. Impasse. And for extra bonus points, every single support link in the credit card emails is broken because they have re-worked the site for the new Xbox.
A few weeks ago I transferred a domain I bought from Google for AppEngine to my 'usual' domain registration service. Very easy to do, but it took 5 days for the transfer to kick in. I wish you had posted this earlier because this could have been a solution for you. That said, try it right now, and maybe it will work OK when Google/GoDaddy drop your domain.
First: Try repeating everything with a different browser. I couldn't update my adwords payment information recently in Safari, but I had no trouble doing it with Firefox. It sounds like you have a different issue, but that could do it.
Google sites are all a little funny with anything other than Chrome.
why not contact the admin email on the whois information for the domain, or go through ENOM which is who google seems to have run this operation through....they can probably help renew or get payment information updated......
They like using the service Google provides and they really want to continue paying for it. Not everyone gets their rocks off serving a popular website and tuning the dozens of arcane knobs to make it hum as well as Google can.
They probably don't want to pay $$$$ for someone else to move it and/or host it. Migrating years of posts and all the comments... that's a decent sized job. Even if the export/import to some other blogging engine was nearly perfect (Hint: it's not all roses and perfume), there's a dozen or more billable hours involved to make it run exactly the way it did before on another host. That's probably more than he spends in a year at the current location.
...and so on. There are plenty of good reasons not to move it.
I don't think he was suggesting switching hosts but domain registrars. Not only does Blogger let you bring your own domain from any registrar while hosting with them, but they stopped selling domain registration themselves at some point in the past. Transferring the domain should be completely transparent to Google; the website doesn't need to move or be changed at all.
Hitting a dead-end with Google's customer service? ✓
Have an existing audience you can leverage to get some random Google employee's attention? ✓
Reach front page of Hacker News? ✓
Good news! You should have your problem fixed in 2-5 business days. The rest of us suckers relying on google services get to stare at our inboxes helplessly, waiting for a response to our support ticket (which will never come). I feel like it's almost a right of passage these days to rely heavily on a Google service, only to have something go wrong and be left out in the cold.