Google Workspace thinks my domain is an email provider (2025)

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.

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 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.

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.

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.