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.

Just wait for someone at Google to read this post and then block the domain retrospectively.

• llacb47

  today at 10:02 PM

  And ban their entire Google account

  • qingcharles

    today at 10:12 PM

    And delete all their data.

The end is really hilarious. Google had a stupid frontend-only validation, it seems.

• chmod775

  today at 10:06 PM

  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.

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 would hope that somewhere at Google there is a policy that says you can't do anti-fraud and security checks in frontend only...

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.

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.

• mh-

  today at 10:01 PM

  web.net, at least, absolutely is an email provider.

  • mpalczewski

    today at 10:02 PM

    fair enough. at least not primarily an email provider. so if they offer any email.