Your whole story boils down to you not properly reading an email that even says "Important Information". I don't understand how that part isn't your fault. They even tell you that your account will be suspended in the email. How do you not have a special filter to route emails from critical service providers? And I don't agree that GCP is "the only one that will suspend you for things like this". AWS can and has suspended accounts for arcane reasons though support was reasonably helpful enough
I sympathise with the abysmal support though obviously. GCP has horrid support and deserve to be called out. I wouldn't recommend GCP to anyone
> Your whole story boils down to you not properly reading an email that even says "Important Information".
Because 99% of emails labeled "Important Information for your Account" get discarded by spam filters including the one in your brain. In most cases it's nothing more than just another bad spam/CEO scam/phishing attempt.
Clear communication is important - a proper subject line would be "Your GCE account #XYZ is going to be terminated unless verified until 2023/01/01".
Again, how is it that an email, that came from your cloud service provider, titled "Important Information Regarding Your Google Account" was ignored because of the "spam filter in your brain"? Again, this really sounds like an excuse for not reading important emails from your provider. It doesn't even seem to have been marked as spam by Gmail and is from Google Payments which should already have sent off alarm bells. I'm not saying that responding to their mail would 100% have led to your account staying on cause GCP is generally pretty shit but this part of your article is basically handing all responsibility of poorly handling important communication off to someone else
I suggest once you move to AWS you filter and route all emails from these "special" senders to a separate tag that always notifies you on incoming emails so you don't miss them
> but this part of your article is basically handing all responsibility of poorly handling important communication off to someone else
I'm not the person you replied to. Anyway, I'd expect of a company like Google to not word their e-mails in the same way cyber-criminals do - and for what it's worth, many cyber-security training programs actually teach that vaguely worded but "important sounding" subjects are a key indicator of something being fishy.
Ah sorry I didn't notice you weren't the same person
While the subject line could be better, the subject is not the only indicator of the importance of the email. It is coming from "Google Payments" and as a customer of GCP, why wouldn't you treat every email that comes from Google with an equal amount of importance even if there are false positives? As I said, having a filter of email addresses routed to a specific tag, all marked important and notifications for every email that lands there is one of the most basic things you can do to not avoid important notices
I don't see the issue with the subject line. I get the general rule to not mark everything important but in this case the mail IS important
> I don't see the issue with the subject line. I get the general rule to not mark everything important but in this case the mail IS important
In a world where people get sometimes hundreds of emails a day, on top of a constant onslaught of spam, scam, phishing and otherwise malicious email, it is basic netiquette of summarizing what exactly you want from the receiver.
Additionally, a lot of people seem to have taken buzzfeed-style clickbait headlines as the role model for communication and that may be a factor here as well.
How do you know? Sender lines are faked all the time. If the subject line reads like spam, I'm not looking at who sent it. I just delete it out of pure muscle memory.
Again, not saying this is a good habit, but it is an understandable habit.
> How do you know? Sender lines are faked all the time.
by that logic, you shouldn't trust any email unless it's signed and you've verified the sender. If the sender is your cloud provider, you read the email and decide from there whether or not it's worthwhile.
"Important Information for your Account" is a marketing email 99% of the time. Emails which are actually important normally tell you why they're important in the subject.
I get “IMPORTANT!” in headings from products I brought online. They’re not important at all. You’re aware of this being normal misuse too, because you use the internet.
Suspension, banning or deletion warnings should be labelled clearly as such in the title. Procedures need to reflect the actual environment.
My work email is treated very different to my personal email though, and my work email with external organisations I work with is treated differently to email I receive internally.
Doesn't matter. Not only does the title say "Important Notice...", the sender is Google Payments. Even if it is a false positive, why would you not pay attention to every email coming from Google when you're a customer of GCP?
I sympathise with the abysmal support though obviously. GCP has horrid support and deserve to be called out. I wouldn't recommend GCP to anyone