the author mentions he bought the domain from a domain name squatter...
When I buy domains from such folk I always do some due diligence to check things like:
* The complete whois history of the domain (who had it before they 'squatted' it - might there be a trademark issue, etc). Worth paying $10 for.
* Is the domain on any spam blacklists, corporate firewall black lists (adult content, gambling etc), etc
* What kind of search pollution does the domain have
... looks like I should add "is domain already on Google Apps"? And if so, negotiate the Google Apps account be shut down by the current owner as part of it the escrow fulfillment requirements. Thanks for this heads-up!
To the OP: If the expiry doesn't run it's natural course, I would contact Don Dodge at Google who is a community-focused executive who runs Google Apps. See if you have any mutual contacts via LinkedIn otherwise email me for an intro (see my profile for addy)
Thanks Ben. That's a great list of things to check. I did check the search pollution and whois history. I didn't think to check the email reputation - oops! Thankfully, I'm not planning on sending much email through it anyway.
I've met Don a few times and I actually pinged him a couple days ago via twitter but haven't heard back from him yet. Perhaps you can forward him the link to my post? Part of the reason I blogged about this was in hopes that Google would reassess how they're handling their verification process.
Had a somewhat related error. My admin account said "this account has been disabled". I simply cannot progress further. You cannot delete the domain, you cannot start over, there is no way of contacting anyone within google, there is no reason why it would be disabled.
Just a total black-box: from one day to the next everything is disabled, and it's the end of your companies account.
I feel your pain. I had a similar thing happen with my AdSense account. They said they had detected invalid activity and my account was closed. I appealed once and lost. Even though I hadn't done anything wrong, it wasn't worth the energy to me to fight for it.
I love Google products, but their lack of decent support kills me.
The domain might be an alias for a different Google Apps domain. If this is the case you would see the the same server error.
I recommend posting to the support forum (they do have employees watching it). If that doesn't pan out you could contact someone on this page (as noted by dotBen).
http://developer.googleapps.com/google-team
You can use Gmail to email from your account, but not through Google Apps. You set up the IMAP server and authorize your regular Gmail account to send and receive emails. Then just set up a filter to keep things organized. It's not an ideal solution, but you can use your email through the Gmail interface (and spam protection) in the mean time.
When I buy domains from such folk I always do some due diligence to check things like:
* The complete whois history of the domain (who had it before they 'squatted' it - might there be a trademark issue, etc). Worth paying $10 for.
* Is the domain on any spam blacklists, corporate firewall black lists (adult content, gambling etc), etc
* What kind of search pollution does the domain have
... looks like I should add "is domain already on Google Apps"? And if so, negotiate the Google Apps account be shut down by the current owner as part of it the escrow fulfillment requirements. Thanks for this heads-up!
To the OP: If the expiry doesn't run it's natural course, I would contact Don Dodge at Google who is a community-focused executive who runs Google Apps. See if you have any mutual contacts via LinkedIn otherwise email me for an intro (see my profile for addy)