Email quota increase requests not being dealt with

[Nick]

I deployed two apps to appengine over a month ago, and made an email quota increase request immediately, because it defaults to the crippling quota of 100 a day.

My first request was outright denied - awesome.
That took well over a week.

With no alternative or recourse, I just resubmitted the request, which resulted in an email asking me to provide appids of other apps with billing enabled.

I have roughly 75 apps on appengine under various silver, gold etc support/billing plans, so I just submitted a random selection of about 5.

This has resulted in nothing for about 2 weeks, when I've now suddenly got an email telling me that it's underway, and this time I'll DEFINITELY get a response in 5 business days.

A) this is dumb and a killer for apps being deployed for the first time. A month to get up and running is a joke, on a paas offering
B) you guys can see all the apps I have, why do I have to supply you with app-ids
C) can someone get these damn things approved, I'm sick of waiting
D) clearly no one is dealing with these requests and it's embarrassing that you have a 5 day SLA, but worse that you can't even come close to meeting it.


I understand why the restriction is there, but it's a heavy handed mechanism and why am I, a heavy using, long term customer, being punished for it?

[Ryan (Cloud Platform Support)]

Salutations Nick,

While I have no visibility into the email teams quota procedure I can speak to my experience with quote increases in general. Quotas generally don't get approved for new apps, this is particularly true for the occasional email quota request I have submitted on behalf of customers. This is to prevent spammers and other abusers from flooding the system. Generally for email providers blacklists are created based off of IP's. So if someone gets one of the Google IP's blacklisted it causes issues for hundreds of apps.

The reason we ask for APP ID's is a way to confirm identity and see which projects you need quotas for. I cannot say exactly why you were asked for the billing app ids (as I stated I have no visibility into the email quota process) but I would have asked something similar in case you wanted to show an app with high traffic that your email isn't associated with. Our ability to 'browse' apps is limited to protect your information and privacy. We don't just randomly search for apps and look at them. Each time we touch any information on an app we need justification (ie customer said we can look at this app because they are related).

Quotas are applied on an app by app basis. You have 75 apps, we would need to get approval from other teams for each app independently before processing it. We generally don't apply quotas account wide (ie manually go to each app and apply the quota) unless there is specific justification for it.

As I started earlier quota approvals take time because they involve many safety checks and approvals from multiple teams. This is all done to protect everyone from spammers and abusers. As you said you submitted for multiple apps so we need to get each one approved by each team to proceed. 

I would recommended (as I do with customers I work with regularly) looking at SendGrid. While it is a third party tool you can start with '25,000 free emails per month'. 

As I stated a couple times I have no visibility into the email quota team, but I can try and get an update for you. If you PM me with the 5 apps you applied for quota increases I will try and contact someone from the team. I cannot guarantee I will get an answer but I will do all that I can.

[Nick]

Thanks for the concerted reply Ryan, I'll message you back privately with my appids, and see if we can kick it along.

Just for a general opinion, two things stand out to me:
Send grid/mailinator are viable alternatives, but that feels like the wrong direction for a PaaS, obviously they've solved the issues of outgoing spam (realistically as have google).

If the email quota controlling team sit outside the Appengine/cloud team, that leaves little recourse to anyone, which is far from ideal. If I can't go to stack overflow, I can't go to the team, I can't go to support and I can't come here; where does that leave me?

Anyway, thanks for picking up the ball.

[Ryan (Cloud Platform Support)]

I look forward to receiving the message. I just want to be clear I will do my best to help, I cannot guarantee anything.

While it may seem odd it's all designed to protect you and others. As the service is run out of datacenters the mail would be sent from those datacenters. If one person gets the IP blacklisted everyone on that datacenter will get blocked. Add that to the fact that GCP was not designed to be a mass mail system I hope you can see why we have all those systems in place.

Yes the email quota team is not under the GCP umbrella but they do follow the emails sent to them. They in turn need to contact other teams (such as a team that makes sure the requestor has not abused the system in the past). While this can lead to delays it is again all designed to make sure someone with malicious intent does not prevent you from doing business. 

Personally I would rather jump through some hoops at the start of my project than have to scramble latter because someone else disrupted my work.