Google Apps account for domain suspending

Question

I received an email from Google:

It looks like you haven’t used your Google Apps account for the domain windyspot.com in the past 365 days. Google will suspend your account on or after Dec 2, 2017, and will close your account and delete your account data on or after Jan 1, 2018, unless you take action as described below.

Want to keep your account? If you want to keep this Google Apps account, please sign in to admin.google.com before Jan 1, 2018, and we’ll know that you’re still using the account. If you’ve forgotten your username or password, we can help you recover your account. Once you log in, you should receive an email within the next 48 hours letting you know that your account is no longer targeted for deletion.

I went to admin.google.com and tried to sign in with my regular Gmail account, but then it says:

admin.google.com is for G Suite accounts only. Regular Gmail accounts cannot be used to sign in to admin.google.com.

I don't have any @windyspot.com email address. windyspot.com is only a website, hosted on Google App Engine. I don't remember signing up for a Google Apps / G Suite account.

Will the domain or App Engine hosting stop working if I don't manage to sign in?

Or can I ignore this?

Answer 1

I'm a Google employee, on the App Engine team. I don't work on Google Apps / G Suite, but I had this same issue with an old domain of mine that I'd forgotten about.

You probably do have a Google Apps account, even though you don't remember setting one up. I think that some years back that was the only (recommended?) way to run an App Engine app on a domain other than appspot.com.

Anyway, the trick I found was not to go to admin.google.com, like the email said, but rather http://www.google.com/a/MY.DOMAIN.HERE/ -- in your case http://www.google.com/a/windyspot.com/ -- which sent me to a login page which gave me some hints about what account to use.

Try logging in as various usernames under that domain -- admin@windyspot.com, yourname@windyspot.com, etc. It'll tell you if the username doesn't exist. Once you find one that does exist, try resetting the passwords. With any luck, the recovery email or phone number will be something you still have access to.

Failing that, contact Google support directly; they'll sort you out!