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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Same thing happened to me [1], with a slightly different rationale for pulling the extension.

This happened despite tens of thousands of users, years of good reviews, and an extension so useful that Google's own accessibility team demos it at conferences.

I was only able to get the situation sorted because I know people who work at Google on the Chrome team. Even with all this, it took weeks to get the previous version restored, and after that weeks more before we could push an update without having it get automatically rejected.

The only "good" news is they didn't uninstall our existing user base.

1: https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/google-yanked-my-chrome-ex...

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Hey, it's off topic, but I just learned about your product and sent a link of the product page (beelinereader.com/individual) to my colleagues - only to find out that my email was filtered as a spam by FortiMail! Apparently, the offending text was that URL. Maybe it's somehow related? Was this product site previously infested by malware or something?

Wow, thanks for letting me know. We have never had any malware, though our inline install of Chrome/Firefox extensions has been flagged by Avast at times (despite our attempts to get whitelisted). Neither our website nor our tools have ever done anything even vaguely shady — we don't gather user-level browsing data or anything else like that, so it's a big bummer when we get flagged like this.

Do you know if there's a way that your company can report this as an inappropriate block to FortiMail? I will try to reach out to them also, but my guess is they'll be more receptive to a customer request than to one of their blacklisted websites!

BTW, we're not publicizing this, but right now we're testing out a "BeeLine Advocate" program. Basically, if you install the extension and complete the free trial (2 wks), you'll be invited to get free access to our Pro tier in exchange for filling out periodic surveys.

We've just opened up this program, and it'll probably be open to new users for 3 weeks or so. Thought I'd share with the community here, since HNers are great for feedback (as you've just shown with your comment!).

> Do you know if there's a way that your company can report this as an inappropriate block to FortiMail?

Our corporate email is outsourced to another company, where they apparently use FortiMail as a packaged solution. So I don't think it's very likely that they'll listen to me - but I'll try anyway. Good luck with the new campaign!

> I was only able to get the situation sorted because I know people who work at Google on the Chrome team.

Hehe, one thing all successfully resolved issues have in common - a friend inside of Google. Maybe that's by design... Google employees are not friends with bad guys!

Sounds like they don't really have automation that well set up for fixing up removal mistakes. Not a great sign.

Did you ever find out why this all happened?

I did not, and hearing this guy’s story means that the problem hasn’t been completely solved.

For us, this was triggered by a question about our privacy policy (which we have, and always have had). I assumed that it was just a glitch in their review and follows-up software — specifically, that it didn’t give the full 7 day grace period. But it sounds like it’s a bigger problem than this.

One of the big frustrations for me was that their system was run from an anonymous mailbox, and seemed to have different folks responding different times. Also, if they sent you a message and you replied immediately, you might not hear back for days. At times, it seemed like I was either corresponding with a bot or someone with very bad English.

Maybe a tech journalist can write a story about what’s going on, and actually get some answers from them?

Another good option is posting your story on HN: if it gets to the front page, you have good chances of solving your problem.

I did post at the time. Didn’t get much attention.

Well, it worked in this case (see the updates to the original post).

Stop contributing to google's ecosystem.

I have told them that this issue has pushed us to look more at other platforms. We are also on Firefox (much easier now that their extension platform is similar to Chrome’s), but we still have the vast majority of our users on Chrome (60k versus <1k).

I even submitted our extension to Opera. Months went by with no response. Dev forums show that this is a common experience.

We’re also on iOS, but since extensions don’t really exist on mobile, this isn’t a great substitute.

I’d welcome suggestions for another platform that we should be on!

You can start inviting users to install Firefox. If enough sites do it FF share will raise and Google will change their behavior.

This is a good point, and it actually fits with our ethos of minimal tracking, which I've been meaning to emphasize in our onboarding process.

Maybe a nudge toward Firefox can be part of that message.

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