Month: April 2019

My Google Voice account has been suspended, what do I do now?

You have received the dreaded pop-up or email notifying you that your Google Voice account has been suspended for a policy violation. This article will cover all of the steps you need to take to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.

What you need to know

Let’s start with the good news: All hope is not lost. It is possible to have your account restored. 

The bad news:You did something to trigger the Google Anti-Spam detectors and it won’t be entirely painless getting your account back. You will also need to change the way you use the service to avoid it happening again (more on this below).

Google Voice is notoriously under-documented and Google purposely does not publish the specific triggers that will get your account suspended. It’s also really difficult to get help. There is no toll free support phone number to call, no email address to email. There is a community help forum, but the moderators are not part of the team that handles account suspensions.

The Fix

It’s important to know up front: has your account been temporarily suspended or marked for abuse? There is a difference.

How do I know if I have been suspended or disabled?

Your account can be temporarily suspended for 24 hours, in those cases you just have to wait for the suspension to be removed.

If your receive and email stating that your account has been marked for abuse you have been marked for abuse and suspended.

Unable to access a Google product If you've been redirected to this page from a particular product, it means that your access to this product has been suspended. Read on for more information. Your access to this Google product has been suspended because of a perceived violation of either the Google Terms of Service or product-specific Terms of Service. For specific product guidelines, please visit the homepage of each Google product you're interested in for a link to its Terms of Service. Google reserves the right to: • Disable an account for investigation. • Suspend a Google Account user from accessing a particular product or the entire Google Accounts system, if the Terms of Service or product-specific policies are violated. • Terminate an account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice. Next steps for suspended accounts: If you believe your access to this product was suspended in error, contact us.

How to Get your account back

Step 1: Review the Google Voice Acceptable Use Policy https://www.google.com/googlevoice/program-policies.html

Have you violated any of the rules? Be honest with yourself here, no judgement from me. How were you using the service prior to being suspended?

Here are a few examples of behaviors that can trigger the SPAM detection services with Google Voice:

  • Making a lot of phone calls in a short period of time
  • Sending a larger than normal number of text messages in a short period of time
  • Redialing the same number over and over again

 Finding this important information about Google Voice is not easy unless you search for it. Stuff happen and accounts get suspended so it’s important to know what you did so that you don’t make the same mistake again.

Step 2: Submit a suspension appeal request 

Fill out the following form to appeal your suspension https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/suspended. Explain what happened before your suspension. IMPORTANT: If your entire Google account has been suspended, including your Gmail account, make sure you use a different email address that you have access to. 

You can try posting to the Google Voice Help community forum https://support.google.com/voice#topic=1707989, but understand that the team there does not handle account suspensions. That is managed by an entirely different team within Google. They can provide guidance on how best to proceed, just remember to be polite. You catch more flies with Honey than Vinegar.

Step 3: If your first appeal is denied, wait a day or two and try again

In my research for this guide I found a few instances where it took multiple appeal attempts to get an account reinstated. See here https://www.reddit.com/r/Googlevoice/comments/3e9txi/my_account_was_suspended_and_having_issues/

And here https://www.reddit.com/r/Googlevoice/comments/7l3hj5/anyone_else_not_able_to_send_texts_or_receive/

I am not advocating that you SPAM Google, but rather encouraging you to wait a day or two before resubmitting. I know that it’s infuriating that this is the way to get your account back, but it’s unfortunately the only way that I’ve been able to find.

What do to after your account is re-instated

Make sure you don’t repeat the same mistakes again! Check out our easy-to-follow guide <here>

Once you do have your account back, give some serious consideration to whether Google Voice is the right service to use for your business. I have a handy guide that hopefully can help answer those questions for you <link to guide here>.

Ready to make the move to a different product? Learn how to port out your Google Voice number <here>

Did you find this guide helpful? Please consider subscribing to my mailing list. I’ll periodically send you emails with other content related to Google Voice and other products that can benefit your small business. 

5 Reasons Why Your AT&T IP Flex Orders Take Forever

You’ve got your AT&T IP Flexible Reach, a.k.a. IP Flex/BVOIP, service provisioned and set up (which was probably a monumental feat in and of itself), you’ve placed your test calls and now you’ve placed your first order. If you are like me, this has probably been your experience:

  • You place the order with your account team. Maybe they acknowledge your order, maybe they don’t. 
  • After several days or weeks of no response, you follow up but don’t hear anything. 
  • After several more weeks your account manager discovers that there was an issue with the order and it needs to be placed again. 
  • After several more weeks of waiting you finally receive confirmation that your order was accepted
  • Several more weeks of waiting
  • You get a meeting invite for the middle of the day (when you requested an after-hours port)
  • Yadda, yadda, yadda
  • Two to three months later you’ve finally ported your numbers

Now you get to start all over again and figure out what black magic you have to work to make it happen in half the time! I’m hopeful that this post will help you avoid some of the painful mistakes and issues I’ve encountered on my own IP Flex journey over the years.

Here are my top 5 recommendations for how to improve the AT&T IP Flex number porting experience:

  1. Make sure you have Letters of Authorization Signed.This important form confirms that you own the numbers that you are requesting to port. Your order is almost guaranteed to fail if you do not have this signed and submitted with your order. 
  2. Pre-qualify all of your sites for IP Flex at one time. AT&T has a group that will pull Customer Service Records for your branch offices and review all numbers associated with your account. They will do this for any location regardless of whether or not they are the LEC. This saves an unbelievable amount of time for you as the customer because you don’t have to go to your LEC and ask for those records. This one step has virtually eliminated ALL issues we’ve had with incorrect orders or missing DIDs on our orders. 
  3. Create Branch Office Extensions (BOEs) ahead of time.Think of a Branch Office Extension, or BOE, as a bucket inside of your IP Flex service. You have your main IP Flex “Nodes” where your calls come in on your SBCs. Those nodes have addresses associated with them for 911. Obviously, not every single site you move to IP Flex will have that address, even though the calls come in and go out of those devices. This is where BOE’s come in. They carve out a space in your environment where AT&T knows that a specific DID belongs to a specific 911 address. This ensures that when an emergency call is placed on the IP Flex network, AT&T knows exactly which PSAP (emergency responder) to route it to. 
  4. If you have a large number of branch offices, can you commit to porting 20 or more sites? If so, AT&T can commit project management resources to your account to help with submitting and tracking port orders. Typically, this person will have IP Flex knowledge and will understand what internal systems to check whenever there are issues with orders. Sometimes this can save a full MONTH’s worth of delays. 
  5. Check your email! Seriously!AT&T is notorious for assigning multiple order writers to process your order. I will often get lengthy, jargon-filled emails from order fillers that I don’t always understand. Often these emails have a one-liner at the bottom of the email stating what action I need to take for the order to proceed to the next step. Read these emails thoroughly and carefully. Don’t be afraid to email your account team asking for help, especially if you have a project manager as recommended in point number 4. AT&T will cancel your order if you don’t respond in time forcing you to reset the clock on your port order. 
  6. BONUS! Set your engineer as the local contact on the order.In fact, there is no reason to list a local person from your remote site at all: with SIP trunking everything is centralized. Listing the name of the engineer responsible for porting the numbers is critical because all email commuincation about the order will go to this person. If you split responsibilities for engineering/operations and order placing make sure ALL individuals are included as contacts on the order. This will save you headaches down the road as your order works it’s way through the AT&T systems.

How can I connect up an older PBX with a new modern VOIP system?

 There are typically four ways to do this:

  • IP based trunking if the PBX supports it. This would involve using protocols such as SIP, H.323, MGCP, etc
  • T1 tie trunks. You can set up a QSIG or PRI connection between the two phone systems. This configuration requires that you have hardware on both ends to support the T1 connection.
  • Analog lines. You can extend individual analog lines between your phone systems. This requires that you have hardware to support it as well as making sure you have enough lines to support the number of calls you will route between phone systems at any given time. 
  • Forwarding calls out of your telephone system’s PSTN conneciton. In this scenario, you could allow users on the old PBX to dial the typical 3-5 digit extension and simply send the call out to your telco so that it comes in via the PSTN on the other phone system. This is probably the easiest solution but you could incur carrier charges depending on your set up.