Snippet #144

Grrrrrrrrr. I get an email notifying me that my SSL certificate is going to be revoked in a little over a month because it was generated a while ago with a CSR produced by an only 1024-bit key.

No problem; they’ll re-issue me a stronger certificate for free. The catch is they want to send a verification email, which Google controls because I’m using Google Apps for Business.

Google says you can can create a group for postmaster (and abuse) addresses, and they’ll still monitor it but at least I’ll be able to read the email.

Except that I can’t. Every time I try to navigate to the page I get a hard error. I’ve tried multiple users accounts, deleted and recreated the group, cleared all my cookies etc. It’s just broken. To add insult to injury, their admin UI is ever changing and doesn’t have the options that their help documentation claims it does.

</end of rant>

Update: Grrrrrr, again. This page makes it sound like it’s not a transitory issue, and that I will have to enable Google Groups for Business, which apparently is not included on my (granfathered) free Google Apps for Business account.

That means I can either pay $300/year forever (or rather, until Google changes its terms) in order to turn my 6-user Google Apps for Business account into a paid version, or I can suck it up and just forget about ever reading email to postmaster@ and get a brand new SSL cert (provided they don’t insist on emailing me at postmaster@, that is).

Final update: I was able to turn on a 30-day trial of paid Google Apps for Business, get the group (mostly) working (the Web-UI never worked, but receiving email to postmaster@ did), and then downgrade, while apparently preserving the ability to receive email at postmaster@. Along the way, I lost access to one of my email accounts (on the upgrade), and then another (on the downgrade); after six or so hours, everything has reverted back to normal.

Sadly, this whole enterprise has been a great waste of energy for little productive purpose.