Carl Hutzler's Blog

One of my clients forgot their password a few days ago for their email address which is hosted on Google Apps. It just so happens that this account was also the admin account for the entire domain!

On top of this issue, for some reason the “I forgot my password” link was just telling us to “check with your domain admin” for assistance. While I was pretty sure I had checked the box allowing us to reset the admin password by sending an email to a secondary email address, this was not showing up.

We are using Google Apps for free (not the premier version) so we had little recourse. From clicking on a few help pages, though, I was able to find a single route to getting the password reset. Basically Google wants you to submit a help ticket (via a form). I did this and a few mins later got a response from Google with a ticket number in the subject and instructions inside.

The instructions in the email said that I needed to confirm I was the domain owner. OK, fair enough. They gave two options…create a special subdomain specified by google (and related to my specific help ticket#) and point it to a specific google server (ghs.google.com). Or I could create a special file named gafyd.html with my specific help ticket# inside of the plain text file. I opted for the latter because my hosting company (1and1) was experiencing subdomain creation issues (more on that next!!).

I uploaded the file to the website and answered back to google’s email stating it had been completed. 36 hours later, I got an email back from google with a temporary password inside. This worked and we were back to business as usual.

One other note on this…something is not working with google’s “I forgot my password” link. While I did try it after I got back into the account and did see the link to “send a new password to my alternate account” (or something like that) once, I have been unable to get that link to show up again in any of my google hosted domains. Not sure what is going on, but if anyone has a clue, let me know. I sure let Google know with screenshots, etc.

UPDATE: Google got back to me about the link not working with a nice email if a bit corporate/form-ish, but at least they said they will look into it.

Hello Carl,
Thanks for your reply.
Thanks for keeping us posted. I’m very glad to hear your issue related to
account login has been resolved!
I’ve recorded your feedback related to the ‘forgot password’ link and will
submit it to the appropriate team. Our team of experts will work on your
report and determine whether the link was broken or not.
Have a great day!
Sincerely,
Shashank
The Google Apps Team