Brown County is getting e-mail from Google accounts again. After months of inexplicable and unresolvable blockages, an April 17 mention of our woes on Govtech.com got a Google rep on the horn to Brown County tech chief Paul Sivertsen to say, check your blacklist:
It had been “an issue with their blacklisted IPs,” or Internet protocol addresses, Sivertsen said via email, describing the article as “the missing piece to this puzzle,” which was “contact with Google.”
Sivertsen indicated he heard from Google on April 18, and the interaction identified and appears to have fixed the issue of blacklisting, which his agency had previously suspected.
In a LinkedIn message, Donna McIntire, Google customer engineer manager, public sector, North America, said the county’s firewall had used a real-time blacklist (RBL) monitor that had blocked certain Google-based IPs [Theo Douglas, “Google, South Dakota County Resolve Email ‘Blacklisting’ Issue,” Govtech.com, 2018.04.30].
Recall that on April 3, Sivertsen told the Brown County Commission, “…we’re set up the best we possibly can be and it’s all a Google issue.” He said fixing the problem might require contracting with a third party (AAN’s words) “highly dedicated to sifting through bits of data to pinpoint the exact cause.” Instead, it turned out the problem was found on the county’s blacklist and was solved with a single contact.