Google Cloud suspension for “abusive activity” while using n8n (Gmail API only)

Questions
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Hi everyone,

I’m currently using n8n to automate email workflows via Google APIs, and today I received two messages from Google stating that my Google Cloud project has been suspended due to “abusive activities” and repeated Terms of Service violations.

This is quite surprising to me, because this Google Cloud account is used exclusively with n8n, and only for email automation purposes (no scraping, no bulk spam campaigns, etc.).

Here’s part of the message I received:

“This activity violates the Google Cloud Platform Terms of Service or the Terms of Service of the Google API you may be using.”

So I’m wondering:

  • Is using n8n with Google APIs (especially Gmail) potentially against Google’s ToS in some cases?

  • Has anyone here experienced a similar suspension or warning from Google?

  • Are there specific best practices or limits I might have unknowingly violated (rate limits, sending patterns, etc.)?

I’m planning to submit an appeal, but I’d really like to understand what might have triggered this before doing so.

Any feedback or similar experiences would be really helpful :folded_hands:

Thanks!

1 Like
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Using n8n is not against policy, but if you use it for what qualifies as spamming or large scale email sending that might.

They didn’t write anything specific? Otherwise I’d suggest dropping their ToS into an LLM together with the emails you send, and let it get to work to find what could’ve caused it :smiley:

1 Like
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It’s true that I forgot to mention it, but the fact is that I don’t send any emails. I only use the Gmail trigger…

The goal is to retrieve my payslips when I receive the email notification. So when I receive an email with the expected subject, I trigger the automation, which downloads the payslip from an online platform and uploads the PDF to Paperless. Nothing more.

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Hi @CodeRider883 Welcome!
This can happen when you are getting a huge amount of mails, and the flow is getting triggered so many times, umm i think trying out the IMAP node might give us more context on what is the error exactly.