Gmail problem with multiple users in different locations

marko99

Hi all, I'm hoping that somebody might be able to help with this.

I'm running a weekly quiz (every Saturday night) for members of a club while the COVID-19 restrictions continue - we send out the questions in a WhatsApp group and teams send their answers back by email to a dedicated gmail address.

We have almost 100 teams registered so there is a sudden flood of emails after each round, and we have four people involved in scoring, all logged in to the gmail account in their separate homes.

On the last two Saturday nights, our access to the email account has been temporarily suspended half way through the quiz (for about 20 minutes) and, while we have asked participants to switch to an alternative email address, I'd like to figure out why this is happening. The email account has been verified by adding a phone number.

I'm guessing that it is either because of the unusual pattern of activity (no activity for 7 days, then about 500 incoming emails in the space of two hours), or because we have five different logons from different locations (or maybe a combination of both reasons).

Can anyone shed any light on this, and/or suggest anything we can do to stop it happening? It looks like our quiz series will be running for another few weeks!

Many thanks!

advertsfox

Gmail is reacting exactly as intended in this case, multiple different IPs into the same account will trigger a security alert.

What you should be using (which will massively speed up the results) is Google Forms.

https://www.google.com/forms/about/

marko99

advertsfox wrote:

Gmail is reacting exactly as intended in this case, multiple different IPs into the same account will trigger a security alert.

Hmm ok, I really don't want to change the structure at this stage (i.e. WA for questions, email for answers). Thanks for that, I'll see if I can manage a workaround.

Ten Pin

Would cloud storage work...G Drive, One Drive, Drop box etc, although it might trigger similar security hurdles.

Are the multi logins via browser or mail client? Try both to check if lockout occurs via either channel.

marko99

Thanks for the suggestions folks - someone offline has suggested making the other users "delegates", instead of them each logging in separately. It looks like this might do the trick- they will each have to have their own google account as their principal account to which we will then delegate access to the quiz account.

Many thanks for the suggestions - much appreciated!