You will randomly lose access to your DigitalOcean account

Piotr Włodarek
2 min readApr 5, 2021

The verification code just won’t come to my email. Being locked out of my DigitalOcean account I wasted many hours of my life with pointless trial and error.

Yes, my mailbox is working perfectly fine. In fact I do receive other DigitalOcean e-mails.

Yes, I verified spam million times, as well as other folders.

No, I don’t have custom filters silently removing verification codes.

Yes, my MX DNS record is correct. Again, all e-mails arrive fine, except DO verification codes.

I’ve been using email for 24 years, and yes, I can receive email proficiently.

As it turned out:

“We temporarily blacklisted your email address so our system wouldn’t keep sending more emails to you” Wait, WAT? They explain further: “It looks like your email service provider has bounced emails from our email address support@support.digitalocean.com that sends account and billing notifications.”

Well, this specific email I had with Google, so it’s not like a niche email provider issue. Also, I’ve been a paying client for about two years (this account alone / no billing issues) while hosting the most boring stuff like git repositories, a few static websites and an open source service.

The most infuriating thing is there was no error message at all during the sign-in process. Should they pop up “we blacklisted your email because we felt like it, please contact support” I wouldn’t have lost hours debugging the shit.

Another issue is, DigitalOcean does not support any proper 2FA. You can pick from a joke-2FA based on SMS and half-joke 2FA based on a shared secret. No modern WebAuthn/U2F could be configured, which says tons about general company stance on security.

Finally, a less relevant issue is, there is no good way to opt-out of this “verification code”. It’s forced on the user every single time if user browser is amnestic (which it should be).

Ultimately the issue was resolved by contacting support and manual removal of my email from a blacklist.

I am now closing my DigitalOcean account as I can’t risk randomly losing control over my infrastructure.

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