Conflicting with our firewall policies - Some users cannot access Google Workspace mail

[blowrancebenton]

This appears to causing an issue for some of our on-prem clients behind our Sonicwall firewall. We are a school district and block external email access along with proxy servers and other site categories, applications, etc. Some of our users are getting error messages attempting to access their Google Workspace email. After much troubleshooting it seems we've isolated it to Google ChromeVariations being enabled and/or the "IP Protection Proxy" flag being Default (We do not know the Active Variation GUID to look for that on systems that our users report the issue).

Example of user complaints:

• Issues were reported late this afternoon from {redacted} and {redacted} regarding an issue accessing email. {redacted} stated the issue started the week before Thanksgiving and has persisted.. Error message: This site can't be reached ... "The webpage at https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?authuser=0 might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address." "ERR_FAILED"

• Email can not pull up. Keeps saying there is a firewall or proxy that is keeping it from working. Have reset my connection, cleared cache, and restarted computer.

Resolution for us is to:

1. Disable Google ChromeVariations (or set to enable for critical fixes only) and/or
2. Go into chrome://flags and disable "IP Protection Proxy"

Once we do this, we can terminate and relaunch Chrome and then the user can access email again.

Our first discovery of this was November 30, 2023 which reportedly started around November 20-24. This seems to be a growing issue with the above solution resolving each one.