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Google App Engine Silently Stopped Sending Email 5 Weeks Ago

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Re: Google App Engine Silently Stopped Sending Email 5 Weeks Ago

#51

Post by jethro_tell »

levemi wrote: post #23
mattbillenstein wrote: post #19

Don't use appengine for anything -- ever. It's a terrible platform/product and google would rather you move on to GCE anyway...

Isn't SnapChat built entirely on AppEngine? Why haven't they moved to GCE if it's so terrible?

Jeez, if the Snapchat backend looks anything like the ux works this isn't much of an endorsement. Just because some company moves a lot of bits doesn't mean they know what they are doing. The easiest way to move a lot of bits is to be bad at infrastructure and have investors with deep pockets. Fuck just run a rack of open relays and bad NTP/DNS servers.

Re: Google App Engine Silently Stopped Sending Email 5 Weeks Ago

#52

Post by tominous »

Maybe I'm old-fashioned but if I was affected by this issue (and it had persisted for so long) I would set up an SMTP server and an appropriate MX record, then demonstrate using mail logs or port snooping that this was definitely not a receive-side issue.

Of course the support organisation here (Google) should be well equipped to set up this kind of testing themselves and work with a customer to root cause the issue. In my experience though these issues are rarely taken seriously until there is no-one else left for support to blame.

Re: Google App Engine Silently Stopped Sending Email 5 Weeks Ago

#53

Post by CydeWeys »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #20
achant wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And only sometimes. The issue resolved itself on my app two weeks ago. My guess is there is an outgoing spam filter run amok in some of the clusters.

I think there is not a spam filter but this is a rule to prevent people from setting up phishing scams or other deceptive emails and they are using an appengine instance to host their scam.

That seems like a very good guess to me. It's a tricky balancing act between allowing everything and locking things down to fight spammers.

Re: Google App Engine Silently Stopped Sending Email 5 Weeks Ago

#54

Post by nikanj »

spicyj wrote: post #41
martindelemotte wrote: post #28

I wonder if people at Google know how awful it is to report an Appengine bug. You have to battle for days to get your bug acknowledged. I've noticed that they've added more support people since the early days but it's still a pain as they seem to have an incentive to answer the tickets as fast as possible without doing any real investigation. The linked issue is a good example of this behavior.

They have paid support if you want it.

Paying for the service should be enough to get support.

Re: Google App Engine Silently Stopped Sending Email 5 Weeks Ago

#55

Post by jpatokal »

martindelemotte wrote: post #28

I wonder if people at Google know how awful it is to report an Appengine bug. You have to battle for days to get your bug acknowledged. I've noticed that they've added more support people since the early days but it's still a pain as they seem to have an incentive to answer the tickets as fast as possible without doing any real investigation. The linked issue is a good example of this behavior.

Please remember that Google App Engine is entirely free up to (roughly) 5 million page views/month: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/kb/#quota

If you're running production services, you should probably sign up for a paid support package, which have guaranteed response times down to 15 minutes: https://cloud.google.com/support/

Disclaimer: I work in Google Cloud Support.

Re: Google App Engine Silently Stopped Sending Email 5 Weeks Ago

#56

Post by markdown »

awinter-py wrote: post #43

The problem is that pesky humans can't decide what they want. Not sending mail is a bug but not receiving mail (i.e. spam filtering) is a feature? I can appreciate how this is confusing.

Not sending is a bug when it's undocumented, when it happens without notification, when there's no error message, and when there's no outgoing-spam bin.

The GAE docs say "do x and we'll send your mail". If we do x and mail isn't sent, then that is a problem.

Re: Google App Engine Silently Stopped Sending Email 5 Weeks Ago

#57

Post by nxzero »

nikanj wrote: post #54
spicyj wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have paid support if you want it.

Paying for the service should be enough to get support.

Paying for the service is paying for the service; bundling it with support costs would just make it cost more for people that don't need support.

Re: Google App Engine Silently Stopped Sending Email 5 Weeks Ago

#58

Post by jpatokal »

Google Cloud Support here. To correct the misleading title, this is not a generalized outage of any kind, but an issue with some applications sending mail that trigger spam/malware/etc filters. Since spammers generally do not comply with RFC 3514, filtering is unfortunately not an exact science, so false positives happen and we're working with the customers in question on a case-by-case basis.

Also, App Engine is integrated with both Sendgrid and Mailgun, and we strongly recommend using these if you're planning on sending larger quantities of mail:

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/sendgrid

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/mailgun

Re: Google App Engine Silently Stopped Sending Email 5 Weeks Ago

#59

Post by martindelemotte »

jpatokal wrote: post #55
martindelemotte wrote: post #28

I wonder if people at Google know how awful it is to report an Appengine bug. You have to battle for days to get your bug acknowledged. I've noticed that they've added more support people since the early days but it's still a pain as they seem to have an incentive to answer the tickets as fast as possible without doing any real investigation. The linked issue is a good example of this behavior.

Please remember that Google App Engine is entirely free up to (roughly) 5 million page views/month: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/kb/#quota If you're running production services, you should probably sign up for a paid support package, which have guaranteed response times down to 15 minutes: https://cloud.google.com/support/ Disclaimer: I work in Google Cloud Support.

I can't comment on the paid support. I've just noticed that the non-paid support engineers seems to be under pressure.

I feel little bit bad for them sometimes. They don't seem to have the time to look into problems. It must be quite a boring job for those assigned on the public issues.

Maybe their higher-ups aren't aware of that.

Re: Google App Engine Silently Stopped Sending Email 5 Weeks Ago

#60

Post by developer2 »

nxzero wrote: post #57
nikanj wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying for the service should be enough to get support.

Paying for the service is paying for the service; bundling it with support costs would just make it cost more for people that don't need support.

Google specifically seems to target their services much more at the large enterprise, rather than small companies and individuals. Enterprise will always pay for support, so if they are your target market, it's a given you can get them to pay. It's less of a necessity for providing lower costs, and more of a business decision to not expend resources to acquire customers that aren't bringing in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars every month.

$10-20/month VPS providers often respond to, and actually take action, on tickets within 5-15 minutes at no extra cost. Of course there is no guarantee, and a ticket can certainly wind up unresolved for 24+ hours. In my experience, if the ticket you file clearly explains your issue and represents something they can realistically help you with, the level of service provided for such a low server cost can be exceptional.

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