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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

#101

Post by manyxcxi »

brianmcconnell wrote: post #72
cramsdale wrote: post #65

Hey Folks, The issue reported here is linked to App Engine and Gmail tightening up their spam filters. The root cause was an increase in organizations sharding out their spam systems to utilize App Engine’s free tier in such a way that is (a) in direct violation of our ToS and (b) making all of our lives suck a bit more (raise your hand if you want spam). It’s unfortunate that while App Engine is trying to provide a…

Long time App Engine user here. If you're sending email as part of your app, I'd recommend using Mailgun (or similar services). You can set up DKIM, inbound routes, etc, and generally have more control over how your mail is processed. I never got the impression App Engine really wanted to be in the email delivery business, so if that's important to you, there are tools that are focused on that (and free up to a month…

Love Mailgun. You can configure it to just be a very easy mail provider or use the APIs to send mail and turn on all kinds of things like campaign monitoring, tags, click opens, etc.

The best part for me when using it for customers has been the bounce/click through rate tracking. When someone asks me, "how do I know they got it?" It's incredibly nice to point them to the dashboard and show a less than 1% bounce rate (people putting in bad email is almost always the reason) with a log of every single email sent.

Most my clients get this service for free because their volume us low enough. They have quite a generous free tier.

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

#102

Post by klewandowski »

markdown wrote: post #82
cramsdale wrote: post #65

Hey Folks, The issue reported here is linked to App Engine and Gmail tightening up their spam filters. The root cause was an increase in organizations sharding out their spam systems to utilize App Engine’s free tier in such a way that is (a) in direct violation of our ToS and (b) making all of our lives suck a bit more (raise your hand if you want spam). It’s unfortunate that while App Engine is trying to provide a…

Hi Chris, > This issue should be limited to new applications where the trust signal might be a bit lower. Thus existing apps / customers shouldn’t be experiencing issues. 1. My app is not new. It's been running without issue for 2 or 3 years. 2. My app is not on the free tier. 3. On average, my app sends out under 8 emails a day, and it's done the same for over 2 years. How your algorithm considers my app a spam risk…

Hi, if you haven't already sent Chris an email, can you send me the details of your account and I'll get answers for you today? lilkim@google.com

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

#103

Post by awinter-py »

markdown wrote: post #95
Godel_unicode wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except as soon as you tell the spammer what is blocked and what isn't, they just add that to the playbook. I agree with you that some measure of notification that there's spam filtering would be good, but it's Google we're talking about. There's spam filtering.

> I agree with you that some measure of notification that there's spam filtering would be good, but it's Google we're talking about. There's spam filtering. Nonsense! I had no idea this was a feature of GAE. I pay for the use of GAE, and so long as I send less than my quota of emails, it's not Google's business what the content of those emails are. There's no reason that there should be silent spam filtering on outgo…

Nope, I don't think there's an outgoing spam filter. My guess is that individual messages are only stopped when they enter a gmail account; if there's an abuse filter for email senders, it's probably on the whole account after a manual complaint process.

The point: G is accepting cash from one group of people to send a ton of messages (mostly unwanted by addressees) and earning ad dollars from another group to stop unwanted messages.

30 years ago this would be textbook conflict of interest but the 'veil of automation' means we're blind to a lot of unsavory business practices.

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

#104

Post by elbigbad »

brianmcconnell wrote: post #72
cramsdale wrote: post #65

Hey Folks, The issue reported here is linked to App Engine and Gmail tightening up their spam filters. The root cause was an increase in organizations sharding out their spam systems to utilize App Engine’s free tier in such a way that is (a) in direct violation of our ToS and (b) making all of our lives suck a bit more (raise your hand if you want spam). It’s unfortunate that while App Engine is trying to provide a…

Long time App Engine user here. If you're sending email as part of your app, I'd recommend using Mailgun (or similar services). You can set up DKIM, inbound routes, etc, and generally have more control over how your mail is processed. I never got the impression App Engine really wanted to be in the email delivery business, so if that's important to you, there are tools that are focused on that (and free up to a month…

Thanks for the suggestion! I was having issues with SendGrid and had never heard of Mailgun. Took literally 2 minutes to get set up on Mailgun, add the credentials to my app, and send my first email! It's a super small app so don't need anything fancy, Mailgun is perfect.

edit: Not to say Mailgun isn't fancy, I have no idea if it is or not, I can say that it works in minutes though.

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

#105

Post by levemi »

jethro_tell wrote: post #51
levemi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> if the Snapchat backend looks anything like the ux works

What does this even mean.

> Just because some company moves a lot of bits doesn't mean they know what they are doing.

You have to have some measure of competency to be able to operate at Snapchat scale. You really do.

> Fuck just run a rack of open relays and bad NTP/DNS servers.

You really have no idea what you're talking about.

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

#106

Post by jjjjoe »

inopinatus wrote: post #83
jpatokal wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think this is a terrible attitude. I will never implement it in my own support model. People shouldn't have to pay me in order to report a bug in my system. Arguably I should pay them, because one report is the tip of an iceberg of silent affected customers. More often than not, what most people want is simply an acknowledgement. They're not seeking a bug bounty. And definitely not the brush-off you just gave the G…

Cloud 1:many (community) Support here.

You absolutely do not have to pay us to report a bug, period. The same day this bug was filed, one of my colleagues (pay...@google.com) jumped on the report and started asking questions to determine what was happening.

It seems to me that the GP's complaint is that this process was too slow: too much back-and-forth, too little dedicated attention to get the problem figured out immediately. That's a frustration which is easy to understand.

The point about support contracts was most likely intended to emphasize that if your livelihood depends on a service, you should have an agreement in place that guarantees you can wake up an engineer on the weekend.

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

#107

Post by bobbyi_settv »

an_account wrote: post #64
nikanj wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying for the service should be enough to get support.

For a comparision, AWS also makes you pay for prompt support, and all of their services cost money (unlike AppEngine which has a lot of free services).

> all of their services cost money

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Every AWS service I can think of has "free tier" for lower use and then charges for higher use, like AppEngine. For example, AWS's email service (SES) is free up to 60,000 emails per month.

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

#108

Post by jethro_tell »

levemi wrote: post #105
jethro_tell wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> if the Snapchat backend looks anything like the ux works What does this even mean. > Just because some company moves a lot of bits doesn't mean they know what they are doing. You have to have some measure of competency to be able to operate at Snapchat scale. You really do. > Fuck just run a rack of open relays and bad NTP/DNS servers. You really have no idea what you're talking about.

>> if the Snapchat backend looks anything like the ux works

>What does this even mean.

I find their app to be very poorly designed, I wouldn't be surprised if their back end is also poorly designed.

>You have to have some measure of competency to be able to operate at Snapchat scale. You really do.

Meh, they are big but they aren't that big. There are about 3000 bigger sites out there and not that many are built on GAE so that's a strange way to measure the competency of GAE or snap chat for that matter.

You can run at scale and do it poorly, Enterprises do it all the time. Size and scale aren't really a good indication of quality.

If you want to make a case for appengine, do that, but don't tell me that 'these guys vetted it, and they are kinda big, so it must be good' There's a lot more big sites that don't use app engine. Size doesn't equal competency.

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

#109

Post by jjjjoe »

martindelemotte wrote: post #59
jpatokal wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hi, I manage the team. Do you have some recent examples I can show to the higher-ups? Our incentives are built around quality of work, not speed, so what you're describing is definitely not working as intended.

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

#110

Post by pmlnr »

tshtf wrote: post #24
pmlnr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For programmers, maybe. Running mail servers is a sysadmin task. (I mean no attack here, this is plain statement)

Running a mail server is simple, even for programmers. Running a mail server with reliable outbound delivery, and inbound spam filtering, is anything but simple.

A reliable mail stack is configuring postfix+dovecot or cyrus, adding dspam, opendmarc, opendkim and a bunch of dns records.

How is this any harder than anything else in computing?

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