Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Is Eating Our Mail

tablix.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 720 posts

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#241

Post by reaperducer »

prlambert wrote: post #183
reaperducer wrote: post #8

Google has no incentive to fix these kinds of problems. It's big enough that when someone complains that a message sent wasn't received, the intended recipient will say, "I never have problems with my Gmail account. It must be you." And the sender has to switch to Gmail to reliably communicate with the outside world. I wish this was just paranoia, but we've seen multiple discussions on HN about Google programs and po…

I'm one of the PMs for Gmail and hang around HN quite a bit. This is my personal take, not an official reply. It's simply not true we have no incentive to fix this. Here are a few: Firstly, Gmail's success is entirely predicated on the health of the global email ecosystem. Gmail does not, inherently, have any network effects (unlike FB, messengers, any other comms tool of Gmail's scale). Email itself, of course has a…

If we lose an open, healthy ecosystem with many providers, we'll destroy the base we stand on.

Or you've grown large enough that the base no longer matters.

we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our users

it definitely makes me sad to see articles like this

There are going to be false positives, we will make mistakes

we could do much better there.

Most of this reads like it was written by Facebook's PR department after yet another scandal.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#242

Post by Chlorus »

jocoda wrote: post #111
sevensor wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, the spur for me to finally sign up for Fastmail was that I was applying for a job and I can't trust Google with crucial email. You get what you pay for.

Even if you pay for it and don't use g, you can't know with absolute certainty that your email is going to get to the person you are sending it to. There's a high 9's probability that it will arrive safely, but there's several ways that things can go wrong, simplest of which is that you are deleted by a misconfigured filter. There are US ISPs (cough sbcglobal) that routinely throw away mail from some arbitrary IPs de…

> Even if you pay for it and don't use g, you can't know with absolute certainty that your email is going to get to the person you are sending it to.

And there's the core of all of this. SMTP is a best-effort protocol that does not guarantee delivery. Until someone comes up with something better, we're condemned to seeing "Help! My very important email disappeared in transit" threads on HN every several months for the rest of eternity.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#243

Post by 13security »

chrisfinazzo wrote: post #132

Can someone explain in simple terms why, in 2019, anyone is running their own mail server? Unless you are the sysadmin, server guy/gal, whatever, this just sounds like signing up for a world of hurt doing it yourself.

Because they have no way of measuring how much of their outbound mail is going straight to Junk, so they just assume their messages are being ignored.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#244

Post by megous »

deelly wrote: post #197
marktangotango wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Secondly, we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our users. This is so deeply disingenuous and at odds with so many peoples experience it’s absurd. Or satire?

Probably key point is "..with developers and all our users.." but not individual developers and individual users.

Key point is that words don't matter unless they're backed up by some concrete action.

The worst thing about this blocking is that you often times don't get to see what's wrong. So you're running around in circles, trying to use various mx tools on the internet to find the problem.

This is not just gmail issue. Though with many smaller providers you'll at least get something like "your blocked by XYZ blacklist".

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#245

Post by pteraspidomorph »

cmroanirgo wrote: post #236
prlambert wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of the PMs for Gmail and hang around HN quite a bit. This is my personal take, not an official reply. It's simply not true we have no incentive to fix this. Here are a few: Firstly, Gmail's success is entirely predicated on the health of the global email ecosystem. Gmail does not, inherently, have any network effects (unlike FB, messengers, any other comms tool of Gmail's scale). Email itself, of course has a…

As a "small fry" myself, the hoops I've had to jump through in order for Gmail to accept legitimate mail from my mail server are rather large. Like the op, legit email appears in the trash of some recipients for goodness knows why. Like OP I've spf, dkim, & have never been on rbl. I (& services on my machine) are the only senders, and the recipients of those machine messages want them (about 10ppl in total & email ha…

I have a small mail server and fortunately, as long as my server is well configured gmail has always been well behaved for me. Microsoft, on the other hand...

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#246

Post by [deleted] »

monocularvision wrote: post #200
bencollier49 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastmail [EDIT: Sorry, missed the 'free' in there. Guess you get what you pay for]

I would love to pay FastMail for my family’s email. I have myself, my wife, my four children, one family address and one other generic address. 8 emails would cost me $240 a year at a minimum. If they could solve for my situation and not charge me that kind of money, I would switch from Gmail immediately.

[deleted]

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#247

Post by jrockway »

darrmit wrote: post #208
asark wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think (some of them) may think that's true, but their internal reward structures and top-down priorities are clearly set up such that it's not, in practice. There's no other reason it could be so bad.

This seems to be common with the product teams I’ve interfaced with. Good intentions, but bad prioritization and little incentive to do anything other than cater to the big revenue drivers.

Why would you start a for-profit company to not focus on "big revenue drivers"?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#248

Post by JohnFen »

Interesting...

Like the author, I've been running my own mailserver for over a decade and am very conscientious about ensuring that no attackers use it as a spam relay.

While the vast majority of the people I exchange email with don't use GMail at all, so it can take a while before I notice any issues with it, I did happen to notice that GMail was rejecting my outgoing email a couple of weeks ago.

This week, I finally got around to trying to address the problem (it's not high priority because having GMail reject my emails isn't really a huge deal).

...and I found that it is working again without my changing anything. Weirdness abounds.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#249

Post by DuskStar »

benou wrote: post #231
mcsb4 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's simply not true we have no incentive to fix this I just happen to have set up an email server and encountered the same problems with Google as described in the article. I own the IP since quite some time, it is not on any black list, reverse DNS is set up etc. but Google rejects email as spam. And this even happens when the gmail account has added the sender in his address book and has send the first email to…

> Use your AI to put email into the spam folder. Refusing it outright is a case for the European Commission which hopefully will slap you another few billions of fine onto the wrist until you remember to play nicely with the other kids. I prefer getting a bounce than ending in the spam folder by far. Lots of relatives on Gmail never look into the spam folder so I never know if they get to see my email or not and I en…

But if it ends up in the spam folder there's at least a chance that it'll be trained out of the spam folder by people marking it as "not spam", and it provides a workaround for the people who really need it to work _now_.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#250

Post by majkinetor »

jacobolus wrote: post #218
prlambert wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of the PMs for Gmail and hang around HN quite a bit. This is my personal take, not an official reply. It's simply not true we have no incentive to fix this. Here are a few: Firstly, Gmail's success is entirely predicated on the health of the global email ecosystem. Gmail does not, inherently, have any network effects (unlike FB, messengers, any other comms tool of Gmail's scale). Email itself, of course has a…

> I'm one of the PMs for Gmail and hang around HN quite a bit. Can you bring back the old web UI? I experience obnoxious interaction and interface bugs in the new one on an hourly basis, it has horrendous interaction latency for many operations that used to be snappy, it looks worse, and has basically nothing new I want. Actually, can you bring back the Gmail of like 10 years ago? Basically every change since then ha…

New UI really makes Gmail barely usable, basically on any kind of connection. Since it came into being, I avoid checking gmail because its unbearably slow and buggy.

I have 20 years of XP in this industry and build large gov services, and I am astonished that Google allows itself such a failure.

If you want, I will make a gif of Gmail unresponsiveness in default Chrome browser on 50MB connection - taking more then a minute to load and then some more to stop glitching. Then I will show you ProtonMail, Zimbra etc. having no problem whatsoever.

Its embarrassing and affects all their cloud tools in some measure. Google was once a good company. Today, most of the IT people I know or work with try to replace anything google.

Above post from the google employee which "cares" makes me angry - what do you think m8 ? That we are squirrels ? Shame on you. If you have some moral decency that you propagate here, go and work for somebody non-evil, take as many people you can with you and write a blog about it so anybody can know.

Post reply on HN