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Gmail marking email from me as spam

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Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#171

The attitude of the replies he gets lower down in the thread is shocking. I hope whatever mailing list that is doesn't have any kind of good reputation, because it seems like the consensus opinion there is shockingly anti-cooperative, anti-internet, "me before the network", even going as far to say "if Google thinks you're a spammer then you probably are". How things have changed.

It’s posted elsewhere in this comment thread but that’s after the point where it becomes clear that he wrapped a moral argument in a technical envelope and people spent a lot of time trying to help him out with the technical argument.

Put another way, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#172
post #8

Google's making us play by their rules: 1. Our ML models see that your emails spam? You're spam. 2. You're using Tor or a VPN? Here's 10 reCaptcha's. 3. Don't use Google Webmaster or use AMPs? Good luck finding your page on the 1st page. 4. Youtube video includes education hacking tutorials? Demonetized. Obviously some alternatives are moving to Fastmail and using Duck Duck Go, but we need Google to stop this "my way…

Isn't duck duck just redesigned yandex (aka kgb) search?

At start it has mark that search results based on results from yandex engine and crawled results

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#173
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its inaccurate to say that SPF, DMARC and DKIM setup this way is a "misconfiguration", It still allows anybody you are mailing to verify that email is from your mail server, and your domain, which is good enough for anti-spam purposes. Setting SPF to neutral (or softfail) and DMARC to none just ensures stuff like mailing lists forwarding mail from your domain aren't automatically marked as spam. In my experience it d…

> Setting SPF to neutral (or softfail) and DMARC to none just ensures stuff like mailing lists forwarding mail from your domain aren't automatically marked as spam. Not exactly. DMARC inspection passes if either SPF or DKIM validation passes. A mailing list forwarding mail will break SPF, but retain the DKIM signature. So you can definitely use strict SPF and DMARC with mailing lists. In fact, retaining mailing list…

Lots of mailing lists add footers to the body of a mail, or otherwise mess with the message which is going to cause DKIM to fail.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#174
post #172
post #8

Google's making us play by their rules: 1. Our ML models see that your emails spam? You're spam. 2. You're using Tor or a VPN? Here's 10 reCaptcha's. 3. Don't use Google Webmaster or use AMPs? Good luck finding your page on the 1st page. 4. Youtube video includes education hacking tutorials? Demonetized. Obviously some alternatives are moving to Fastmail and using Duck Duck Go, but we need Google to stop this "my way…

Isn't duck duck just redesigned yandex (aka kgb) search? At start it has mark that search results based on results from yandex engine and crawled results

Ddg is a wrapper around Bing. They may incorporate other results as well.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#175
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Setting SPF to neutral (or softfail) and DMARC to none just ensures stuff like mailing lists forwarding mail from your domain aren't automatically marked as spam. Not exactly. DMARC inspection passes if either SPF or DKIM validation passes. A mailing list forwarding mail will break SPF, but retain the DKIM signature. So you can definitely use strict SPF and DMARC with mailing lists. In fact, retaining mailing list…

Lots of mailing lists add footers to the body of a mail, or otherwise mess with the message which is going to cause DKIM to fail.

That's horrifying [0]

An email service that alters the content of an email message in any way should definitely be marked as malicious. This allows for phishing (replacing a URL in the email), censorship, fake news, etc etc.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1172/

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually worse than that: > "Their network; their rules". No, it's not their network. It's our common network. If anybody imposes own rules on their part of the network, we are losing interoperability. Internet loses any sense. He apparently thinks that he (or maybe more accurately "we") should dictate how private companies treat traffic. Despite it's huge footprint, Google does not have a monopoly on email, if…

> Google does not have a monopoly on email 53% of email accounts in the US are with Gmail. What's the definition of a monopoly?

From my old law courses (IANAL but someone decided programmers should have a basic knowledge of law):

* An illegal monopoly should not be absolute. Having >20% of the market has been enough te be considered a monopoliy for antitrust. The main question is if your actions dominate the market.

* But having a monopoly is not enough. You can have 100% of the market and be legal. Abusing the monopoly is the problem. Abuse is typically crushing smaller competitors, or using your monopoly in 1 market to push yourself to another market.

* Is google abusing its potential email monopoly? My non-lawyer guess is no. Being non-responsive and arrogant is not illegal.

* But the google browser and search engine might very well be other stories. Here google seems dominant enough to influence web standards and change other corporations behaviour to raise in their search index.

* I don't think US or EU governement are willing to step in, though.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#177

I would argue in this narrow case - I would not point to nefarious undercurrents. Google's ML mail spam models are that way because there's too many bad actors. Email, even in 2019, still extremely valuable. If you can get into people's email inbox, there's still quite high conversion rate - better than clicks/videos on a pure percentage basis. Even the author wants to reach out to people in a cold fashion. As a gmai…

There is no way that Google would suddenly start to mark as spam continuations of threads that were perfectly fine between senders that have been in contact for years unless their spam filters were either seriously broken or they tweak them to cause more people to switch to gmail.

I'm afraid you're wrong here, Jacques.

When you refer to specific threads going back and forth this may be. But here's my counter example.

I sent emails to my girlfriend's gmail address from my own domain hosted on a mail server run by a reputable company for years with no problem, whatsoever.

Then, on vacation in Thailand, my rather elaborate trip reports for which there's really no plausible explanation that they could be spam, suddenly bounced.

Sent from the same domain from which I sent mail for years and Google suddenly branded me a spammer and refused to deliver those mails even to her spam folder.

The auto-reply from Google is about as useless as you would expect. There are a few links, which are neither informative nor do they help to resolve the issue.

I worked around the problem by sending mails from my own Gmail account, but it left a really rotten feeling around the lines:

NICE COMMUNICATION YOU HAVE GOING THERE, WOULD BE A SHAME IF SOMETHING HAPPENS TO IT!

So I guess your assertion is wrong. Our exchange went on for a minimum of four years. Always from the same account and suddenly I was deemed an evil spammer.

It really sucks.

or they tweak them to cause more people to switch to gmail.

That, actually, is my suspicion. It's easy to brand that as "protecting their user base", but in reality make it so cumbersome that you're not able to send mail to a significant percentage of users over which Google controls their email unless you switch to Google for email.

edit: A couple spellos and a clarification

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#179
post #8

Google's making us play by their rules: 1. Our ML models see that your emails spam? You're spam. 2. You're using Tor or a VPN? Here's 10 reCaptcha's. 3. Don't use Google Webmaster or use AMPs? Good luck finding your page on the 1st page. 4. Youtube video includes education hacking tutorials? Demonetized. Obviously some alternatives are moving to Fastmail and using Duck Duck Go, but we need Google to stop this "my way…

"Moving to Fastmail" is such a popular alternative that if they ever get to any kind of reasonable size we'll be in the same position all over again. That should not be the suggestion. Many smaller providers encourages the competition necessary for an open network, not a small number of huge providers.

But fastmail lets you use your own domain, so there's much less vender lock-in.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#180
post #126
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Consider physical junk mail... Where I live it takes a sticker 'no spam' glued to the mail box and no more junk happens

I've lived in several places where this practice is common and none where it remotely works - it's totally ignored. Where are you based?

I will just second that this works in my country (Lithuania).
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