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Gmail marking email from me as spam

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Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#301

Post by shadowgovt »

guizb wrote: post #119

The email landscape is substantially more complex now than it was three decades ago. The poster seems to be frustrated that he is mostly getting technical explanations to his rather emotionally fueled question. He is literally phishing for an argument on the morals of a big company deciding he is a potential spammer without absolute proof. He made it clear that his opinion is that there should be a system in place at…

Basically. His fundamental issue is that Internet services that lack an authority framework organically bred "ghetto" infrastructures, where things work worse because a person lacks access to "the right kind of people" in a system that's supposed to be democratized. He's not wrong, but it's not like someone sat down and decreed some email sources should be untrusted for fun; the system started out very implicitly trusting, we added a pile of humans to the system, and oops! They acted like humans, took advantage of other people, implicit trust broke down, and now there are "good" and "bad" online neighborhoods.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#302

Post by teejmya »

LeonM wrote: post #118

I run an email security/monitoring business [0], and we hear this issue with Gmail a lot, in fact: we have been bitten by it as well during the early days. The problem at hand is that it is really hard to debug situations like this. Google won't tell you why a particular email is blocked, because that information will be immediately exploited by spammers. We build our software suite because we found that mistakes in…

https://testssl.sh/ is super useful, thank you for sharing

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#303

Post by abofh »

fx32s wrote: post #115
the_pwner224 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's ML mail spam models are that way because there's too many bad actors. Email, even in 2019, still extremely valuable. Google's spam models freaking suck donkey dick. I use Fastmail but my university uses Google for email. A service we use (Piazza, class Q&A) sends notifications via email. Over the years I have gotten probably about 1k email notifications from them, and replied to a few of them too. Google h…

It's curious that people have such diverging experiences with the spam filter. I think the claim that Google's filter is objectively worse should at least be supported by some evidence if you're going to make a bold statement like that. As another data point, for me and friends I it beats competitors by a large margin.

So I own a very short, easy to type domain, and maintain a wildcard. By volume, I probably get 60% spam to 40% content. I apologize to all the hard working vendors being fed into my spam list, but there's a secret: double opt in.

As a bonus, if you require opt in, I won't be able to cancel your car reservations with budget ROBERT.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#304

Post by gm »

shadowgovt wrote: post #298
gm wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it should suffice to know that after one repeatedly trains the google spam filter with "report not spam" and "mark as spam", it should learn that well enough, no? As an example: Some dumb ass Verizon customer gave them my email address as their own. I got a ton of communications from Verizon that I could not turn off (bill past due, thank you for you promise to pay, and all sorts of really annoying messages).…

> Google is failing at a level where even I could program it better You should do so. You can set up filters to hook into keywords, domain names, etc., and route to spam. If the stuff you're getting is that obvious in structure, you should be able to kill it with a handful of such filters.

Do you know by chance know if user-0defined filters take precedence over Google's spam detection? If so, I might go for it.

I say "might" because no matter what I program into it, I'll never be sure there's not an important false positive that got trapped, and so I'll forever be checking my spam anyway. It might be all for naught.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#305

Post by massaman_yams »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #133
LeonM wrote: post #118

I run an email security/monitoring business [0], and we hear this issue with Gmail a lot, in fact: we have been bitten by it as well during the early days. The problem at hand is that it is really hard to debug situations like this. Google won't tell you why a particular email is blocked, because that information will be immediately exploited by spammers. We build our software suite because we found that mistakes in…

No, it's incorrect to say that running an email server requires just "a bit more work". Google basically no longer allows low volume servers to send mail. I wrote more about this here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-ser...

And if you read the rest of that mailop thread, you'll see that the broader IP reputation of the /24 where your IP is located is a key part of whether or not your email gets delivered.

I would venture to guess that a substantial portion of people reporting issues delivering at small scale are sending from a low-reputation netblock. (Assuming auth is all set up optimally.) So it's not that it's not possible to send at low volume, it's just that most people don't know to look at the netblock, it's hard to evaluate netblock reputation, and it's not always possible to select a preferred netblock within a given provider (especially VPS providers with low-cost options).

The bottom line is: it's hard to run your own mail server, and much of the reason for the success of services like Sendgrid is a) it's easier to set up auth properly with most of them, and b) they actively manage the email reputation of their netblocks (though some do this better than others).

If you're approaching things from a practical perspective instead of making this your hill to die on, you just use an email service provider, and for the vast majority of senders, life is a little bit easier. There's plenty of ESPs to pick from, and there's a very good chance you can find a free one that delivers better than an average VPS or IP of a residential ISP.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#306

Post by huhtenberg »

driverdan wrote: post #286
huhtenberg wrote: post #232

Might be a good time to mention a new development with Yahoo Mail. They now appear to use a form of shadow ban. They will accept an email, with all outward symptoms being normal, but it will not appear anywhere in the user's mailbox. Not even in the Spam folder. This started few months ago when we were sending out our (rather infrequent) newsletter. 5th or so message to ...@yahoo.com address failed with 421 4.7.0 [TS…

I don't think this is new. Many email providers will throttle / blackhole you if they decide you're sending too fast or see too many bounces. Slow down your send rate, make sure your server is configured correctly, and prune your lists.

"Many providers" - any concrete examples? For an SPF/DKIM'd server that's been at the same IP for nearly a decade and had not a single spamming incident.

PS. The list is immaculately maintained, the server is configured as properly as it gets and very conservatively rate-throttled. There's nothing obvious.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#307

Post by gpm »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #97
irjustin wrote: post #79

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…

> Google's ML mail spam models are that way because there's too many bad actors. Email, even in 2019, still extremely valuable. Google's spam models freaking suck donkey dick. I use Fastmail but my university uses Google for email. A service we use (Piazza, class Q&A) sends notifications via email. Over the years I have gotten probably about 1k email notifications from them, and replied to a few of them too. Google h…

Piazza absolutely sends spam about the recruiting side of their platform, whether you like it or not.

I absolutely click spam on every single one of those pieces of mail, and I'm glad that they are being penalized for it.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#308

Post by NiloCK »

jacquesm wrote: post #162
irjustin wrote: post #79

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.

Regarding a specific thread going back and forth (span of a month or so, not years):

Google marked as spam my 7th or 8th reply in a chain of emails with a prospective tenant (presumably) because my email contained instructions for sending me money. I assumed that they weren't interested anymore and had ghosted, but luckily we crossed paths at a grocery store or some such.

My emails continued to be marked as spam after they added me as a contact, individually fished each one from their spam folder, and continued to write replies. Weeks later (with no apparent cause) I started arriving in their inbox again.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#309

Post by Goronmon »

rapind wrote: post #199
the_pwner224 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's ML mail spam models are that way because there's too many bad actors. Email, even in 2019, still extremely valuable. Google's spam models freaking suck donkey dick. I use Fastmail but my university uses Google for email. A service we use (Piazza, class Q&A) sends notifications via email. Over the years I have gotten probably about 1k email notifications from them, and replied to a few of them too. Google h…

I'm not defending gmail, but I will say that some users simply suck (unintentionally). I bet some of your peers are just hitting the spam button instead of simply deleting the email, generating a bad reputation for the sender. I've seen this with my SaaS. We ONLY send transactional emails like purchase receipts and login links (using postmark). We're very intentional about not sending anything remotely resembling mar…

Yet I still get the occasional user who will flag their purchase receipt as spam when all they really mean to do is delete it. They don't get the difference and don't realize that it matters which button they click.

I have a relatively high profile email address (first initial and last name) and I almost daily get at least one form of "receipt" from a transaction someone made where they entered my email by mistake.

Sometimes I'm in a bad mood and I'll mark anything I see like that as spam partly because its frustrating and partly because I suspect a good number of these emails actually are spam masquerading as receipt/login/etc emails.

And I just don't have the energy to figure out which are legit or not.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#310

Post by throwaway2048 »

fastball wrote: post #197
daliusd wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not both? Google can be evil too.

Yeah, but in this case Google isn't being evil. Do you really thing Google wants to intentionally stop your innocuous emails from getting to your mail box? Why in the world would they want that?

They have very little incentive to fix the problem.
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