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

Gmail marking email from me as spam

mail-archive.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 407 posts

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#331

Post by aschismatic »

LeonM wrote: post #259
throwaway2048 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe it or not, its possible to carefully look into things and check them, but I understand its much easier to be smug and assume that its my fault.

Judging by your username I don't expect you to share the domain name here, but if you need a second opinion, send me a PM and I'll analyse the domain for you. There is usually some misconfiguration somewhere that goes overlooked. Happens to the best of us :-)

I've thought about setting up a mail server on a DigitalOcean or Vultr VPS without any experience with mail servers (for person use). Whenever I read opinions about operating a private mail server, there's usually a few people that express great satisfaction in doing so, and say that it's not too difficult. However, there are also many more people that say it's not worth the effort since there's maintenance to consider, complex setup, and the cost of email providers is usually the same or less than running your own server.

What is your opinion (or others' if they'd like to chime in)? If you enjoy running your own, are there any guides in particular that you'd recommend? Does the future of email look even more prohibitively complex for self-hosting?

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#332

Post by tytso »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #323
dageshi wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And is your server sitting on the same IP range as those that do? Do you know? Google provides a service to its users, they don't provide a service to you.

Isn't receiving legitimate email and delivering it to Inboxes part of the service it provides to its users?

Filtering SPAM mail with an acceptable false positive and false negative rate is part of the service.

Unfortunately for you, the e-mail providers' customers (the users receiving the mail) get to decide what is an unacceptably high false positive/negative rate --- and not you. If e-mail recipients get too much SPAM or if they get mail that they want landing in their Spam folder too often, then they will switch. This provides the economic incentive for mail providers to Get Things Right.

Unfortunately, there is so much spam out there that if you are too relaxed with letting marginal e-mails (or e-mails from marginal network neighborhoods through) the false negative rate could result in so much spam in users' inbox that they will get mad, and switch.

However, it can happen that the email provider can be too sensitive, and there can be too high of a false positive rate. For example MIT recently tried relying Microsoft's spam filtering system. Way too much stuff landed in the spam filter, and while you could go to the spam filter and manually mark e-mails as "not spam" and eventually Microsoft's ML algorithms would hopefully figure it out, the false positive rate was too high and the MIT community (especially the ones with the real power, e.g., the professors) rose up with an outcry, and MIT abandoned using Microsoft's Spam filtering service.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#333

Post by vbezhenar »

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…

May be you should not send purchase receipt by default? I don't know why everyone does that as I don't care about it at all. If it's not required by law, add button to your UI which will mail receipt (or better just let user download it) and that's about it. While I'm not marking those receipts as spam, I'm sure that some users would do that as it's unwanted mail for them.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#334

Post by cnst »

dghughes wrote: post #250
sneak wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried filter rules?

Not sure about OP but to me rules in GMail don't work. Gmail filters don't seem to work anymore. I had filters and labels and it was great but I noticed they seems to be failing. If you go down the rabbit hole of Google Gmail support you'll find filters don't apply to email ("conversations") already in your inbox. But they also don't seem to apply to new email. Asking on various groups people seem to be giving instru…

I think they change the way it works, and then existing filters may break at one point. I've had this happen to several filters.

TBH, it's just easier to re-do the filters. There's also an option to make it apply to old conversations on a one-time basis as well.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#335

Post by loup-vaillant »

xxs wrote: post #101
sdan wrote: 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…

>2. You're using Tor or a VPN? Here's 10 reCaptcha's. I get recapthca ALL the time for just not being logged on and deleting all filthy cookies on exit; and not "honoring" 3rd party cookies at all... and I don't care. Best part is that if you live in a country you don't speak the language you get google services in one of the country official languages -- so what you should do and mark is often unclear. The next best…

> (edit adding "?hl=en" to the url tends to fix the issue in most of google services)

Seriously, you shouldn't have to. Your browser sends language preferences, doesn't it? Nope, IP trumps user preferences.

Had the same problem when using my job's VPN with an exit point in Germany (working from France). Very annoying.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#336

Post by EvanAnderson »

tytso wrote: post #332
EvanAnderson wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't receiving legitimate email and delivering it to Inboxes part of the service it provides to its users?

Filtering SPAM mail with an acceptable false positive and false negative rate is part of the service. Unfortunately for you, the e-mail providers' customers (the users receiving the mail) get to decide what is an unacceptably high false positive/negative rate --- and not you. If e-mail recipients get too much SPAM or if they get mail that they want landing in their Spam folder too often, then they will switch. This p…

My experience is that the email provider's customers have very little say in the matter. I deal with complaints from Customers who use Office 365 and Gmail about false positives regularly. They aren't MIT-profile Customers, so their complaints are ignored. The complaint usually turns into "Why can't this sender just use Google or Microsoft for their email like 'everybody' else?"

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#337

Post by rstupek »

vbezhenar wrote: post #333
rapind wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

May be you should not send purchase receipt by default? I don't know why everyone does that as I don't care about it at all. If it's not required by law, add button to your UI which will mail receipt (or better just let user download it) and that's about it. While I'm not marking those receipts as spam, I'm sure that some users would do that as it's unwanted mail for them.

I would find it odd not to receive a receipt. A receipt email should not be classified as spam. Anything else I would say would be spam.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#338

Post by theamk »

vbezhenar wrote: post #333
rapind wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

May be you should not send purchase receipt by default? I don't know why everyone does that as I don't care about it at all. If it's not required by law, add button to your UI which will mail receipt (or better just let user download it) and that's about it. While I'm not marking those receipts as spam, I'm sure that some users would do that as it's unwanted mail for them.

Please keep sending email receipts by default.

The purchase history on website disappears, logins get forgotten and so on. Only receipts in the mailbox stay forever, as I want them to.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#339

Post by cnst »

vbezhenar wrote: post #96
z3t4 wrote: post #40

I remember when Gmail was new. You got an e-mail that said "hey, we think you are sending spam, please do this". I replied and said that I always send from this domain, so if they think I'm spamming, just block the domain, then they white-listed it instead. I always see DMARC as a solution in these kind of threads, but the problem is that it's trivial for spammers to also setup DMARC. In fact almost 100% of the spam…

It might be extremely weird but not impossible, if Google algorithms classify properly setup domain as a suspicious one.

No, not at all. There are reports that even if you use G Suite, and whitelist your own domain to send yourself logs through crontab, your may still have problems with the email deliverability.

My own domain was blocked for nothing more than sending myself a list of a few dozen domain names through cron, which Google deems as containing malicious links, even though there are no links present.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#340

Post by heyoni »

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…

I’m going through the thread and the answer comes down to reputation...is that really a technical measure of the issue rather than a social one?
Post reply on HN