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Gmail having issues

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Re: Gmail having issues

#131

Post by Alex3917 »

IshKebab wrote: post #64
firebaze wrote: post #47

As quite a few googlers appear to read and write on HN, I'd really welcome an insider info on what's going on the last few days. Sure there will be some internal turmoil going on right now, but isn't there some non-confidential info to share? Can't imagine this will hurt the image of google neither in the short nor long run, quite the opposite.

I wonder if Gmail is just not a very well maintained codebase. Here's an issue where old emails just become inaccessible. Not fixed for over a year and they've locked the thread so I'm starting to wonder if they actually deleted the emails by mistake. https://support.google.com/mail/thread/6187016 Maybe time to switch to a more reliable provider.

> Not fixed for over a year and they've locked the thread so I'm starting to wonder if they actually deleted the emails by mistake.

Did you try pulling them down using the API tester?: https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/reference/rest/v1/us...

Some of the internal formatting that Gmail uses has changed over the years, so more likely than not the API that parses the stored message for display in the Gmail UI is just throwing some kind of error.

Re: Gmail having issues

#132

Post by petercooper »

Jap2-0 wrote: post #69
petercooper wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we're unusual in not relying on third parties for list management. We can rollback. Or I might just comment out the 'unsub on hard bounce' code for the rest of the week..! :)

Unsub on two consecutive bounces seems more reasonable to catch flukes (or Gmail going down)?

Yes, most likely! That is a common approach for 'soft bounces' in most list management systems (e.g. MailChimp).

The problem here is Gmail has been throwing out "NoSuchUser" errors which are an instant unsub in most systems because Gmail takes repeated delivery to non-existing addresses into account for deliverability purposes.

I'm extremely paranoid about email hygiene, tiny bounce rates and high delivery rates, so we aggressively unsubscribe troublesome addresses (often to the point of getting reader complaints about it) for many reasons beyond that, however.

Re: Gmail having issues

#133

Post by icedchai »

erhk wrote: post #92
icedchai wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Their' works fine and has been gender-neutral English for ages.

Ages is subjective, it came back in to popularity only recently

That varies based on location and regional dialect. Here in the northeast US, I remember using singular they/their since the 80's. It would be interesting to know when this become popular elsewhere.

Re: Gmail having issues

#134

Post by kharak »

gurjeet wrote: post #75
rat9988 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would advice anyone to not share any information that his company hasn't agreed explicitely to share.

s/his/her/

I remember some people tried to get BLM into German discussions, which made absolutely zero sense, as we have a complete different history and culture. Now I see this popping up. I really hope Europe can get some cultural distance between itself and the USA in the near future. The time is ripe.

Re: Gmail having issues

#135

Post by alphadevx »

megous wrote: post #89
wenbin wrote: post #9

"Type: Permanent; SubType: General; Code: smtp; 550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try 550-5.1.1 double-checking the recipient's email address for typos or 550-5.1.1 unnecessary spaces. Learn more at 550 5.1.1 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=NoSuchUser y128si147264pfg.177 - gsmtp"

A lot of people will lose transactional email messages, because of this. I'd absolutely hate to be hit by this at this time. Thankfully I've made an time investment to run my own mail server years ago. A handful of times it broke down, it either went offline or started returning 4xx codes due to misconfigured or broken milter after an update. Neither meant lost messages from normal senders that use queuing MTAs.

Same for me, mainly for privacy concerns. And I back it up daily to my local NAS. It's so easy to configure and run your own mail server, that I'm surprised we are the minority in the tech community.

Re: Gmail having issues

#136

Post by petercooper »

mehrdadn wrote: post #101
Jap2-0 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unsub on two consecutive bounces seems more reasonable to catch flukes (or Gmail going down)?

Logically you'd expect unsubscribe to only act after lots of bounces of this format when the address has been receiving mail fine before. It also seems reasonable not to trust such bounces for the entire domain for a while when this happens to lots of other addresses that have worked fine before. Not that I expect software currently works this way, but it does seem like a common sense thing to code in.

I mean, it's possible, but you'd need to queue up a day's worth of bounces, do the analysis, and then handle the bounces asynchronously later on to do that.

Most systems operate more immediately in isolation on individual addresses than that right now, because such analysis is generally not needed (until today, of course ;-)).

Re: Gmail having issues

#137

Post by betaby »

noemit wrote: post #103

is there a product you could use, like a cache layer for gmail? An investor I know would love that product. I understand things go down, but it's actually quite a pain to lose access to your existing emails and calendar events. Could he just use a Mail app like Outlook? Yes. But that's too complicated to set up I think.

SMTP was designed to have primary / secondary etc. Google decided they know better and not to follow the SMTP standards

Re: Gmail having issues

#138

Post by icedchai »

throwaway201103 wrote: post #99
icedchai wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Their' works fine and has been gender-neutral English for ages.

His and her no longer correlates to biological sex, so what does it matter anymore. Pronouns can mean whatever you want them to mean.

Okay, so use "their." It is gender neutral, so should work for everyone.

Re: Gmail having issues

#139

Post by [deleted] »

rat9988 wrote: post #62
firebaze wrote: post #47

As quite a few googlers appear to read and write on HN, I'd really welcome an insider info on what's going on the last few days. Sure there will be some internal turmoil going on right now, but isn't there some non-confidential info to share? Can't imagine this will hurt the image of google neither in the short nor long run, quite the opposite.

I would advice anyone to not share any information that his company hasn't agreed explicitely to share.

[deleted]

Re: Gmail having issues

#140

Post by userbinator »

joatmon-snoo wrote: post #91
redwards510 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In lieu of an actual Googler, how about some educated speculation? It blows my mind that Google can even have problems like this. Aren't their apps highly distributed across tons of CDNs? Don't they have world class Devops people that roll out changes in a piecemeal fashion to check for bugs? How exactly can they have an issue that can affect a huge swath of their customers across countries? Insight appreciated.

Googler but nowhere near Gmail, so just educated speculation: * We have a lot of automation/tools to prevent incidents when mitigation is straightforward (e.g. roll back a bad flag, quarantine unusual traffic patterns), which means that when something does go wrong it's often a new failure mode that needs custom, specialized mitigation. (e.g. what if you're in a situation where rolling back could make the problem wor…

We have a lot of automation/tools to prevent incidents when mitigation is straightforward (e.g. roll back a bad flag, quarantine unusual traffic patterns), which means that when something does go wrong it's often a new failure mode that needs custom, specialized mitigation.

As Douglas Adams says, "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

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