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Gmail having issues

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Re: Gmail having issues

#151
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah, thanks for the explanation.

Re: Gmail having issues

#152

Anyone else having issues in general with "the internet" over the last few days? The images on different websites I've visited don't load (e.g. twitter, bbc etc). When they do they load, they load verrry slowly

I reeeeally don't want to go down this rathole but a few days ago when my kids were having problems connecting to YouTube on both wifi and LTE I had begun to think that Trump pulled the 1. Stop Internet, 2. Attempt Coup thing.

Re: Gmail having issues

#153
CEO of an email marketing platform here (EmailOctopus). If anyone's curious, here's a chart showing our bounce rate to Gmail addresses over the course of the week:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EpUE20UXYAEa_Uv?format=jpg&name=...

That's a peak of 90% of Gmail inboxes bouncing – and this has been going on for almost 24 hours.

Re: Gmail having issues

#154
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

80s in Australia too, been hearing/using it my whole life.

Though with respect to 'ages' apparently it's been around since at least the 14th century but certain purists tried to stamp it out at various times (just like the singular 'you' which no one currently has grammatical issues with I hope).

https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...

Re: Gmail having issues

#155
post #105
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doing all the work twice is expensive. Sure, but they already do all the work twice . I get a completely different site on my phone than on a desktop/laptop. In fact, they maintain far more than two designs - in addition to two native apps, there's a mobile website, the desktop website, and the basic HTML version. On top of that, they have multiple display density options for desktop (which admittedly is mostly jus…

They don't. The browser just adapts.

Desktop: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/

Desktop (plain HTML): https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/

Mobile: https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp/

Re: Gmail having issues

#157
I use Helm for email. It’s a silent little server in my living room routed via Amazon (using a TLS cert that lives in my living room). I’d say about every three or four months it goes down for 5 minutes if I need to reboot my wifi router.

I use it for privacy (am a fan) but I feel pretty smug knowing I’m getting better reliability too. At least this month :)

No affiliation with the company.

https://www.thehelm.com/

Re: Gmail having issues

#159
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's so easy to configure and run your own mail server

Is it? Is dealing with IP reputation, getting your emails accepted by major providers, and being on the hook for fixing everything yourself very easy? I haven't tried, so I don't have personal experience, but I've heard enough horror stories to think that it's not a good use of my time.

Re: Gmail having issues

#160

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.

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.

> It blows my mind that Google can even have problems like this.

When you operate at Google's scale then everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Google does an amazing job providing high-availability services to billions of users, but doing so is a constant learning process; they are constantly blazing new trails for which there are no established best practices, and so there will always be unforeseen issues.

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