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Gmail having issues

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Re: Gmail having issues

#291

Post by dqv »

dataflow wrote: post #237
octoberfranklin wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the Nightmare Scenario for mailing lists. Many of them auto-unsubscribe after a bounce.

I said this in another comment but this seems like a naive way to react to an "address does not exist error" that they've already delivered to before. The only legit scenario in which that happens is when the user deletes the address, which is a rare event (pretty much always The underlying issue (wherever this occurs) seems to be lack of nuance regarding error codes when people try to implement robust systems. Diffe…

If Google and other major mail providers weren't opaque about this, then fine, but for me a single bounce is an immediate removal. I can't take the risk. I can't imagine the hell that would ensue trying to get through to Google to ask them to take me off their deliverability shitlist.

Re: Gmail having issues

#293

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

hannofcart wrote: post #210
Seirdy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is another good reason to have email @yourowndomain.tld When this happens, you can spin up a temporary server and have a mechanism in place to redirect email so you don't go down when your provider does.

Except as an academic exercise, trying to roll and maintain your own email is fraught with difficulties.

You can forward handling to a provider, like gmail. The idea is that you own your email address and can switch providers more easily if you are not satisfied with them or they turn out to be evil.

Re: Gmail having issues

#294

Post by jimmydorry »

mehrdadn wrote: post #253
throwaway201103 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuance is not called for. The standard states that a 5xx SMTP error is a permanent error and "The SMTP client SHOULD NOT repeat the exact request" Gmail screwed up here, returning a 550 error, it's not anyone else's job to try to second guess that or retry in contradiction of the accepted standard. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321

Gmail screwed up, but that's beside the point. We're talking about designing robust systems. You don't design a robust system by assuming nobody will screw up! Re: the RFC, note it says "should not", not "must not". That seems to suggest they acknowledge repeating might actually make sense in some cases. And honestly the practicalities of this situation and the risk-reward tradeoff seriously tilts toward repeating th…

Try delivering to invalid email addresses too many times (too many of course being up to each mail provider), and you will be the one shitlisted (and rightfully so, as you are likely bruteforce enumerating valid email addresses).

For any small provider, getting on the shitlist is catastrophic as unlike the big providers, getting off of it will be hard / impossible.

Re: Gmail having issues

#295

Post by makeworld »

monsieurbanana wrote: post #186
maest wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s#s/his/her#s/his/their# also works and avoids awkward escaping. The first symbol after s is used as the separator. Works in vim, at least. In other words: s%s/s\\/his\\/her/s\\/his\\/their/%s#s/his/her#s/his/their#%

Did you just assume my regex engine is pcre gendered???

Wow, I've never heard this joke before. Original and well-applied to the situation.

Re: Gmail having issues

#296

Post by xkcd-sucks »

zikzak wrote: post #285
dataflow wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said this in another comment but this seems like a naive way to react to an "address does not exist error" that they've already delivered to before. The only legit scenario in which that happens is when the user deletes the address, which is a rare event (pretty much always The underlying issue (wherever this occurs) seems to be lack of nuance regarding error codes when people try to implement robust systems. Diffe…

Aside - I'm not an expert but systems like MailChimp will get very worked up if your list has lots of undeliverable addresses on it. This can trigger an audit of your list which prevents sending, etc. These audits seem to take quite a while, in my very limited experience.

So what you're saying is, if you're annoyed by "subscribe to our mailing list" modal popups, "doesno5exist@garbage.blah" is better than "jeff@amazon.com" ?

Re: Gmail having issues

#297

Post by jraph »

jhatemyjob wrote: post #284
crazypython wrote: post #248

Remember, free and open source software is more reliable: ( https://www.gnu.org/software/reliability.en.html ) "One reason is that free software gets the whole community involved in working together to fix problems. Users not only report bugs, they even fix bugs and send in fixes. Users work together, conversing by email, to get to the bottom of a problem and make the software work trouble-free." And Service as a Sof…

Funny how you always see this comment in this type of thread

I generally agree with the GNU stance on most things, but here this is just irrelevant and out of topic.

I run my own mail server, and you can screw up badly with free software. And you probably will more than Google or the big players, especially if it is not your job. Free software does not make your admin-sys screw-ups or hardware failures something you can "get the whole community involved in working together to fix problems".

(Fortunately, I haven't screwed so badly that my server started responding "no such user". Just some regular downtime that, as far as I know, has not make me miss any mail)

Using someone else's computer and services can be problematic for a lot of reasons, but uptime / reliability is generally not the issue.

Re: Gmail having issues

#298

Post by MagnumPIG »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #217
petercooper wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Gmail takes repeated delivery to non-existing addresses into account for deliverability purposes. I think you mean "reputation purposes"? If so, wow, that sucks. Their opaque rules have conditioned their counterparties to punish Google as hard as possible for a screwup.

> Their opaque rules have conditioned their counterparties to punish Google as hard as possible for a screwup.

Good for karma, bad for everyone though.

Re: Gmail having issues

#299

Post by reilly3000 »

I'm glad to have found this thread, but its kept me up cleaning out thousands of "bounced" blocks from the last 2 day's suppression lists. They are both @gmail.com and gSuite/Workplace domains, and incidentally a ton of random blocks from Comcast as well from users that have months of open history.

This blew away about 10% of our newsletter and marketing subscribers. I can't imagine the time you're having if you send to millions of Google accounts.

Pardon me for being conspiratorial, but I have to say that the timing of these particular issues is of concern in light of the massive attacks the US government and others have faced this week. It seems adversaries would have plenty of fun if they got a new toy that could mess with the user/resource permission mapping at Google would want to use it to go after inboxes to do email confirmations. Even those this is 99% likely to be a DevOps chore that created an SRE nightmare, I'll allow myself believing 1% this was SecOps locking down huge swaths of accounts to mitigate a mass email verification attack.

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