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Gmail having issues

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Re: Gmail having issues

#381

Post by makomk »

jrockway wrote: post #197
megous wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought SMTP was specifically designed for this (with support for multiple MX entries, queuing at the sender MTA side, etc.) and there's an easy hard boundary at the user mailbox level you can use to partition your system. It should not be a problem that gmail is "down". Unless this would be happening for more than a few days, noone would lose e-mail. It's a problem that it's not returning a temporary error code, b…

It is pretty clear that accepting a TCP connection and reading the bytes of the email from the sender is not the problem. Google is bouncing messages with an error like "that user doesn't exist". This would lead one to believe that some instances are having trouble looking up users, and that doesn't scale super easily. If the product guarantees that it will reject invalid email addresses (which is nice of them, not r…

If it really doesn't want to accept emails for addresses that it doesn't know are valid, a well-behaving email server should send temporary failure codes when it can't look up if addresses are valid, and let the sender retry later when the address lookup is working and it can give a definite acceptance or rejection of the email. This is not even remotely a new problem, it comes up in email systems all the time because even at much smaller than Google scale they tend to be distributed systems. Someone screwed up.

Re: Gmail having issues

#382

Post by madsbuch »

oakfr wrote: post #379
fwn wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Services are better in my opinion when you pay for them and you’re not the product. Services also tend to be better if lock-in effects on customers are low. ... and using your own domain for email does reduce lock-in significantly. unrelated: the link in your profile does not seem to work.

Does gmail have such a big lock-in effect on users since it allows them to use the gmail interface with their own email? (i.e. you can split the service and the UI)

Yes, gmail is complete lock in (with current legislation). You can not move your `@gmail.com` address to another provider eg. Proton.

But there is a case for making legislation forcing email providers to allow moving emails to other providers (how it should be done technically is another question). This is already in effect for telephone numbers many places.

Re: Gmail having issues

#383

Post by martin_a »

gpmcadam wrote: post #353

People will suggest running your own mail server, and if you have the time and energy then definitely do that. But the next best thing you can do is simply just use your own domain. That way, you can at least decide to migrate your email elsewhere. Don't use the free domains you get from things like gmail or other providers, because then you have to _change_ your email address, and not just your MX records.

10 GB space, 1 tld domain of your choice, 99,9% uptime for 1.85€/month with a setup fee of 10€. Hetzner will take care of everything else for you as it's managed webhosting.

https://www.hetzner.com/de/webhosting

Just because you can (theoretically) run your own infrastructure does not mean you should. Trust the professionals. You don't do your own surgeries, do you?

(not affiliated to Hetzner, just was the first offer I thought of.)

Re: Gmail having issues

#384

Post by martin_a »

oakfr wrote: post #361
gpmcadam wrote: post #353

People will suggest running your own mail server, and if you have the time and energy then definitely do that. But the next best thing you can do is simply just use your own domain. That way, you can at least decide to migrate your email elsewhere. Don't use the free domains you get from things like gmail or other providers, because then you have to _change_ your email address, and not just your MX records.

Good luck getting the same quality of service as gmail with your own mail server. The fact that gmail fails every so often (extremely rarely actually) is a good sign: zero failure would mean that they are over-investing in quality and losing flexibility. Gmail only needs to be as good as the best web service out there.

Uptimes in Germany are usually 99.9% for most hosters. I think Gmail has lost to all of those yesterday.

Re: Gmail having issues

#385

Post by higerordermap »

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…

Ah the free software religion, or as I have taken to call it, GNU minus rationale.

-----------------------------

> One reason is that free software gets the whole community involved in working together to fix problems. Users not only report bugs

This works only for popular open source software, and still doesn't apply to infamous Unix mail servers or likes of GNOME. The 'community' is often more interested in adding features than fixing bugs.

> so never use a service where in principle a program would do.

Comfort vs Freedom tradeoff. Sometimes data privacy / freedom isn't just that critical to justify costs and difficulties of self hosting.

> Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS). For our freedom's sake, we have to reject that too.

For what it is worth, SaaS has only benefited freedom of people working in big corporates. It has loosened the grip of enterprise software directly sold to C-suites by wine-and-dine sales methods.

And know what, software writers have to make good amount of money too. Just giving away free desktop / server software doesn't work out for most developers. I will happily accept if an open core software has a value added SaaS. And "live cheap and write freedom respecting software for some semi-arbitrary definition of freedom", is just disrespectful to talented software developers.

> someone has the power to silently impose changes in how the user's computing gets done.

Again a convinience and security etc.. thing. Most use cases, you don't care.

Stallman sees everything as black or white. (Linus Torvalds has also written on this)

I'd suggest Stallman once watch 2017 Tamil movie "Vikram Vedha" :-)

Re: Gmail having issues

#386

Post by makomk »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #339
onion2k wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's user service should be able to tell the difference between a user's data not being available and a user that has been deleted or never existed in the first place. This issue is Google sending the wrong error code because of a problem on their end. Mailing lists believing what an email provider tells them and acting in an overly cautious way is a separate issue.

> Google's user service should be able to tell the difference between a user's data not being available and a user that has been deleted or never existed in the first place. This can't work; you can say that gmail's system should have a component that recognizes the difference between various failures, but that new component can itself fail. You can't solve the problem of "what if something fails" by saying "just add…

Of course it can. Software is complex and that complexity can cause all kinds of problems, as can the fact that the networks linking computers are unreliable, but software is fundamentally deterministic. If you write a piece of code that returns a temporary failure when it can't look up whether a user exists, that code will not mysteriously change itself to start returning permanent user does not exist errors. (Now, if your overall stack is designed in such a way that you can't reliably tell the difference between lookup failures and users that don't exist, you have a problem - but the problem is with the design of the system, not some inherent problem with software.)

Note that this is rather different from physical, mechanical systems which can fail in all kinds of exciting and unpredictable ways due to physical wear and tear, things getting jammed in places, component failure, etc.

Re: Gmail having issues

#387

Post by [deleted] »

martin_a wrote: post #384
oakfr wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck getting the same quality of service as gmail with your own mail server. The fact that gmail fails every so often (extremely rarely actually) is a good sign: zero failure would mean that they are over-investing in quality and losing flexibility. Gmail only needs to be as good as the best web service out there.

Uptimes in Germany are usually 99.9% for most hosters. I think Gmail has lost to all of those yesterday.

[deleted]

Re: Gmail having issues

#389

Post by ashkankiani »

gpmcadam wrote: post #353

People will suggest running your own mail server, and if you have the time and energy then definitely do that. But the next best thing you can do is simply just use your own domain. That way, you can at least decide to migrate your email elsewhere. Don't use the free domains you get from things like gmail or other providers, because then you have to _change_ your email address, and not just your MX records.

I agree with this, and setting it up with Fastmail was so easy, I set up two more domains just for fun. Same goes for adding import from Gmail/Softbank/Apple/anywhere. It's like a 1 minute procedure to import an account, literally. Excellent product, glad I migrated off of Gmail.

Re: Gmail having issues

#390

Post by probst »

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…

There is actually a very good reason to drop these email addresses, and the reason is that a high-rate of non-deliverable emails hurt your sender score. It's a total pain to get emails delivered to the major email providers in the first place, and you immediately land in spam (or with emails not delivered at all) if they don't trust the sending email server or your score is anything but stellar!
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