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Gmail having issues

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Re: Gmail having issues

#391

Post by LoSboccacc »

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.

> the same quality of service

and the weight of google as well!

an individual mail getting onto an blacklist is most often than not a dead sentence for the address, the domain and sometimes even the ip.

but if google is at fault and email get into a permanently removed bucket, like in this event, it's in the interest of the other to play nice and accommodate for the fault.

I think people severely underestimate how hard it actually is to consistently deliver email in 2020 between dkim, spf and domain keys while tiptoeing around everyone else ip/email antispam services.

Re: Gmail having issues

#392

Post by rav »

makomk wrote: post #386
thaumasiotes wrote: post #339

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 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,…

> that code will not mysteriously change itself to start returning permanent user does not exist errors

That is true in a perfect world. In the current world, there are all sorts of ways that code implemented one day does not run the same the next day. Say the code is in an interpreted language and an unrelated sysop updates the language runtime in a way that changes the behavior. Again, in a perfect world that doesn't happen, but that is not always the world we live in. I have great sympathy with people who treat software systems AS IF they were "physical, mechanical systems which can fail in all kinds of exciting and unpredictable ways".

Re: Gmail having issues

#393

Post by [deleted] »

makomk wrote: post #386
thaumasiotes wrote: post #339

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 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,…

[deleted]

Re: Gmail having issues

#394

Post by jug »

ttul wrote: post #234

Email sender here (on behalf of about 2.5 million domains). We noticed the issue and mitigated it by transforming the 5xx error into a 4xx error so that messages to Google are re-queues instead of being permfailed. But even with this intervention, the ticket volume was insane...

Oh my.. Few will have even thought of this in time and been this proactive :/

Re: Gmail having issues

#395

Post by thaumasiotes »

makomk wrote: post #386
thaumasiotes wrote: post #339

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 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,…

> but software is fundamentally deterministic.

That's true, but human behavior is also fundamentally deterministic, and those two observations are about equally useful.

> 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.

No it isn't. Those are deterministic too.

Re: Gmail having issues

#396

Post by joshuamorton »

vitus wrote: post #190
missblit wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rollback proof bugs are rare, but boy howdy are they exciting. I think I've only seen one so far (unless you count bad data / bad state that persists after a bad change is rolled back... which can also be pretty exciting)

Chrome web store has no rollback strategy, there is only roll forward :(

You can build rollbacks out of rollforwards, although it certainly isn't particularly fun. You patch an update to version N version code so that it's higher than N+1 and roll out the N+2 labelled N.

Re: Gmail having issues

#397

Post by RealStickman_ »

Triv888 wrote: post #367
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.

You need to at least hide your domain whois contact information if you are going to do this...

Many domain name registrars offer that as a service.

Re: Gmail having issues

#398

Post by TonyTrapp »

xianwen wrote: post #319
freehunter wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Outlook.com for my primary email and I’ve had a few more outages than with Gmail but nothing I would consider major. The major issue is Outlook.com’s spam filtering is drastically worse than Gmail, I get so much spam that would be just so obvious to any rudimentary spam filter, I mark them as spam in Outlook.com, and the next day I get the exact same email again.

I'm considering moving to Outlook.com.

Maybe their spam filtering is worse, but they also block way more legitimate smaller mail servers for no good reasons. Every few months I have to send an appeal to them so that I can continue sending mails from my mail server. They claim that there were user complaints about spam but it's pretty much impossible. I think they just silently blacklist smaller mail servers periodically and hope that they can fight spam that way. Obviously they can't.

So if you want to be able to receive emails from smaller mail servers - don't switch to Microsoft.

Re: Gmail having issues

#399

Post by mehrdadn »

probst wrote: post #390
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…

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!

I have 2 responses to the sender reputation concern:

1. If the user's mail service penalizes you equally regardless of whether the recipient's addressed existed 1 day vs. never existed, that itself is absolutely inexcusable nonsensical behavior that needs to be fixed. You shouldn't do that, just as you shouldn't shoot the mailman (or even arm yourself...) merely because he knocked a second time.

2. Notwithstanding the previous point, I don't buy this as valid justification anyway. The proposal isn't that you should blast 100 emails toward the mailbox every time you get a bounce due to an address not existing. The idea was to just exercise some intelligence in the matter. Like maybe just retry a couple times, spaced out by a day or two. The bounce rate increase due to such an event is very negligible here—people don't suddenly delete their accounts en masse. When that happens, it's clearly due to an outage, not because half the users at that domain suddenly decided to delete their accounts. (Which is something you can also easily detect across the domain as another useful signal to drastically lower the bounce rate across the entire domain, btw, if you're absolutely paranoid about your immaculate delivery rate dropping by an epsilon. But it shouldn't be necessary given how negligible the impact should be.)

So I don't buy this excuse one bit.

Re: Gmail having issues

#400

Post by 627467 »

himinlomax wrote: post #341
vxNsr wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is your livelihood, but as someone who basically never wants marketing emails, all I can think is "nice" hopefully I get auto-unsub'ed from a ton of lists.

If they normally successfully deliver to gmail, it's safe to assume a large number of people who do receive their emails want to receive them.

This is very charitable. How many people live with the nuisance of mailing (they un- or knowingly subscribed to) VS those who actually go through the trouble of unsubscribing/mark as spam in hope to rid of the from inbox?
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