Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gmail having issues

google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 460 posts

Re: Gmail having issues

#421

Post by ACS_Solver »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #414
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.

> People will suggest running your own mail server, and if you have the time and energy then definitely do that. As a learning experience, sure, but most people are not prepared for what running a 24/7 mail service requires of them. First of all, a static, non-residential IP is likely needed. The big players will flat out refuse receiption if your IP is registered as residential, so that rules out hosting it from you…

I think the barriers are overstated a bit. I have email on my own server, part of the stuff I run on a dedicated server. Granted, it costs money, but I'm using the server for more than email anyway. That takes care of the IP address, and since the server's with a data hosting company, they take care of the network infrastructure, hardware maintenance and such.

Downtime hasn't been a major issue - senders will retry sending email, usually multiple times over several days. I've been able to have downtime of 24-48 hours without losing any messages.

A SPF record is just another easy to create DNS entry. If you know how to manage DNS, setting up SPF is a matter of minutes. DKIM is just slightly more complicated, with an extra key generation step. Sites like mxtoolbox.com can help you validate records.

The biggest problem I think I have with my own server is security. I do patch the machine regularly, but of course I don't have the same kind of security that Google or another big player would. On the other hand, I suspect I might have a smaller attack surface and better security than plenty of small websites.

Re: Gmail having issues

#422

Post by alexandra_cgg »

Seirdy wrote: post #41
j-wags wrote: post #20

Over the past 24 hours, I've had GitHub request that I re-verify my gmail three times (roughly 22 hours ago, 2 hours ago, and now), each time resetting my primary email's status to "Undeliverable" and "Unverified" The triggering event may be an email bounce. I get a lot of github notifications sent to my email, and the failure of just one/a few may trigger the reverification.

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.

still use gmail to manage email lmao

Re: Gmail having issues

#423

Post by dqv »

mehrdadn wrote: post #420
judofyr wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What you're proposing is to explicitly ignore the specification (which says that you should _not_ retry when you receive a 550) and try to implement a custom…

No, I am quite explicitly not ignoring the spec. It quite deliberately says should not , not must not . If anyone is ignoring the spec here, it's you, not me. Should not is sound advice; it's telling you what you're supposed to do when you don't have a reason to behave differently . You know, like how you "should not" leave the lights on when you leave your room. Or—more pertinently here—how you "should not" assume e…

But the RFC isn't only for senders it's also for receivers, isn't it?

That means there are two sides to the interpretation of what SHOULD NOT means. And in this case, senders have, due to experience, interpreted what Google does when someone SHOULD NOTs:

- The sender SHOULD NOT send us the same sequence again when we reply 550, if they do they MUST go on our shitlist.

Obviously it's not so binary and it takes retrying to several different recipients, but people have very good reason to interpret this SHOULD NOT as MUST NOT.

Re: Gmail having issues

#424

Post by joana035 »

bayindirh wrote: post #372
ascar wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your answer kind of misses the point GP was trying to make. Google's mailserver could genuinely believe that the user doesn't exist, if the user service doesn't fail completely but cannot access part of the data and thus doesn't find a user record. In this case the returned "user doesn't exist" error is intended behavior of the mail server and the post you replied to still stands. If you sent to that email successful…

> Your answer kind of misses the point GP was trying to make. Actually, I don't think so. > Google's mailserver could genuinely believe that the user doesn't exist, if the user service doesn't fail completely but cannot access part of the data and thus doesn't find a user record. As a system administrator and/or provider you have to think about worst case scenarios and provide sensible defaults. Your mail gateway sho…

Technically speaking it's possible to soft bounce upon 5xx errors, but in practice, retrying even when the destination tells you not to is the quickest way to get reputation ruined.

Google SMTP servers should have returned a soft bounce here (not hard bounce), so then retry can work.

Re: Gmail having issues

#425

Post by judge2020 »

gravitas wrote: post #413
LeonM wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is not. It really grinds my gears if people are spreading misinformation about 'being on the same network as a spammer', 'indiscriminate blacklists' and corporate overlords for being the reason on why their email is not being delivered. Spam filters have been content driven for a long time now. IP addresses and domain names are ephemeral and so are 'blacklists'. With the amount of spam being send, we would hav…

My corporate overlord (~10k ppl) has a policy to place all incoming email from domains less than 30 days old into the Junk folder, it's a tier 1 rule which cannot be overridden or circumvented by user rules. No amount of properly configured mail services will matter in this scenario. :-/

That's probably more of a phishing defense, but not really effective either way. 'Good' spammers will be constantly registering domains and only use the ones that are a few months old since time-based spam policies are fairly common. This type of policy only works for low-barrel spam and shady operations that register domains with stolen credit cards and end up losing their domain within a few weeks once the chargebacks get to the registrar.

Re: Gmail having issues

#426

Post by terragon »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #243
nine_k wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can as well be Google, just the paid Apps version. Zero time to get used to a different UI. I suspect there must be a solution to easily migrate all your tags and filtering rules. (Tags are the killer feature to me. Outlook sort of has them but they are less flexible.)

does the paid apps version have better uptime? Is it not affected by the current issues?

My company has paid apps, and we have been facing issues same as everyone else.

Re: Gmail having issues

#427

Post by BubuIIC »

jsnell wrote: post #305
octoberfranklin wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really cannot believe they did not immediately hack in a new rule to their SMTP server: never return a 5xx (permanent failure), instead return a 421 (temporary failure try again later). That simple fix buys them 24-72 hours to solve this properly. Yeah, it burdens servers sending mail to them because now they have to hold on to all mail (including mail that really is permanently undeliverable) for another day or so…

This outage seems to have lasted for about 2.5 hours. Probably this was fixed by rolling back whatever caused it. (I don't think the rollout was finished before they resolved it; my mail server sends a lot of emails to Gmail addresses, and even at peak I was only seeing maybe about 1/3 mails be rejected.) There is no way that putting in a hardcored hack like that would have been faster. Making the change is, of cours…

This has been going on for 2 days, not 2 hours.

Re: Gmail having issues

#428

Post by jrockway »

jeffbee wrote: post #215
jrockway wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I doubt that the delivery stack would 550 for mere trouble looking up an account. This smells more like the identity system was incorrectly returning authoritative denials.

Yeah, that sounds right to me. I would expect to see a temporary rejection with DEADLINE_EXCEEDED or something like that.

I think a lot of time and effort is spent categorizing errors from external systems into transient or permanent, and it's always kind of a one-off thing because some of them depend on the specifics of the calling application. It definitely takes some iteration to get it perfect, and it's very possible to make mistakes.

Re: Gmail having issues

#429

Post by gravitas »

judge2020 wrote: post #425
gravitas wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My corporate overlord (~10k ppl) has a policy to place all incoming email from domains less than 30 days old into the Junk folder, it's a tier 1 rule which cannot be overridden or circumvented by user rules. No amount of properly configured mail services will matter in this scenario. :-/

That's probably more of a phishing defense, but not really effective either way. 'Good' spammers will be constantly registering domains and only use the ones that are a few months old since time-based spam policies are fairly common. This type of policy only works for low-barrel spam and shady operations that register domains with stolen credit cards and end up losing their domain within a few weeks once the chargeba…

Yah, I do not defend it in any way - it's security theatre to me; they also wholescale block entire TLDs (more than one) under the same umbrella, block access (HTTP) to any domain less than 30 days old as well. It is in my experience that most companies of size implement compliance checkbox solutions and do not really care about internal user experience, you (me, we) are expendable and replaceable. Comply or face sanction/termination of employment, compliance is what matters to the business.

Re: Gmail having issues

#430

Post by throw1234651234 »

toast0 wrote: post #126
WolfRazu wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Gsuite has a SLA and telephone support etc.

They have telephone support, but the agents aren't empowered to do very much of anything.

I am not going to try it. I just restored data from a backup email server these emails get duplicated to.
Post reply on HN