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Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

atha.io

71–80 of 443 posts

Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#71

Email deliverability is the reason I gave up on email entirely for my side project and built on Telegram instead. Setting up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, warming up a domain, monitoring reputation, dealing with bounces and complaints... all of that just to maybe land in someone's inbox. With Telegram you send a message via the Bot API and it arrives. 100% deliverability. No spam filters. No authentication chain. The message jus…

Until the platform owner bans for whatever reason and if communication by way of the platform was your only means of communication with your customer base, that's the platform owner having the power to destroy your business. No different that businesses that rely on the neverending goodwill of the mobile app store owners. One misstep and your business is gone with no recourse whatsoever. Protocols > Platforms. Always.

Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#72
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For producers, ignoring a SHOULD is riskier because it shifts the burden to every consumer. For consumers, ignoring a SHOULD mostly affects their own robustness. But here Google seems to understand it as a MUST... maybe the scale of spam is enough to justify it. Users are stuck between two parties that expect the other to behave.

> maybe the scale of spam is enough to justify it. This is 100 percent the case, and why these things are this way. If you wanted to make email two point oh, I dont think it would look a lot like what we have today.

https://jmap.io

Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#73
post #46

Typically I'm a DIY type who loves tinkering and building... HOWEVER, I have learned the hard way to never apply that spirit to email. In Europe you see this stuff all the time with old school "IT" (what old industrial companies call tech) people balking at the prices of commercial API-based senders and email marketing ESPs. "Money to send emails in the cloud? HAH! Back at Siemens in 90s we were running millions of e…

Google is at least less arbitrary than Microsoft. Microsoft will decide an email is spam today, and tomorrow the exact same email is perfectly fine. I think Google relies more and more on sending IP and domain reputation rather than content.

Deliverability to Microsoft famously took a dive a bit over a year ago due to random arbitrary failures within their infrastructure causing DMARC/DKIM problems which they clearly were having problems diagnosing.

Even with a six-figure email spend and weeks of troubleshooting the best response we could get from our mail provider was that they were having problems getting traction with Microsoft on the issue.

Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#74
post #61

Worked on an ESP. We had a couple of server software we used on low-level for sending. None of them would accept the message without a Message-ID. But even if you have a super-custom, SMTP-injecting service built, how can you ignore all of these bounces from a provider thats likeliest to be the major one you are sending to? Unthinkable. I would not like to have business with such a payment provider.

This is the one that gets me - sometimes you're forced to work with systems that do annoying things that you have to accommodate. It's annoying, but it's more important to do the thing that prevents your users from having issues than it is to be theoretically right about whether something's required by a standard.

I've dealt with many worse cases than this, where the systems I was integrating with were doing things that weren't even close to reasonable, but they had the market power so I sucked it up and dealt with it for the sake of my users. Maybe Google's wrong here, but how do you not just implement the solution anyway?

Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#75

> Viva.com's outgoing verification emails lack a Message-ID header, a requirement that has been part of the Internet Message Format specification (RFC 5322) since 2008 > ... > `Message-ID` is one of the most basic required headers in email. Section 3.6. of the RFC in question ( https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5322.html ) says: +----------------+--------+------------+----------------------------+ | Field | Min | Max…

Avoid SHALL, SHOULD and all other crap, use Elon MUST.

Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#76
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For producers, ignoring a SHOULD is riskier because it shifts the burden to every consumer. For consumers, ignoring a SHOULD mostly affects their own robustness. But here Google seems to understand it as a MUST... maybe the scale of spam is enough to justify it. Users are stuck between two parties that expect the other to behave.

> maybe the scale of spam is enough to justify it. This is 100 percent the case, and why these things are this way. If you wanted to make email two point oh, I dont think it would look a lot like what we have today.

I think a mail 2.0 would be notify and pull based.... you notify a recipient's mail server that there's a message from for them, then that server connects to the MX of record for the domain of and retrieves message.

Would this make mass emails and spam harder, absolutely. Would it be a huge burden for actual communications with people, not so much. From there actual white/black listing processes would work all that much better.

Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#77
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maybe the scale of spam is enough to justify it. This is 100 percent the case, and why these things are this way. If you wanted to make email two point oh, I dont think it would look a lot like what we have today.

https://jmap.io

jmap is the communication between a mail client and shared directory/mail services on a server. It does not include server to server communications (that I am aware of) for sending mail to other users/servers.

Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#78

Email deliverability is the reason I gave up on email entirely for my side project and built on Telegram instead. Setting up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, warming up a domain, monitoring reputation, dealing with bounces and complaints... all of that just to maybe land in someone's inbox. With Telegram you send a message via the Bot API and it arrives. 100% deliverability. No spam filters. No authentication chain. The message jus…

Unless you are running a more complex setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC really aren't that complicated. They are annoying and additional checkboxes you have to go trough that are hard to fully automate because they require access to DNS, but they are more busywork than difficult.

Domain and IP reputation and all the other quirks of deliverability are much more of a headache. DMARC is setup, test and done. But deliverability in praxis is something you cannot just test and can break at any time. The second worst are email providers that do whitelisting for email and require you to go through their process to even be allowed to send emails to their customers. The worst are providers that randomly decide to drop your emails without informing you or giving you a proper way to appeal as a small sender. If you're not a large email provider they have no problem just dropping you and the fault is on you because your service is the only one that is not working.

And then there are so many more intricacies of the ancient email protocol. Compatibility with horrendously outdated and misconfigured mail infrastructure is particular frustrating to me. I'm running a modern, properly configured, state of the art email server, but get ghosted by large email providers, yet have to deal with the broken mess, much bigger providers than myself are, which of course have no trouble delivering their broken spoofable email just because they are large enough.

Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#80

With fintech that surprises me not the slightest bit. Financial institutions are filled to the brim with unbelievably incompetent people. A large part of it is probably willful ignorance, too. It's often truly staggering that a financial company I interact with in day to day live is even able to exist. That's until I remember that all the others are just as incompetent. "Major European Payment Processor" really just…

There is plenty amount of incompetence in FAAMG. Notepad ....

Do Europe financial institutions have the same level of corruption as the USA? Such as a credit card company authorizing credit card transactions with incorrect expiration date to maximum profit, Bank of America? Or opening new accounts without consumer consent, Wells Fargo?

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