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Google seems to have broken email forwarding

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Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#4

Post by Zezima »

This was happening to me as well. I was trying to get an email from a known individual, but after being sent 4-7 emails, none came through. I checked the email service which the emails were being sent to and they were no longer there (forwarded already), and also not in my gmail inbox yet.

They're still no where to be found, might be in limbo, but email forwarding definitely took a hit yesterday

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#5

Post by jmount »

Obviously good email (deep in a conversation) being declared "spam" has been a problem with my business for some time also.

I figure Google takes all email in a 2 step process (either intentional or accidental)

   1: get a good fraction of the world on GMail

   2: intermittently declare any non GMail mail spam (
      greatly lowering the utility of non GMail).
This isn't about any mass mailings or even mailing lists. This is about directly replies from me to people I have been emailing for months all of a sudden ending up in their Google Spam folder. Combining that with Google's good reputation and it comes off like "my dog ate my reply" (even though the mail is in their spam folder, the point is it is easier to convince a Yahoo user something is wrong on their side, than to convince GMail user something is wrong on their side). And it isn't that I all of a sudden decide to include a lot of links, attachments or zip files.

And for the "I don't like conspiracy theories crowds." From the first this said "either intentional or accidental". It would be enough for this to be a fortuitous bug for the effect to hurt non GMail users disproportionately. Google could even fail a fraction of GMail and the overall image would still be "email is flakey in general, we'd better all switch to the service provider for safety."

I known spam filtering is hard- but GMail has some really strong signals that I would think could dominate here (like incoming email contains text unique to a recent outgoing email). Or email is from a sender you clearly have a relation with.

(note: "Google takes all email" is a possible outcome, not a plot/conspiracy. A bug like this on a system of this size can have a big impact. Of course that does mean somebody running a system of this size might have an extra responsibility to look out for such things.)

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#7

Post by lucb1e »

Google has always had issues with legitimate e-mail the spambox, but then again, I have yet to see a spam filter with no false positives. Google just errors a lot more on the side of classifying email as spam compared to most email services (more false positives, but less spam in the inbox). What makes this even more annoying is that they hide the spam folder so that users don't even know that it exists anymore. I always have to give directions where to find it and invariably get reactions like "Oh, I didn't know GMail had a spam box!" or "Ah thanks, I would never have found that."

I did consider setting up a route in my mailserver to GMail using my Google account credentials for their SMTP server, but then decided they should better get their own shit straight. It wouldn't scale to do this for everyone.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#9

Post by [deleted] »

jmount wrote: post #5

Obviously good email (deep in a conversation) being declared "spam" has been a problem with my business for some time also. I figure Google takes all email in a 2 step process (either intentional or accidental) 1: get a good fraction of the world on GMail 2: intermittently declare any non GMail mail spam ( greatly lowering the utility of non GMail). This isn't about any mass mailings or even mailing lists. This is ab…

[deleted]

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#10

Post by wahsd »

I wonder if it is related to a change I recently noticed in how email address suggestion and autocomplete, i.e., suggestions, work that behaves differently than before. It's almost like they deemphasized frequent user or maybe domain accounts or something. The effect is that the first suggestion is no the address you are most likely looking to use, and thus risking erroneously addressed emails. So take care.
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