Google seems to have broken email forwarding • Hacker News Board

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#111

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:20 PM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #81

cssmoo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its just that everyone who doesn't run a mail server hasn't had to deal with this shit so finds it hard to believe that their precious email providers are being a pain in the butt. That is until you get a court summons after an invoice was sent several times and never got there because some fuckwit mail policy just blackholed it. This stuff does happen and when it does its costly.

I think there needs to be a more substantial karma gate to downvoting (10 000+), I'd be fine with falling out of that category myself. I've only been interacting on HN for the past year or so, but lurked for several years prior: the community has been becoming a lot more "redditish." I nearly always agree or can be convinced by the higher karma users, but the fresh users seem to be defaulting to reddit-level argument…

For the record, I downvoted you for bringing up the "HN is becoming Reddit" meme, which is something I've seen popping up here all too often for the last 4.6 years I'm participating in HN community (and from what I heard, it happened long before then too) - and yet for all those years of "becoming Reddit" HN still did not become it.

Also, Reddit is cool, and there's ton of quality discussions - usually under particular subreddits. For example, I love /r/KerbalSpaceProgram for a perfect combination of being large, friendly, fun, and full of people willing to teach each other some more advanced science.

To address your point: I think current downvote gate is fine and adjusting it up won't really help much. What would help (though I don't know how to achieve that) is people realizing that when saying anything controversial, you might end up getting a bunch of downvotes immediately, but the score usually settles to a reasonable value within an hour or two. It takes time, but one just has to get used to it.

TL;DR: karma comes and goes; look at it through a low-pass filter, to filter small variations.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#112

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

bhauer wrote: post #68

eli wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's malicious. Running mail servers and filtering spam is not easy.

Which ironically is the reason I most often hear from Gmail advocates/apologists for why they advocate Gmail over running your own e-mail server. I don't disagree. E-mail is a mess. Still, on the whole, for any person or organization with modest technical chops, I feel the freedom and decentralization (which is a positive for the entire ecosystem) is reason alone for retaining control by self-hosting.

It's all about cost/benefit analysis. Maintaining an e-mail server and not getting overwhelmed by spam is hard; making sure you your e-mails will be received is even harder. Most of small businesses or organizations simply don't have resources to do that, if you count in the value lost when business e-mails get flagged as spam.

Decentralization is cool and all, but until we have some kind of self-contained, easy to deploy and maintain solution for e-mail servers, it's hard to me to recommend anything other than GMail to people - especially that typical small company or organization has a lifespan that's shorter than Google, so they don't get any important benefit from decentralization.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#113

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

npsimons wrote: post #93

throwawayaway wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well i've started marking ebay, linkedin and google+ stuff as spam. i'm sure somebody else did amazon the same favour... so... sorry? :)

Don't do this. Seriously, don't. It's one thing if you never asked to get additional emails or you can't opt out, but if you signed up for it, at least put in the same amount of effort to get out of it first. If that fails, sure, then start marking as spam. Otherwise, you're feeding false positives into the system, thereby degrading it on purpose.

Most Amazon email is spam. They send tons of promotional email to everybody that buys something there, with not even an opt-out option, and after you receive the emails, go to the opt-out link and uncheck it, they create new categories with you signed in by default. The GP is correct in marking amazon emails as spam, and I'll ask anybody that's considering stopping to keep marking it.

That said, this is no excuse for Google to mark their transactional emails as spam for people that clearly want to receive them. Google is just being lazy and doing a bad job. Even Yahoo gets that right, Google can do it too.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#114

Post by kuschku » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:30 PM UTC

reuven wrote: post #83

I have been running my own SMTP server for about 25 years. I finally decided, in the last month or so, that it just wasn't worth the effort involved in handling spam and anti-spam stuff -- not only from Google, but from other providers who are so worried about spam that they falsely tag all sorts of stuff as spam. I found that accurate configuration and maintenance, including of SPF and DKIM, wasn't worth my time and…

For me it luckily works – I only host a dozen of users on my server, but it works nicely, and – after having spent a few months setting it up once – also runs nicely with Google and the other large providers, even Yahoo and Hotmail (for now).

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#115

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:32 PM UTC

shiggerino wrote: post #52

jimrandomh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, gmail classifies nearly all of the transactional email I get from Amazon (order acknowledgements, shipping notifications, etc) as spam, and no matter how many I catch and un-mark, it won't stop. Spam classification is a hard problem, but I don't think they've put the false-positive/false-negative tradeoff in the right place, and they really need some safety valves like offering to whitelist an addres…

It would also be nice if you could disable spam filtering entirely and run your own client-side.

Looking at the contents of my spam folder, and knowing that they likely reject many more e-mails in the background, I'm pretty sure I'd drown if I ever tried to use such option...

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#116

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:36 PM UTC

ibz wrote: post #42

jimrandomh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, gmail classifies nearly all of the transactional email I get from Amazon (order acknowledgements, shipping notifications, etc) as spam, and no matter how many I catch and un-mark, it won't stop. Spam classification is a hard problem, but I don't think they've put the false-positive/false-negative tradeoff in the right place, and they really need some safety valves like offering to whitelist an addres…

I always mark Amazon mail as spam. Could it be that if a lot of people mark a certain kind of email as spam, Google just treats it as spam?

To all the people that say "don't do this" - I don't do this with Amazon, but I do that with LinkedIn and any company that starts to, well, spam me with e-mails. And I think it's totally fair. It's a way for people to send a message to the companies that don't respect their customers time, because some bean counter realized that they can wast X hours of people's time and get Y amount of additional sales from it. I'm sure that without such feedback, we'd get spammed by useless newsletters even more.

(And keep this discussion in mind next time you read a HN story teaching people how cool e-mail marketing is for your startup - what it's cool at is often pissing off your users.)

Also Google took a good approach to that issue - when an e-mail has an unsubscribe link and you try to mark it as spam, you get asked if you'd like to unsubscribe instead. And yes, I sometimes do exactly that.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#117

Post by gvozd » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:43 PM UTC

mpnordland wrote: post #71

I run my own mail server, and I've found it to be pretty much pain free. Of course I'm the only one who uses it, and I don't do fancy stuff, but after a few bumps when starting out, it works great. I've only had to fix things occasionally, like heartbleed. On the whole, it's been really nice. Is my experience abnormal?

I've had the same experience running my own pair of iRedMail servers in FreeBSD jails. It was easy to set up, and not hard to secure. I haven't had trouble with spam so far, and it has allowed me to migrate off of gmail. Setting up failover took a little work, though.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#118

Post by thaumasiotes » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:46 PM UTC

ccozan wrote: post #88

ibz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always mark Amazon mail as spam. Could it be that if a lot of people mark a certain kind of email as spam, Google just treats it as spam?

I would not recommend this. Amazon emails can be unsubscribed. And they are not really spam, they are not coming unsolicited, aren't they?

I get a ton of unsolicited email from Amazon. It tends to be of the form "order confirmation for product XXXXX" or "your order of XXXXX has shipped". I don't view this as particularly unreasonable, though.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#119

Post by Naga » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:49 PM UTC

rev_bird wrote: post #84

Naga wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been waiting for an email from a company that I'm in the recruitment process with and your comment inspired me to check my spam folder. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have seen an email from a government agency looking to recruit me. So thanks!

You'd think .gov, of all TLDs, would have a lower spam score.

It was actually .gc.ca, since I'm in Canada, but still.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#120

Post by thaumasiotes » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:50 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #113

npsimons wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't do this. Seriously, don't. It's one thing if you never asked to get additional emails or you can't opt out, but if you signed up for it, at least put in the same amount of effort to get out of it first. If that fails, sure, then start marking as spam. Otherwise, you're feeding false positives into the system, thereby degrading it on purpose.

Most Amazon email is spam. They send tons of promotional email to everybody that buys something there, with not even an opt-out option, and after you receive the emails, go to the opt-out link and uncheck it, they create new categories with you signed in by default. The GP is correct in marking amazon emails as spam, and I'll ask anybody that's considering stopping to keep marking it. That said, this is no excuse for…

Speaking as a person who frequently buys from Amazon, I've never experienced this. (No, it's not that promotional email from Amazon is going into my spam folder. I have to check my spam folder semi-regularly because gmail keeps flagging perfectly legitimate email as spam.) The mail I get from Amazon is order confirmations and a newsletter that I specifically signed up for. What's this promotional email that you're talking about?