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Dear Google Mail Team

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Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#261

Post by mike_hearn »

massaman_yams wrote: post #252
mike_hearn wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only have to rewrite headers if your mailing list is actually modifying the mails i.e. doing a MITM attack on the mail flow. Some mailing list admins feel very strongly about footers, subject line tags etc and then claim they "must" rewrite the From header, but I am not sure it's technically required.

Discussion groups retransmit messages, which is enough to fail authentication in a lot of cases. Here's an example: you have an address @google.com, which has a DMARC policy of 'quarantine'. You send a message from this address to a discussion group, which in the process, resends your message from a non-google server, thus failing DMARC. Google's DMARC policy says that if an ISP receives a message from a @google.com…

The whole point of DKIM is that messages can be relayed without breaking authentication, because it uses digital signatures instead of sending IP. So I think it wouldn't break

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#262

Post by austenallred »

e12e wrote: post #256
wutbrodo wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pedantry, but 1 billion isn't all that conservative. GMail announced ~425M users in June 2012 and announced 900M a month and a half ago.

Thanks for pointing out the real numbers. In my defence, I was thinking "conservative for the near future", so the next 5 years or so. An of course giving 9M users a bad experience isn't that great either.

If we're being pedantic, it's probably worth noting that the "99%" was a completely arbitrary assumption, and trying to run statistics based on one anecdote and an unfounded assumption is not going to produce accurate results.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#263

Post by scrollaway »

milspec wrote: post #254
scrollaway wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my point. Everything that went to spam, I flagged as "not spam".

Yes, but did you ever mark mailing list email as spam? (actual spam even) If so, maybe gmail thinks "this sender is spammy". That's the mailing list.

I don't think I did; but if I did, I'd argue gmail should know better.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#264

Post by e12e »

austenallred wrote: post #262
e12e wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing out the real numbers. In my defence, I was thinking "conservative for the near future", so the next 5 years or so. An of course giving 9M users a bad experience isn't that great either.

If we're being pedantic, it's probably worth noting that the "99%" was a completely arbitrary assumption, and trying to run statistics based on one anecdote and an unfounded assumption is not going to produce accurate results.

True. I suppose the main point is that with a billion users, even some "small fraction" of users having problems, is going to translate to a lot of people having problems.

Honestly, if Google took support even half-seriously (or: they considered eg: users of gmail their customers, rather than just their advertisers) -- these kind of issues wouldn't be so bad.

I do think it's just a question of time before Google relegates itself to irrelevance through a strictly inferior product though.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#265

Post by thaumaturgy »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #123
justwannasing wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't a clue what you mean. I run several mail servers and have no issues whatsoever with GMail. And I run through all the spam filtering, too, and only recall one that was inadvertently marked as spam but, iirc, the mailer was the problem.

I wrote a daemon that monitors a mailbox that users can submit spam to, for spam that makes it through the other filtering layers. The daemon finds the original message in the user's mail directory, reads the headers, tracks down the originating network using whois, and then blackholes the network and emails me a notification about it. Some networks are whitelisted for practical purposes. Google's one of them. If nec…

Back. Here's a recent selection of subject lines, extracted from spam daemon replies. The "Zenefits + Problem" ones are funny .. my dba is "No Problem", and they're not smart enough to correctly handle that I guess, which makes sense, since they're also dumb enough to spam me. I've never replied to any of their messages.

    "Re: Zenefits + Problem"
    "Higher Targeted Traffic: Associatedtechs.Com"
    "Re:re: UL,CE,ETL Split-core Current Transformer(0.333V or 1A/5A output) ,Rogowski coil,hall AC-DC transducer"
    "Poor support processes could be costing you customers"
    "Get ranked higher:"
    "Higher Targeted Traffic: Associatedtechs.Com"
    "Re: Zenefits + Problem"
    "Re: Zenefits + Problem"
    "Your Website...!"
    "Get ranked higher: associatedtechs.com"
    "Google Update for: associatedtechs.com"
    "How to increase your website traffic and generating leads??"
    "Zenefits + Problem"
    "Mobile Apps Development"
    "Digital marketing proposal- www.associatedtechs.com"
This isn't a complete list, sadly, since it turns out the daemon isn't logging ban attempts against whitelisted networks. I should fix it so that it does.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#266

Post by pygy_ »

dottrap wrote: post #242
c5karl wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come to think of it, if they're going to have a "Never send it to Spam" flag in filter config, shouldn't it default to TRUE? If you're taking the trouble to set up a filter, it's probably because you are interested in those messages.

Wait, where is the "Never send it to Spam" option? I cannot find this option.

I'm on mobile, so I can't send you a screenshot, but it should be un the list where you add tags, skip the inbox and so on, acter creating à filtre.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#267

Post by pd1 »

tizzdogg wrote: post #207
e12e wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how you go from: Unless you have Google Apps for Business (or whatever), there are no vanity domains for gmail; to: email is a broken system? Gmail.com is certainly broken in the sense that they want to cram 10 billion users into a single domain. It's ridiculous marketing/brand-motivated UX failure. Since forever most mail services had a few vanity-domains, so people could get first.last@wherever.com. Bu…

I dont believe I said anything about vanity domains, so I dont know what you mean by that. I meant that email is broken in the sense that when some stranger mistakenly thinks that your email belongs to them, and continues to give it out or sign it up for mailing lists, you have absolutely no recourse. If you have an email address that like mine is easily mistaken for other ones you get incorrectly-addressed personal…

But isn't this true about phone numbers, addresses, and other things that have been around for longer than email?

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#268

Post by massaman_yams »

mike_hearn wrote: post #261
massaman_yams wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discussion groups retransmit messages, which is enough to fail authentication in a lot of cases. Here's an example: you have an address @google.com, which has a DMARC policy of 'quarantine'. You send a message from this address to a discussion group, which in the process, resends your message from a non-google server, thus failing DMARC. Google's DMARC policy says that if an ISP receives a message from a @google.com…

The whole point of DKIM is that messages can be relayed without breaking authentication, because it uses digital signatures instead of sending IP. So I think it wouldn't break

... IF the body is not modified, and the header signature matches, AND headers retain DMARC alignment... the reality is that retransmittal (as opposed to just relaying) almost always does one or more of these.

Here's an example from a Google email engineer's recent post to the Mailop list, which is running Mailman software.

Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 2001:41c8:51:83:feff:ff:fe00:a0b is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of mailop-bounces@mailop.org) smtp.mail=mailop-bounces@mailop.org; dkim=neutral (body hash did not verify) header.i=@google.com; dmarc=fail (p=REJECT dis=NONE) header.from=google.com

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#269

Post by mike_hearn »

massaman_yams wrote: post #268
mike_hearn wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of DKIM is that messages can be relayed without breaking authentication, because it uses digital signatures instead of sending IP. So I think it wouldn't break

... IF the body is not modified, and the header signature matches, AND headers retain DMARC alignment... the reality is that retransmittal (as opposed to just relaying) almost always does one or more of these. Here's an example from a Google email engineer's recent post to the Mailop list, which is running Mailman software. Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 2001:41c8:51:83:feff:ff:fe00:a…

That message says the body was modified. The solution is simple: don't do that. Your original message said DKIM breaks if you simply relay mail, but it isn't correct.
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