I have run a private mailserver for over 20 years, and I have the same problem. There's no telling what Google will let through. I have a second account at a medium-sized email provider, basically paying them for access to the email deliverability cartel.
Google Is Eating Our Mail
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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#12A while back I'd explored trying to own my data, especially with email, and found that the efforts involved in hosting your own email server were tantamount to a full-time job. The amount of fighting you have to do to stay on everyone's whitelists is absurd.
There's a good middlespace here, where you pay someone for email service who isn't an adtech company. Sure, you don't host it yourself, but someone who's not selling you is and you're their actual customer. (I pay FastMail, personally.)
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#13I have a similar problem and it sounds like some here do as well.
What can we do about Google's email monopoly?
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#14A while back I'd explored trying to own my data, especially with email, and found that the efforts involved in hosting your own email server were tantamount to a full-time job. The amount of fighting you have to do to stay on everyone's whitelists is absurd.
That's the cost of not pushing the cost on those responsible: the spammers
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#15> I'm sure there is no malicious intent behind this How can anyone be sure of this? This is only one of Google’s practices that seems to follow a pervasive pattern of eroding open internet standards while presenting Google’s own proprietary implementation as somehow superior. Eventually, the open standard loses all meaning because the most popular implementation does not actually adhere to it. Meanwhile, Google reaps…
Indifference that causes a business problem turns into not-indifference. Indifference that does not cause a business problem remains indifference. No one ever calls a meeting.
There is a lot of evil done in the world that comes from this simple and straightforward principle. You don't have to have an evil plan to end up doing evil.
Personally I see this as just more Google incompetence. Gmail has just become bad. If you want to get all your mail you have to use something else.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#16As someone who runs their own personal mail server, this annoys me to no end. I set up DKIM, SPF, and reverse-DNS records and resented every moment of it. Even after all that, there's some chance that an email from my server will be marked as insecure/spam or otherwise just not be delivered because Google has come up with some new brilliant mail security/auth/permission scheme that the world has to adopt tomorrow or…
>Even after all that, there's some chance that an email from my server will be marked as insecure/spam
Don't I know it. This happened to us but not with Google. We use Exchange Online (Office365) and have DKIM, SPF headers configured. At some point our emails stopped being received by bell and cox emails addresses ... sporadically but sometimes for days at a time. It turned out that the spam filter provider (used by bell and maybe cox) correlated one innocuous phrase in our confidentiality notice (which is appended to all outgoing email signatures) with spam and therefore marked the entire email as spam as well.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#17Add another perspective to this. Once I updated my phone, and google would not accept new google Authenticator codes after set up. Locked out of 15 years of email.
I had a fright last time I changed phones. After restoring my backup onto the new phone, I was about to wipe the old one; I did a final pass through my apps just in case... and saw that Google Authenticator configuration did not carry over to the new phone (which makes sens from a security perspective but is a PITA to manage). I had to re-enroll my device with all the services on which I use MFA. After this episode I…
Use Authy, which does carry over.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#18Add another perspective to this. Once I updated my phone, and google would not accept new google Authenticator codes after set up. Locked out of 15 years of email.
They specifically provide 10 one use codes for this type of situation that should be saved somewhere. Also, email should be backed up locally if it’s important, just like anything else. I’m not sure what else people want from a secure email service you don’t have to pay for. Also, any work around the 2FA by a human simply means less security for everyone.
Right. If there was someone you could call about this, there'd be someone a social engineer could call about it.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#19>I've been running a small SMTP and IMAP mail server for [...] around 15 years [...] I have SPF records and DKIM message signing setup on the domains I use. The server is hosted on commercial static IP space (with the very same IP it first went on-line) and I've made sure with the ISP that correct reverse DNS records are in place. [...] Being a good administrator and a well-behaved player on the network is no longer enough [...] Now every time I write a mail I wonder whether Google's AI will let it through or not. [...] So far Google has blocked personal messages to friends and family in multiple languages, as well as business mail. I stopped guessing what text their algorithms deem suspicious.
Yep, I know the author's frustration very well. I made a previous comment[0] trying to warn others of personal email servers' outgoing email being spam-holed -- and yet some of the replies still argued I was overstating the difficulties.
Everybody's risk tolerance is different. Personally, I just don't have the bandwidth to administer my own private email server and constantly worry if recipients are receiving my emails.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#20As someone who runs their own personal mail server, this annoys me to no end. I set up DKIM, SPF, and reverse-DNS records and resented every moment of it. Even after all that, there's some chance that an email from my server will be marked as insecure/spam or otherwise just not be delivered because Google has come up with some new brilliant mail security/auth/permission scheme that the world has to adopt tomorrow or…
>Even after all that, there's some chance that an email from my server will be marked as insecure/spam Don't I know it. This happened to us but not with Google. We use Exchange Online (Office365) and have DKIM, SPF headers configured. At some point our emails stopped being received by bell and cox emails addresses ... sporadically but sometimes for days at a time. It turned out that the spam filter provider (used by…
To be honest I don't like this confidentiality notes and from what I've read (not a lawyer) they don't have any practical effect either.