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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#111

Post by jocoda »

sevensor wrote: post #58
bachmeier wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rule #1 if you're applying for jobs or graduate school - Don't use gmail for your email address. Source: Led a hiring committee this year. Interview invitations and job offers went straight to the junk mail folder. Also serve as Director of Graduate Studies. Admissions and funding offers, as well as general inquiries about availability, all went straight to the junk mail folder. We're not going to change our email se…

Indeed, the spur for me to finally sign up for Fastmail was that I was applying for a job and I can't trust Google with crucial email. You get what you pay for.

Even if you pay for it and don't use g, you can't know with absolute certainty that your email is going to get to the person you are sending it to.

There's a high 9's probability that it will arrive safely, but there's several ways that things can go wrong, simplest of which is that you are deleted by a misconfigured filter.

There are US ISPs (cough sbcglobal) that routinely throw away mail from some arbitrary IPs despite there being absolutely no SPAM blacklist entries for the IP, even if you are replying to a mail sent from one of their clients.

outlook.com once, (and maybe still does) blocked email from an entire C-block for some reason.

(edit - grammar)

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#113

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

xuki wrote: post #107
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Ads support is incredible. I’ve been shocked. You can tell where their real business is. You call and you get a competent human in less than a few minutes. Also, Google email deliverability is good, inbound and outbound. I’ve been running an email service and have had no problems with them, unlike Hotmail/Outlook.

Are you spending money on Adwords or receiving money from AdSense? I have heard many horror stories from Adsense but nothing from Adwords.

Sorry, didn't meant to be confusing. Specifically "Google Ads" which is how they they've rebranded AdWords, I believe. And so yes, spending money.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#114

Post by lucb1e »

lupire wrote: post #76
i_dont_know_ wrote: post #6

As 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…

Do you resent HTTPS too? I'd rather turn on encryption/signing/security for my mail than contribute to a system like the telephone network where bank accounts get emptied by transoceanic criminal networks on the regular.

Asking whether anyone resents using https is just being snarky. You know the answer and the obviousness of it makes it condescending. We all agree that https is good, so comparing that to spf and dkim is like saying GP is stupid for not having enjoyed it.

Even ignoring spf and the other anti-spam tech that doesn't do anything remotely like https, dkim only signs messages. Https is more like pgp or s/mime, not dkim. It's like posting the hash when you share a binary online: the recipient can verify the integrity and sender (namely, whoever put up the hash), but I don't think anyone considers a signed binary to be private like bank transactions done with https.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#115

Post by i_dont_know_ »

lupire wrote: post #76
i_dont_know_ wrote: post #6

As 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…

Do you resent HTTPS too? I'd rather turn on encryption/signing/security for my mail than contribute to a system like the telephone network where bank accounts get emptied by transoceanic criminal networks on the regular.

I do actually resent the way google imposed HTTPS everywhere, but my issues were with the rollout as opposed to the tech. Rant for another day :)

But with the security/encryption/signing for email... yeah, if it was just an "on" switch somewhere, I'd be all for it. Unfortunately, setting up SPF for something like exim isn't very straightforward at all. It's flipping LOTS of "on" switches in lots of different places, generating and copying keys around, setting permissions on all the files properly, testing etc. It turns into a legitimate project fairly quickly, and it's hard to prove that this is a better method than just really well-trained spam filters. So, basically, it ends up being by Google fiat that I had to do that project.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#116

Post by CyberShadow »

Arnt wrote: post #71
reaperducer wrote: post #8

Google has no incentive to fix these kinds of problems. It's big enough that when someone complains that a message sent wasn't received, the intended recipient will say, "I never have problems with my Gmail account. It must be you." And the sender has to switch to Gmail to reliably communicate with the outside world. I wish this was just paranoia, but we've seen multiple discussions on HN about Google programs and po…

I too self-host and have done for decades. When I had a problem that may perhaps have been like this, Google disabled the relevant part of them spam filter and made an issue in some internal tracker. I write "Perhaps" because my report was a lot more specific. Google sells mail+spam filtering+more as a product, with a seven-digit number of paying customers, each of which pay per month and user. What more incentive co…

> I write "Perhaps" because my report was a lot more specific.

How did you even get your report to be read by an engineer at Google? This seems impossible unless you have some kind of business connection.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#117

Post by jasode »

lucb1e wrote: post #105

Can confirm, my server is also not accepted by google for years now when mailing someone with a business account. I'm not going to bother fixing Google's problems and support the behaviour, though, I'll just contact them through other means and let them know their email provider is blocking mail addressed to them. At work we use sendgrid because of this. Have to trust a centralised third party to send out api keys. I…

>Can confirm, my server is also not accepted by google for years now when mailing someone with a business account.

Hey, I remember you were one of the replies[1] in my previous thread that said I was exaggerating the "send emails" issue. Maybe your difficulty with Gmail's mystery filtering algorithm will warn others that depending on personal email servers for reliable outgoing email is a non-trivial endeavor.

Perhaps personal email servers are not impossible to set up but they're also not as easy to debug as some make it out to be.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15526127

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#118

Post by lucb1e »

macspoofing wrote: post #16
i_dont_know_ wrote: post #6

As 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…

> we use Office365 and don't have this issue

I'm not surprised Microsoft's IP range is known by google. Sending from sendgrid, mailchimp, and a few others that send a lot of mail also works. It's when a new player wants to get in the market (or god forbid, an individual with their own nerdy server) where the trouble arises.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#119

Post by supermatt »

bartimus wrote: post #56

Google seems to not agree DKIM is setup properly? https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/checkmx/check?domain=tab...

Not set up to send email through google. Unless they are using gmail as an smtp relay (which they aren't), that shouldn't be a problem - otherwise he would be giving google authorisation to send emails on his behalf.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#120

Post by maxaf »

blamestross wrote: post #54
maxaf wrote: post #9

> 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…

Organizations are often best modeled by an optimizing AI system. Often there is no intent behind behavior, simple that behaviors that result in propagation of the meme are preferred by the system. Never ascribe to intent what emergent behavior and individual's apathy can explain.

You’re saying that the system’s apparent behavior is by design, but wasn’t that design put forth by employees of the company in question? These aren’t natural phenomena we’re discussing. When a puma tears apart a rabbit, it does so without any influence from the agency of man. Gmail’s “spam filtering” is no such thing: it was deliberately designed to work this way by paid professionals who knew what they were doing.
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