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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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121–130 of 720 posts

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#121

I'm also one of those oldfarts that insists on hosting my private emails for me and a few friends. I've owned the ip since early 2000's and have had zero "spam"/blacklist incidents. One trend I've been noticing is that Microsoft/Outlook have regularly started to block me. I have to contact their abuse which takes a day or so to get unblocked. To date, I've done so >10 times: hotmail-com.olc.protection.outlook.com[104…

At >10 times I'd automate that process.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#122

Add 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.

Happened to me too. The thing that triggered lockout was attempt to login from different country (I've changed my VPN provider). I didn't give Google my phone number so the only option left for recovery was tricky questions like "what city you've been logging in from" which I failed to answer.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#123
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wholly agree with your statement. I would add that, sadly, its like this with most things Google: 1) vague descriptions of the problem, 2) impossible to get support or talk to anyone, 3) severe consequences (because of the ubiquity of Google’s platforms i.e. search, Gmail, Android, Chrome). Anyone who’s had a safe browsing problem, an App Store issue, or, heaven forbid, an AdSense issue will attest. As far as it re…

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.

I would disagree, the 'AdWords Expert' I had a pleasure of speaking with sounded like someone who started there a week ago

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#124

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…

It's not just email, it seems like any service is at risk of being ignored through malice or just being too tiny it gets neglected if it doesn't help the walled garden somehow.

At one point I heard a rumor that no human had worked on Google Finance in over a year, simply because nobody was interested. Not their biggest service of course, but still a major site that presumably generates a lot of revenue. If they think that global finance is "too boring" for their amazing engineers then support for everything is liable to be canceled at any moment.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#125
I run a highly customised PHPBB forum.

Without these customisations that forum would be overrun with all sorts of spam.

However, these customisations only stop spam postings but can't stop actual registrations.

Based on the users that I see who are registering I see a great majority of these spammers love using Gmail accounts.

So while it is good that Google Gmail is trying to fix these spam issues, from where I stand Gmail users seem to be a big part of the spamming problem.

Spammers love Gmail only because they can easily create spamming e-mail accounts.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#126
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

To clarify, I wasn't arguing that sending email to Gmail is easy especially if you're using an independent provider that is unknown to Google - which is how you're framing my response as (why?).

I was acknowledging the general issue of dealing with modern email problems and how opaque the underlying systems are.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#127
I'm glad I'm not the only one seeing these problems. I send mail from a personal server, and recently discovered that my messages to people @gmail were frequently sent to spam or simply dropped. I briefly thought friends were ghosting me until I figured it out. I set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, but it seems like the only way to get reliable email these days is to use Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo (at least for a little while...).

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can also have more than one device set up for TOTP - phone, previous phone or tablet, desktop using WinAuth or similar. Authy and the password managers will also track those seed values, though it's best to store them separately from your actual password storage. Another thing that will not migrate phone to phone is Signal conversations if you're inclined to keep those.

Yes, I lost my Signal conversation history as well and had to be re-added to all group conversations (another PITA).

How do you store seed values in password managers? More specifically: how do you export them from Coogle Authenticator? (I’ve not found that option). And how do you import them again?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#129

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.

I had similar thoughts, but it took a while until I found something like Netlify to handle the domain end of things. My personal site was on DreamHost, who threw in Google Apps for free (this was before the bottom tier went paid).

At the very least, I knew that if mail ended up in that inbox, it was usually important.

More to the point, Fastmail allowed me to use Mail.app on macOS and get away from Google's web UI which, despite best efforts on their part - read: none at all - never worked correctly on the desktop with regard to message deletion in IMAP clients.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’ve got to meet people halfway here. While’s gmail’s filtering is obviously neither your responsibility nor under your control, you also can’t really fault people for using one of the most popular email services on the planet. I would hope that your department follows up some other way (you surely have a phone number!). Searches are crazy time consuming and expensive, and grad student recruitment isn’t exa…

> While’s gmail’s filtering is obviously neither your responsibility nor under your control, you also can’t really fault people for using one of the most popular email services on the planet. Why not? Popularity does not imply quality. If it is a poor service, you can (and should) fault people for using it.

People's choice of email provider has very little bearing on their ability to do (e.g.) biology or economics research. Plus, most career centers actively advise students (i.e., many applicants) to sent up a professional-sounding gmail (or similar account) accounts. In short, it makes no sense.

More broadly, grad school admissions--and, even moreso, faculty hiring--is already full of unwritten rules, backdoors, and tacit understands of "how things are done." It emphatically does not need more of those, especially petty ones related to email.

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