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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#161

Post by vidarh »

awinder wrote: post #57
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…

This may be a fair sentiment for an educational institution (you're not directly making money from email sending / hopefully admissions marketing doesn't have this problem), but as a candidate I'd be extremely concerned if a company I was going to work with A) couldn't deliver to gmail and B) held the view that it was everyone else's problem. As it is you're statistically leaving half the candidate pool at the door,…

Judging by what ends up in my gmail, very few people "can deliver to gmail" in any kind of reliable fashion. It depends entirely on how messed up the spam filtering is for individual accounts. The only reason I'm still on Gmail is that it's so entrenched in my life that tidying things up to move is a massive pain and will take a long time (and no, forwarding is not a reliable solution; my experience is that even forwarding from one gmail account to another will invariably cause some mail to go the spam folder of the account you forward from - yes there are options that are meant to prevent this; no they don't work reliably, and haven't in the years I've been using it, so it means one more place to check mail).

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#163

Post by bhauer »

chrisfinazzo wrote: post #132

Can someone explain in simple terms why, in 2019, anyone is running their own mail server? Unless you are the sysadmin, server guy/gal, whatever, this just sounds like signing up for a world of hurt doing it yourself.

It's not as difficult as you've been lead to believe. But if you have no experience with administering servers, the initial learning curve could be significant.

The upsides, sharing many of the common features of all self-hosting, are things such as pure and total control, data privacy, ultimate flexibility of configuration (e.g., infinite and unfettered aliasing), customization of interface, high-performance, etc.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#164

Post by vbezhenar »

Tepix wrote: post #103
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…

The right response to this problem - for gmail users - would be to switch to a different email provider. After all, if you are not receiving important mails because Google decides to block them for inexplicable reasons, you are getting an inferior, faulty service. (For me gmail is inferior regardless as my privacy is violated)

Can you suggest free email provider with similar level of service which allows to use your own domain?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#165

Post by gambler »

LeonM wrote: post #68

I run a mail monitoring service [0], and we hear this complaint every now and then. A couple of things that regularly seems to trigger false positives in spam algorithms: - no or misconfigured SPF and/or DKIM - no or misconfigured reverse-DNS - automatically included footer texts (confidentiality, copyright, safe a tree don't print, etc) - regular automatic replies from the domain (such as out of office notifications…

And with all this corporate shills chant that "Hosting your own things is easier than ever before".

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#166

Post by vidarh »

pjc50 wrote: post #84
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…

"Our outbound email is misconfigured, but this is everyone else's problem"?

I fairly regularly get e-mail sent from gmail users in my gmail spam folder.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#167

Post by megous »

awinder wrote: post #57
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…

This may be a fair sentiment for an educational institution (you're not directly making money from email sending / hopefully admissions marketing doesn't have this problem), but as a candidate I'd be extremely concerned if a company I was going to work with A) couldn't deliver to gmail and B) held the view that it was everyone else's problem. As it is you're statistically leaving half the candidate pool at the door,…

You have it the wrong way. Noone can make it so that gmail accepts their e-mail. It's the gmail's job after it receives the connection to process the SMTP commands and deliver the message to you.

I mean, assumming that the sender doesn't have broken SMTP client or doesn't follow standards.

It's gmail's user's problem if they don't accept mail or check their Junk folder or use an e-mail provider that they can't contact to solve issues on their side.

In the old days, if I didn't receive mail because my mail provider was rejecting it, it was me who had to talk to them. Free has a cost. And it's gmail users who should be paying it in their time and fruitless attempts at communicating with google. At least they'd realize what company they're enabling and how much it doesn't care about their e-mail.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#168

Post by DoctorOetker »

I wonder if originally this technically constitutes an illegal form of interception of mail in some jurisdictions.

Perhaps there really would be a lot more spam without such filtering, but it points to the actual problem being elsewhere. Perhaps we need some kind of cheap and userriendly (uniform but decentralized) email court system, and fine / ban email accounts that misbehave?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#170

Post by megous »

pjc50 wrote: post #84
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…

"Our outbound email is misconfigured, but this is everyone else's problem"?

You don't know what you're talking about. A lot of the blocking is based on IP addresses alone (or worse, IP address ranges).
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