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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#171

Post by bencollier49 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #164
Tepix wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Fastmail

[EDIT: Sorry, missed the 'free' in there. Guess you get what you pay for]

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#172

Post by hitpointdrew »

chrismeller wrote: post #94
organsnyder wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email deliverability has been a hassle for a long time. 15 years ago, AOL was the juggernaut that made sysadmin's lives difficult. I do agree that Google's outsize influence in so many markets is concerning.

It's interesting that you bring up AOL, because I remember dealing with this kind of crap with them. It was annoying, but didn't feel like it was as big of a deal. I guess the only real difference is that with AOL it was less insidious... You knew it was only for aol.com emails and that you weren't dealing with business info. Not that emails to personal addresses aren't important, but at least it wasn't suddenly Some…

>It was annoying, but didn't feel like it was as big of a deal.

Perhaps because email itself wasn't as big of deal back then? Phone calls and snail mail were used with a lot more regularity back then.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#173

Post by [deleted] »

reaperducer wrote: post #23

The last time a company screwed with e-mail at scale was Earthlink. Remember for a couple of years, every time you'd send a message to someone at Earthlink, you'd get an automated rely demanding that you verify yourself before the message would go through? Now I can't remember the last time I saw an @earthlink.* e-mail address. Google has apparently learned from that and put the "error" in the 550 messages, where the…

[deleted]

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#174

Post by jartelt »

bachmeier wrote: post #40
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…

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…

Seems like if you don't change something you are potentially losing out on a lot of great students. Maybe you do not need to change your e-mail service, but I would hope you are at least warning applicants about this issue somewhere in the application process.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#175

Post by sevensor »

chrisfinazzo wrote: post #129
sevensor wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

Fastmail's web client is absurdly excellent compared to Gmail. It's as if, instead of copying all of the bogus stuff Google piled into Gmail, they just made a really good version of webmail the way it was in 2003. Instead of scrapping webmail and starting over, they evolved it into something better. The result is fast, clear, easy to use, and no-nonsense. It's as if all the features that bloat Gmail at this point are just there to solve problems caused by Gmail's bloated feature set. You really don't appreciate how bad it's gotten until you switch.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#176

Post by ameliozanchi »

Does AI compares whom data to define which message is important or No? It doesn't track any specific way on evolution of mentality when it goes to define data correlated to humans usage. Like others products on market. Therefore, if you apply this thought to AI I guess they just made with basics conglomerated informations gathering. That CAN´T move a barrier when satisfying humans usage. It is just how you confront which message is correct to say is relevant or no. AI can be freely a way companies uses their needs on market influence because they're , on a very simple association, doing by themselves, then people get a notion of arbitrariety on those machines that create discussion to the whole universe you see about robot revolution etc, but not the case. I guess they try to hard to make then appear as human to be soon accepted by costumers, its just the way it is, it is not the time to require maximum levels of perfection on how easy they're to addapt as a user

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#177

Post by busyant »

cptskippy wrote: post #29
dralley wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't even have to be doing it deliberately; as you say, the lack of incentives to fix such issues will cause a gradual evolution in that direction.

I feel like as they leave more and more up to the algorithms, we suffer. I've been having this ever increasing in frequency issue where Gmail Search just doesn't working. Not that it doesn't return search results but rather that it returns what I know to be incorrect results. I have an email with some account information that I access a couple times a year at most but will consistently need at least once a year. Just…

> I feel like as they leave more and more up to the algorithms, we suffer.

With all the hand-wringing about what happens when the "computers" take all of our jobs, I think you crystallized how it all ends for us. It won't be a cinematic extinction of humanity. We will just be ignored--each of us trying to talk to a machine with a human voice, and each of us perpetually on-hold.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#178

Post by thallian »

jbergstroem wrote: post #59

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…

I host my own email stuff too (private stuff and for a couple of friends) and sending to microsoft domains (hotmail, outlook.com) consistently gives me the most problems. Right now it seems to be ok again but I always make sure that people using my domains are fully aware of all these problems.

Edit: not long ago I used a gmail account to contact microsoft support to get them to remove me from their blacklist again (couldn't use my normal email for obvious reasons). Ironically enough their reply got marked as spam by gmail (something in my included message parts might very well have triggered that but I had to laugh out loud at the situation).

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#179

Post by Chlorus »

bhauer wrote: post #149
sergiosgc wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> If it is a poor service, you can (and should) fault people for using it. Agreed. There should be some give and take, some minor reputation at stake. It's healthy to have some people applying back-pressure against popularity. I like the idea that laypeople might hear whispers among their tech-savvy friends that it's not considered "cool" to have a gmail address. Much like having an aol.com email address was seen as…

> I like the idea that laypeople might hear whispers among their tech-savvy friends that it's not considered "cool" to have a gmail address

I haven't laughed this hard in a while. How'd that go with convincing people not to join walled gardens like Facebook and Insta?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#180

Post by hedora »

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…

In an attempt to avoid google, I kept a non-gmail address that I don’t administer, and instead forwarded it elsewhere.

The administrators of the account decided to outsource the smtp relay to google. It is ridiculously unreliable, and regularly sends “no such address” responses to my synology NAS (which emails me periodically).

Similarly, when I used gmail’s IMAP gateway for work, it was regularly down.

I’m pretty sure Google will succeed at killing email. I hope gmail also goes down in flames if they succeed.

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