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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#181

Post by monocasa »

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…

Totally. I think that we need to start conceiving of email as the first widely used social network, in terms of the tendencies of large companies to try and balkanize the internet, and what a decentralized social network can look like.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#182

Post by scrollaway »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #101
redm wrote: 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've had mixed-to-excellent Google support on their Cloud and Fi products, as well as my various GSuite accounts.

IMO what "you can tell" is that they have good support where you're actually a paying customer, and no support for their free products.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#183

Post by prlambert »

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'm one of the PMs for Gmail and hang around HN quite a bit. This is my personal take, not an official reply.

It's simply not true we have no incentive to fix this. Here are a few:

Firstly, Gmail's success is entirely predicated on the health of the global email ecosystem. Gmail does not, inherently, have any network effects (unlike FB, messengers, any other comms tool of Gmail's scale). Email itself, of course has a huge network effect, and that is because you can email anyone in the world, regardless of what email system they use. It's because email is open. If we lose an open, healthy ecosystem with many providers, we'll destroy the base we stand on.

Secondly, we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our users. I can tell you it definitely makes me sad to see articles like this. There are going to be false positives, we will make mistakes, but we certainly care a lot about fixing issues like this when we hear about them.

I agree Postmaster tools has been underinvested in and we could do much better there.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#184

Post by LeonM »

gambler wrote: post #165
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".

I know it's going to be an unpopular opinion in this thread, but my opinion is that email is one of the things that most businesses shouldn't run themselves.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#185

Post by majestik »

He’s been using the same IP address for his mail server for 15 years. It’s possible his IP is on a subnet range that regularly gets blacklisted by Gmail due to other actors on the subnet sending malicious email/spam to Gmail.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#186

Post by Chlorus »

OldSchoolJohnny wrote: post #145
awinder wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to switch to gmail, you can pretty reliably switch to a myriad of service providers. You could even solely switch your SMTP server to something hosted and retain message storage on your end if you wanted. It has become very difficult / unwise to host your own SMTP server, though, but that's been true for ages now. Gmail's marketshare is going to make that veeeery obvious, but it really has been a bad i…

Difficult to host smtp?! That's absolutely not true and has never been true. It's difficult to configure and set up in the first place but after that it's just updating. Source: personal experience for decades.

It's not like you'd notice the email you're not receiving, so I'm always a little leery of these "it works perfectly for me!" stories for email stuff.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#189

Post by js2 »

I had my personal domain hosted with Google years ago. One of the reasons I moved away is that emails that I was sending to other Google Apps domains were bouncing as spam when the destination address was an alias. The bounce came from Google Groups, which is what Google used for handling aliases within Apps domains.

e.g. https://pastebin.com/u48DAaLP

That particular example was sent via SMTP, but I had the same problem when sending via the Gmail web interface, and it occurred sending to at least three different Google Apps domains.

After I moved my domain off Google Apps (I switched to Fastmail for a variety of reasons, but that issue was the kicker), I was able to send to those same addresses without issue. In fairness to Google, I was on the Google Apps free tier at the time, so there was nowhere to go for support.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#190

Post by bluGill »

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?

Free is not possible. Someone needs to pay for email, servers need to be repaired/replaced every few years, the power bill needs to be paid, someone needs to ensure that the latest exploit doesn't compromise the server. You are paying for your email, the only question is how.

I use fastmail because the payment is direct: I give them a few bucks each month.

With free email (gmail) the payment is not direct. They are doing something to get money, but what is unknown.

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