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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#191

Post by hedora »

khawkins wrote: post #39
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 now regularly seeing search results bury political pages which seem to run counter bay area political views. I'll search the terms on Bing and DuckDuckGo and the page I'm expecting will be the first hit, but on Google it'll be on page 3 or 4. Clearly they keep the hit in the search results for plausible deniability, but they're trying to influence people by suppressing speech. Given that Google is becoming synony…

Any examples? (DDG fan here; curious to know if it is filter bubbling, or something else.)

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#192

Post by bhauer »

Chlorus wrote: post #179
bhauer wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Ha! Like I said, "minor."

And actually, more seriously, the reputation push-back on Facebook is finally reaching levels where laypeople are picking up on it. There's still a huge amount of ground to cover, but laypeople are now hearing the criticism of Facebook. You can see many switching from a state of ignorance to "I don't care; I have nothing to hide." Maybe in a few years we'll see more people saying "you know what, I do find these privacy losses bothersome." As with many reputation matters, it's a gradual process with give and take.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#193

Post by megous »

The real issue here is that if you tell some gmail user to contact their e-mail provider to resolve delivery issues on their side, like this, they'll just stare at you, not knowing what you're even talking about.

It's like there's an assumption that gmail is perfect, and the problem is with the sender. Even if that was true, a normal mail hosting company would at least tell its customer why the mail is not being delivered, so that the customer can tell the sender what to fix.

The gmail recipient is never exposed to this side of google. So they don't know what a nightmare comapny it is to communicate with.

Why should everyone and their dog be solving gmail users's problems with receiving messages? It's such a demented system. It should be the other way round. Recipients, via their provider should be solving their issues with spam filtering and blocking.

If the gmail user would be blocked by my mail server, I would not tell them to go guess what's wrong, fix gmail, and to have fun. It should not be acceptable the other way round either.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#194

Post by Chlorus »

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…

Uh, SPF was being developed long before Gmail was a thing and was pushed for by at least 1 other (Yahoo) mass mail provider, as was reverse DNS verification. If you're going to be salty at someone, it should be the spammers.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#195

Post by marktangotango »

prlambert wrote: post #183
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…

Secondly, we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our users.

This is so deeply disingenuous and at odds with so many peoples experience it’s absurd. Or satire?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#196

Post by petercooper »

lupire wrote: post #81
petercooper wrote: post #48

Lest anyone think Gmail is less susceptible to problems because of the sheer volume of mail they handle (so any problem gets a lot of 'eyes' on it), they had an amusing and long-standing bug that meant any email containing a link to any domain name starting with "0x" automatically went to spam. You could literally have two long standing, legitimately used accounts send an email to each other containing a link to a UR…

What is your favorite public 0x domain?

https://0x46.net/

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#197

Post by deelly »

marktangotango wrote: post #195
prlambert wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Secondly, we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our users. This is so deeply disingenuous and at odds with so many peoples experience it’s absurd. Or satire?

Probably key point is "..with developers and all our users.." but not individual developers and individual users.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#199

Post by asark »

marktangotango wrote: post #195
prlambert wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Secondly, we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our users. This is so deeply disingenuous and at odds with so many peoples experience it’s absurd. Or satire?

I think (some of them) may think that's true, but their internal reward structures and top-down priorities are clearly set up such that it's not, in practice. There's no other reason it could be so bad.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#200

Post by monocularvision »

bencollier49 wrote: post #171
vbezhenar wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

I would love to pay FastMail for my family’s email. I have myself, my wife, my four children, one family address and one other generic address. 8 emails would cost me $240 a year at a minimum.

If they could solve for my situation and not charge me that kind of money, I would switch from Gmail immediately.

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