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Gmail having issues

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Re: Gmail having issues

#221
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty much the worst response possible. Hard bounces mean that email delivery services are going to start automatically removing, or at least stopping delivery to, entire slews of email addresses. A lot of clean up is going to be needed as a result of this. To add some more details, when using a 3rd party email delivery service, those services will either black-list or just outright remove email addresses wh…

Yes. I email hundreds of thousands of Gmail users each week (yes, double opt in, they all want the mails!) and we immediately delete any user for whom any Gmail error comes up at all in order to keep a solid delivery record with them. Sounds like we might have deleted 80% of our list if we'd sent today..!

So new think to do: Quarantine addresses instead of deleting them and if for one provider most addresses fail don't give them another (maybe manually triggered) try later one.

(And if no such thing is detected deleted quarantined mail addresses.)

Re: Gmail having issues

#222
post #162

CEO of an email marketing platform here (EmailOctopus). If anyone's curious, here's a chart showing our bounce rate to Gmail addresses over the course of the week: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EpUE20UXYAEa_Uv?format=jpg&name=... That's a peak of 90% of Gmail inboxes bouncing – and this has been going on for almost 24 hours.

How do the public gmail addresses compare to the enterprise (used to be G Suite, now Google Workspace) ones?

I would be very interested to know this as well. I am trying to switch my company over to Google Workspace right now and support has been telling me my signup issues will be "resolved in 48 hours or less."

What a joke. And this after we're leaving AWS Workmail because of bounced emails.

No luck with signing up so far.

Re: Gmail having issues

#223
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, maybe, like in every big company, the thing actually doing the work is some old oracle database with some huge monolithic around it...

Out of all the companies Google might be relying on in their back-end, I think Oracle is probably pretty far down the list.

I can’t imagine what part of Google’s history would lead someone to believe there was any third party system in their production stack anywhere.

Re: Gmail having issues

#224
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/his/her/

There used to be times when people didn't care for technicalities like this because the focus was on the person's contribution to the discussion. Now that everyone's replaceable, the popular culture desperately tries to shift focus into arguing about pronouns and terms. Watch out, this is a road to nowhere. Forcing others to use the right pronoun won't build up your retirement fund, but will distract you from worryin…

This is a surprisingly profound and insightful comment so deep in the subthread of, more or less, a shitpost.

Thank you, sir, for elevating our collective level of discourse.

Re: Gmail having issues

#225
Just mistakenly disputed a transaction because of this. I have been working with a mediocre freelancer who didn’t reply to my list of remediation items.

When I followed up today, I got the “this email account does not exist” error from Gmail and proceeded to dispute on PayPal.

I only found out through hacker news that this was a Gmail bug.

Google, I expect a follow up retraction of the incorrect error messages. It’s one thing to give a temporary error. It’s another to say “this email account does not exist”.

Re: Gmail having issues

#226

Just got this from the ProtonMail team: > Dear ProtonMail user, Starting at around 4:30PM New York (10:30PM Zurich), Gmail suffered a global outage. A catastrophic failure at Gmail is causing emails sent to Gmail to permanently fail and bounce back. The error message from Gmail is the following: 550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. This is a global issue, and it impacts all email provid…

This is the Nightmare Scenario for mailing lists. Many of them auto-unsubscribe after a bounce.

Great point. And potentially email delivery services that have auto-suppression lists to protect reputation, at least they might be able to remove entries on behalf of their customers.

Re: Gmail having issues

#227

Just got this from the ProtonMail team: > Dear ProtonMail user, Starting at around 4:30PM New York (10:30PM Zurich), Gmail suffered a global outage. A catastrophic failure at Gmail is causing emails sent to Gmail to permanently fail and bounce back. The error message from Gmail is the following: 550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. This is a global issue, and it impacts all email provid…

Interesting response. And spot on from the technical integrity side. It’s also more fair to email providers as a whole to treat them all the same and respect their error messages. I mean, maybe there’s even requirements in some jurisdictions to deal with the address not found error in a specific way. As an email sender I think I’d prefer the message get auto re-sent after Gmail comes back online though.

Re: Gmail having issues

#228
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yah. Maybe there's an unexpected way that things can fail resulting in 550's. But maybe at Google's scale you should have some kind of kill switch to stop answering SMTP or to not send permanent errors at all, so that you could flip a switch and prevent the worst consequences of this rather than let it go on for a couple of hours.

Absolutely this. I am astonished that either (a) this switch has not been flipped yet or (b) this switch does not exist. Somebody is incompetent here.

Perhaps Gmail is just being discontinued ;)

Re: Gmail having issues

#229

If this had happened on self hosted email server, people would be claiming "this is why you don't self-host email". My company self hosts email and we have never had an outage of this sort. ever. All support emails to gmail accounts are now bouncing for us. It's also been more than 2 hours since this problem started.

If everyone who uses Gmail hosted their own email servers those people would suffer far more and far worse outages that Google has had.

but not all at once

Re: Gmail having issues

#230

Anyone else having issues in general with "the internet" over the last few days? The images on different websites I've visited don't load (e.g. twitter, bbc etc). When they do they load, they load verrry slowly

Yes, they Internet has felt for lack of better word “weird” for the past couple days. Nothing specific but similar to your experience with random things not loading but refresh and it’s fine etc. Or strangely slow response on websites.

That's generally DNS tampering by backbone providers (Centurylink and Verizon in the USA).

Use dnscrypt.

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