Google Is Eating Our Mail • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#251

Post by ghostly_s » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 4:34 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

Oh really? Then what is the mechanism by which an affected user can report an issue like this and receive individual, accountable response? Because that is what a company that cares about fixing issues does.

As far as I can tell, the only redress available for any issue like this with Google is 1) be a big enough name like Jamie Zawinksi (he has been posting about struggles with this exact issue for several months) that your blog post gets attention, or 2) hope your blog post makes the front page on a site like HN.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#252

Post by sbov » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

monocularvision wrote: post #200

bencollier49 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you honestly not afford it? Or do you just think it shouldn't cost $20/month? I'm the sole income earner in a family of 5 and switched us to fastmail.

A lot depends upon how frugal you already are, but I found it trivial to find some extra savings to pay for it. There's a few things I like to treat myself to, and doing that one less time per month pays for it. Eating out one less time per month pays for it too. Ordering slightly cheaper meals for myself when we eat out would also pay for it.

Hell, when I turned off my home server, which I rarely used, I saved $9/month in electricity. If you live in a high power cost state, do a personal power audit. Our family was pretty lazy with turning things off until I figured out how much it costs to run any given thing.

With a family of 6, if you haven't crunched your finances, there are lots of very minor behavior changes that can save you enough money to pay for something like fastmail.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#253

Post by awinder » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

megous wrote: post #167

awinder wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contac…

You can absolutely make it so that gmail accepts your legitimate email if you're delivering email at high scale. A lot of people here running their own email servers would have no problem with the same emails getting delivered if they were hosted on any decently-sized platform, because part of the cost / value of those platforms is that there are human beings doing relationship management with counterparts at Google, fixing deliveribility issues when google is hard-bouncing, or maintaining reputation of IPs (which you can't do -- thats what the original article is running into, it doesn't matter if you've been delivering off the same IP for years if you're only sending small amounts of traffic).

> 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.

In the old days average email user was being inundated with low-quality spam and getting mired in fraud. Google fixed that problem for their end users. In doing so, they made it hard for a small % of people who want to run their own email servers, but they've given all of these people an out -- go sign up with someone who knows what they're doing, and google is going to effectively outsource the fraud/spam management to those companies.

You can tell me I have it wrong but I'm literally just describing the landscape that actively exists and how to navigate around it for anyone who wants to, but you're not taking out google.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#254

Post by jessaustin » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

ghostly_s wrote: post #251

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…

> 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. Oh really? Then what is the mechanism by which an affected user can report an issue like this and receive individual, accountable response? Because that is what a company that cares about fixing issues does. As far as I can tell, the only redress available for any issue li…

Why didn't you link JWZ's blog post?

b^)

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#255

Post by jrockway » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

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,…

> A biz that can't deliver to gmail is a terrible smell though.

If anything, it means that teams are probably too independent and that there is no central approval process for things like sending emails.

For example, a lot of companies use products like Greenhouse. I am sure this will send email from your domain on your behalf. If you don't know what you have to talk to the DNS administrators to add a bunch of TXT records to enable that, you will just notice that some percentage of emails never get delivered (or if the product doesn't tell you that they're bouncing, you may never know. how could you?)

If you use something like Zendesk, you'll note how many people have been burned by this. By default, they end up using something like support.yourdomain.com because despite detailed instructions on how to set up the necessary DNS records to send email from youdomain.com, people still fail to do it right and then complain "nobody ever sees my support tickets".

My point is, email has been abused so heavily that it is somewhat difficult to set up a working system. That was my experience when I ran my own email server. Although I did OK with delivery, I also aggressively filtered messages and used greylisting. This broke a lot of broken email systems, whose administrators immediately blamed me. (I had a long back-and-forth with some company that wanted to hire me. Their email system was super broken. They blamed me and said that they weren't interested in a programmer that couldn't set up a mail server. LOL.)

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#256

Post by rdiddly » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

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…

You might have grounds for a lawsuit if it broke your company.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#257

Post by reitanqild » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 4:39 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #182

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I've heard a few examples here of people having trouble getting support with both GSuite and GCloud.

Sometimes I've got support from GCloud. Even once got two blokes onsite because they'd messed up something badly, but at that time I was working on a project that was seemed to be big time bragging rights for anyone involved on both our side and their side.

Other times our requests would be handled by someone who was more or less clueless && who clearly didn't care at all IMO (this was also the same project.)

For smaller customers it seems to be hopeless from what I read here: - Someone getting their account (GSuite or GCloud) closed for no good reason and with no way to get it back seems to be a thing that happens from time to time.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#258

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 4:39 PM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #218

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…

> I'm one of the PMs for Gmail and hang around HN quite a bit. Can you bring back the old web UI? I experience obnoxious interaction and interface bugs in the new one on an hourly basis, it has horrendous interaction latency for many operations that used to be snappy, it looks worse, and has basically nothing new I want. Actually, can you bring back the Gmail of like 10 years ago? Basically every change since then ha…

[deleted]

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#259

Post by tssva » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 4:39 PM UTC

avian wrote: post #133

bartimus wrote: post #56

Google seems to not agree DKIM is setup properly? https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/checkmx/check?domain=tab...

Thanks for the link. I think the tool you linked specifically checks whether DKIM is set to allow Google's servers to send mail on the behalf of your domain. These checkers for example don't find any errors with the DNS record: https://dmarcian.com/dkim-inspector/?domain=tablix.org&selec... https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=dkim%3atablix.or... One thing that this second one does find is the lack of a versio…

You may also want to add a DMARC policy. A dmarc record generator can be found at https://mxtoolbox.com/DMARCRecordGenerator.aspx

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#260

Post by JohnFen » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 4:39 PM UTC

awinder wrote: post #49

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…

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…

> It has become very difficult / unwise to host your own SMTP server, though

That's not been my experience at all.