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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#261

Post by pdonis »

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…

> Gmail's success is entirely predicated on the health of the global email ecosystem

That depends on what you define as "health".

> 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

If that's the case, then why does Gmail system explicitly thwart this objective, as described by this very article?

> If we lose an open, healthy ecosystem with many providers, we'll destroy the base we stand on

And that's exactly what Gmail is doing when it does what is described in the article.

> we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our users

You personally might, but your company does not. What your company cares about is advertising revenue. If your company really cared about users, it would figure out a way to let them pay directly for your company's services (not just Gmail but search, maps, etc.) so you could see directly from users how valuable those services were, instead of having any benefit to users be a side effect of trying to capture their eyeballs for advertisers.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#263

Post by jacquesm »

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…

I'd love to have a discussion about gmail but offline, feel free to mail me. I've just transitioned a small company over to gmail and the experience so far has been nothing short of terrible, this can't be how it is meant to be. If you're up for it my email is in my profile.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#264

Post by jvagner »

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…

unrelated: i was going through a pile of CDs in my archive this last week, and i noticed an earthlink email address on one of my indie electronic CDs, and i still lament that i can't identify some of my old CDs because there's no discernible artist/album names on the CDs themselves, and neither I.. nor anyone I know locally.. own a CD drive.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#265

Post by imhelpingu »

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…

Wow since you're so concerned and helpful, here's a tidbit: Everyone who has tried to run a personal mail server in past five years can't because of gmail.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#266

Post by jrockway »

kevin_b_er wrote: post #92
rc_mob wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a new message protocol

That message protocol will not be federated due to how greed and a lust for control works on the internet in this time.

That is not the only reason people eschew federation. Think about all the federated protocols in common use today: email, SMS, phone. All of them are overrun by spam. 90% of the time when my phone rings, it's a robocall. That, my friend, is federation in action. It ain't great.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#267

Post by ghostly_s »

Tepix wrote: post #103
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…

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)

I recently switched (mostly) from gmail and realized what insidious lock-in mechanisms the "unlimited inbox" and "inbox categories" really are. I hadn't been giving it much thought, but I've gone well over a decade just casually archiving everything, on the presumption that I can always find anything important I might need to reference by searching for it down the line. And I'd just been ignoring those junkier "category" tabs for months on end, presuming I can always go sort through them later to find those handful of actually-important messages that end up in there.

Maybe this is just my personal organizational problem, but it was like a waking nightmare when I really started to look with fresh eyes at how unstructured my email management strategy had become with the tools gmail gives you. It took me weeks of nights and weekends to sort this all out (finding messages I actually want to save, identifying senders I actually want manually sorted to other folders, unsubscribing from lists I've been ignoring for years because they were conveniently out of site in "promotions") to a point where I felt ready to migrate to a more traditional mailbox setup. I can easily imagine many people seeing how daunting this task is and just deciding to stick with gmail.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#268

Post by megous »

superpie wrote: post #7

A while back I'd explored trying to own my data, especially with email, and found that the efforts involved in hosting your own email server were tantamount to a full-time job. The amount of fighting you have to do to stay on everyone's whitelists is absurd.

There's some setup cost, for sure. But there need not be that much of an ongoing maintenance (for me, it's just pacman -Syu + restart of some services, perhaps 10mins a month). You can also gain some interesting features and insight as a result.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#270

Post by prlambert »

mcsb4 wrote: post #215
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…

> It's simply not true we have no incentive to fix this I just happen to have set up an email server and encountered the same problems with Google as described in the article. I own the IP since quite some time, it is not on any black list, reverse DNS is set up etc. but Google rejects email as spam. And this even happens when the gmail account has added the sender in his address book and has send the first email to…

I'm genuinely sorry to hear that. Our analysts are looking into the issue described in the article, hopefully we find something we can fix that will resolve this.
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