I'm quite happy with the ease of setting up and running a Mail-in-a-Box [1] instance. After seeing this article I did an experiment and while my hosted mail sent to a @gmail.com address did not bounce it went straight to the Spam folder. At least I can add other users to my email and enjoy private conversations.
Google Is Eating Our Mail
281–290 of 720 posts
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Use your AI to put email into the spam folder. Refusing it outright is a case for the European Commission which hopefully will slap you another few billions of fine onto the wrist until you remember to play nicely with the other kids. I prefer getting a bounce than ending in the spam folder by far. Lots of relatives on Gmail never look into the spam folder so I never know if they get to see my email or not and I en…
But if it ends up in the spam folder there's at least a chance that it'll be trained out of the spam folder by people marking it as "not spam", and it provides a workaround for the people who really need it to work _now_.
I believe that the majority of the users are trained to ignore g-mail spam since it's been working good enough for most people. Unless we condition the customer to always view the spam folder it's asking them to do something on top of already checking their e-mail.
My mother would just simply ignore the spam and often times spam catches majority of the phishing e-mails too. So it's a double edge sword educating and conditioning the users to review the spam folder. Why is it the end user's job to determine what is spam and what is legitimate ?
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Use your AI to put email into the spam folder. Refusing it outright is a case for the European Commission which hopefully will slap you another few billions of fine onto the wrist until you remember to play nicely with the other kids. I prefer getting a bounce than ending in the spam folder by far. Lots of relatives on Gmail never look into the spam folder so I never know if they get to see my email or not and I en…
But if it ends up in the spam folder there's at least a chance that it'll be trained out of the spam folder by people marking it as "not spam", and it provides a workaround for the people who really need it to work _now_.
Then they should do both: bounce it and also show it in a folder called 'bounced'.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#284I had exactly the same kind of problems when I tried to set up a new mail server. In the end I just gave up and started using mailgun as a relay.
Can you tell us a little more about your setup? I have a home email server, incoming only because of ISP restrictions, and I would love to make it into a real email server for my family and business.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I live in Argentina. Few years back, an ex government official from the previous government was caught in the act of hiding 8 million dollars in a church.
My partner's auncle was also an ex government official from the previous government.
He was in charge of the country's office for regulation work in rural areas.
Up to that point, he was a complete believer that the government he was part of, was there to really change things and put the country in the right track.
When the news about that other guy's 8 mill broke out, he was completelly and uterly devastated.
I think the same can be applied to a lot of the people that works in Google regarding the way they perceive the company.
I just recently read in the news that there has been some retaliation exherted on googlers because of organizing some walkouts.
To think that your company just does good because you try to do good, and not take a look at what is really going around in the world related to what the company you work for is "a little" naive.
Also, I think that right now companies like Google and FB should be treated and reasoned about like states. To think that they will not abuse their power in one way or the other - just like countries do - is also "a little" naive.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#286Google 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 stopped being a good email provider years ago:
https://github.com/dominictarr/your-web-app-is-bloated
Gmail used to be a small, light, fast and simple email service. Frankly, you should be ashamed of what Gmail has become.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#287He’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.
Presumably, Google's smart enough to identify individual IPs in the range that don't send spam. I have a real shitty neigborhood IP wise, having my mail server on a $1 VPS. Public Outlook.com drops all my mail regardless of content for example, citing spammy IP range. Yet gmail somehow learned after a while to pass most of my messages through.
The real problem is lack of provided reasons for blocking, so people waste a lot of time trying to figure it out by guessing and trying random shit.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#288Earlier 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…
Google the giant will only bend when lawsuit happens. Assuming Google's AI put an urgent email to spam by mistake and made a huge loss to some party, Google should be immediately sued, probably by class action, only then it will respect small and well-behaved players like the original post here. Whenever I read post like this, I recall its once popular(now withdrawn) slogan "don't be evil".
Email is not an appropriate method of communication for highly urgent, impactful, and time-sensitive messages. So the party should sue themselves for negligence.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#289Google 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…
Glad you're here and listening. I'm another poor schmuck who runs his own email server for family members (you can look it up from my HN profile -> mx record) and Gmail deliverability has been a problem for me for over a decade. I do DKIM, SPF, reverse DNS, had the same IP for many years, etc etc., and it's a total crapshoot whether Gmailers get my message in their inbox or spam folder.
Postmaster tools have been useless for me because apparently my volumes aren't high enough.
I'm inclined to think Gmail's approach to this problem is fundamentally flawed, because Gmail has been by far the worst at binning my server's emails. I don't have this problem with Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, etc., etc. Now, feel free to argue that their approaches are too lenient, but if I have to choose between false negatives and false positives in my spam filter, I absolutely know which one I'd choose.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Since you profile claims you are from Google, you should know by helping here you really doing disservice to everyone else having same problems. Hacker News is not a “gmail customer support hotline center”. You have billions of dollars to setup a system or heck the whole state of the art department to help people with their gmail problem. So you will help two people on HN bitching at gmail.. what about all those that never heard of HN? Sorry friend you doing this only because at some degree google and gmail obviously does not want to look bad to tech society. /rant