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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#291

Post by BenjiWiebe »

imhelpingu wrote: post #265
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…

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.

N=1, but my small email server actually hosts emails for a business, and the only problems I've ever had were with Microsoft, and they went away after i jumped through some hoops for them. I'm using a linode and dkim/spf/dmarc/tls/rdns.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#292

Post by verisimilitudes »

This also mirrors my experience, as I host my own email and it's solely for me. At one point, I couldn't successfully send any email to gmail, but then it changed for some reason and simply gets sent to spam folders instead. Perhaps it's entirely related to some people emailing me first that it gets through at all.

I don't send much mail to gmail, though. Sans that, my only issue has been a mail server that uses Reverse DNS, which I don't have set up, and entirely ignores my email without it.

I suppose I can understand this if some people get a great deal of spam, but requiring so much of this on an unencrypted message seems more like useless reassurances than anything. I'm not criticizing email for being unencrypted, but this seems more like another hoop to jump through than anything.

Also of note, almost all of the spam I receive is from gmail addresses and I wouldn't be surprised if the invalid addresses that send messages demanding bitcoin are also from gmail, but with fake From fields.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#293

Post by Goronmon »

PaulHoule wrote: post #207
monocularvision wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find it astonishing how much people devalue software and information services. The same people who have to have a $1500 phone and seem to think nothing of dropping $150 a month on Verizon or AT&T won't spend $5 on any cloud service. This is why Google keeps winning and everyone else is losing, particularly the people who get the "free" services but don't have any say about those services. The real numbers might be…

You seem so unsure about your own point that you immediately downplay a users concerns about spending $250 a year by reducing that number to $5. Why the need to fabricate a theoretical number when someone provided you with a specific value?

If I spend $300 dollars on a phone every 2-3 years and $40 for service a month, am I then permitted to raise concerns about spending hundreds of dollars a year for email accounts?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#294

Post by 7Z7 »

joering2 wrote: post #290
prlambert wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That all depends entirely on whether the "fix" is white-listing the two responders somehow, or flagging the larger issue to the correct team and figuring something more general out.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#295

Post by phinnaeus »

benou wrote: post #231
mcsb4 wrote: post #215

Earlier 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…

> 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…

It might obviate the excuse mentioned a few comments above, "I've never had a problem with Gmail, it must be on your end."

If the message is ending up in your spam folder, it's harder to shift that blame off of Gmail's shoulders.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#296

Post by BenjiWiebe »

PaulHoule wrote: post #207
monocularvision wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find it astonishing how much people devalue software and information services. The same people who have to have a $1500 phone and seem to think nothing of dropping $150 a month on Verizon or AT&T won't spend $5 on any cloud service. This is why Google keeps winning and everyone else is losing, particularly the people who get the "free" services but don't have any say about those services. The real numbers might be…

Not everyone spends money like that. I personally have a 6yr old phone that cost me $20, and since I'm usually on WiFi i have a $10/mo cell phone plan from an mvno. Most of my friends pay more than I do, but still are far from your example.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#297

Post by theWheez »

OldSchoolJohnny wrote: post #145
awinder wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Difficult to host smtp?! That's absolutely not true and has never been true. It's difficult to configure and set up in the first place but after that it's just updating. Source: personal experience for decades.

Any tips for somebody looking to move to my own smtp server? It's been on my mind a few months, and I want to move away from gmail to my own server or to another service, preferably one I pay for.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#298

Post by [deleted] »

joering2 wrote: post #290
prlambert wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#299

Post by dingus »

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 appreciate the response. From someone who has operated a mail server since 2002, it comes across that Gmail does not care about cooperating with small but legitimate mail servers.

SPF, DKIM, reverse DNS, no blacklists, no open relay, longtime ownership of IPs, etc etc. Using various mail testers returns a 10/10 deliverability score.

And yet, messages sent to Gmail always go into the spam folder, or are never delivered at all. These are everyday regular messages, I have never used mailing lists or sent bulk automated messages.

The issue is, there is no recourse, no fix, no acknowledgement of the problem with false positives. There is no tool available to me to understand or correct the "problem". Hint: this comes across as Gmail not giving a shit.

Gmail has a responsibility to be more accountable, even if these problems are unintentional, because Gmail is such an enormous node in a federated network.

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

Correct. Gmail is contributing to the erosion of email reliability. Please course correct.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#300

Post by andai »

surgi wrote: post #64

Am I the only one here experiencing that GMail does reasonably good job in filtering out the spam, while I have to visit the Spam folder approximately once a week, just to randomly correct a mail or 2 a month? (not a Google employee)

Every time I look in my spam folder, there's dozens of legitimate emails in there, and I get this dreadful feeling that over the years, thousands of legitimate mails went over the 30-days-in-spam threshold, down the memory hole forever.
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