Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

blogfontawesome.wpcomstaging.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 325 posts

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#291

Post by projektfu »

ectospheno wrote: post #268
cube00 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But even worse than that, the "confirm your email" email and the following "finish account setup" email came from two different sub-domains. Maybe this is just a new attempt to get around Google's spam filter, but it seems like the worst thing you could possibly do when sending emails. Standard advice is to use one subdomain for "transaction" email (verification, invoices) and another for marketing https://www.twil…

That is standard practice because you will need to cycle that marketing domain until the end of time as its email reputation sinks into the abyss. Because people don’t want spam.

It's good practice because sometimes I don't feel like hitting the Spam button but I still want to black-hole the marketing e-mails. If you are also sending transaction e-mails through that address, then I have to decide whether to bother keeping you as a sender.

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#292

Post by TeMPOraL »

jonhohle wrote: post #286
eru wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One spammer said they could use the same servers for both but when you unsubscribe you have immediately signaled that you are now losing him money. So he uses the slowest cheapest part of the stack for removal. Hmm, wouldn't you want to remove the money losing people as soon as possible, so you don't waste even more money on them?

Doesn’t compute. He probably meant that “customer” is not making him money, therefore not worth the time. The only reason unsubscribing works at all is probably a legal requirement.

It does, probabilistically. For any given customer C, the expected value EV(C) is... not much. By starting an opt-out process, a customer Co is revealed to have EV(Co) = 0, which is less than not much.

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#293

Post by IncandescentGas »

fmx wrote: post #68

GMail disagrees with you, because GMail users disagree with you. They are clicking "report spam" on your emails. Whether or not you think what you're sending is spam, the recipients think it is, and that's what matters. (Based on the other comments in this thread it's not hard to see why they might think so.)

This is not always the case.

Last week, my monitoring system sent me 20k emails in a few hours in response to a server attack.

When those hit my gmail inbox, gmail marked them all as spam. Myself, the user, did not mark them as spam. Gmail did that for me. But their reputation system is behaving as if 20k people marked 20k emails from us as spam.

In response to those 20k emails marked as spam, now our domain sender reputation with gmail is LOW, and our low volume of legitimate email with customers goes to their spam folders.

The gmail client gives me no way to unmark these messages as spam, except to click on each message, one at a time, and dig into a submenu to find the "Not spam" button.

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#294

Post by kolektiv »

EGreg wrote: post #283
kolektiv wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For that I get chastizement on HN, figures. I really wasn't trying to chastize, honestly it was intended as a friendly dollop of advice as someone who's dealt with this kind of thing. But since you have replied, I would say: > Yes, there is a clearly valid business purpose under GDPR for retaining the email addresses of users who want to learn how to use your app better and opted in. Relevance is likely to be seen…

Is there an actual regulation or case law showing what the cutoff time is du jure? I would be glad to respect it if there was. As it is, laws do allow for things they didn’t explicitly prohibit, and especially good-faith things like welcoming people to try the free app again, which they themselves downloaded and asked to be exucated about, since it’s improved, and showing them how and why to use the improvements.

Yeah, that's fair enough, and it is annoying that there is rarely a specific time set in regulation (or even case law which is broadly applicable). Most regulatory bodies will tend to say things like "as short as required/possible" for retention, which is clearly open to interpretation [0].

I would personally see 10 years as "a long time" in this kind of context (although that may be contextual depending on what your product does, obviously). If you can honestly claim/show good faith, that is usually acknowledged, but my point was rather how it would be seen out of the blue from an organisation that has been silent for 10 years (my personal first thought would be "why the hell have they still got my information?", but I am well aware that I'm not the average).

Genuinely, I don't mean to imply bad faith on your part, only to suggest the reactions it may receive, and how careful you should be with your messaging.

[0]: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#295

Post by doctorpangloss »

tzs wrote: post #97
fmx wrote: post #68

GMail disagrees with you, because GMail users disagree with you. They are clicking "report spam" on your emails. Whether or not you think what you're sending is spam, the recipients think it is, and that's what matters. (Based on the other comments in this thread it's not hard to see why they might think so.)

Users definitely click "report spam" in large numbers on things that are not spam. At work we've long had problems of getting reported for spam when the only things we send are: • A receipt when a person comes to our site and purchases something. • Their license key if what they purchased requires a license key. • Replies if they send email to customer support. • If they have purchased an automatically renewing subsc…

if you are a big Google adwords customer you ask them to let you spam users

that is the idea of the Gmail business. it's not complicated.

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#296

Post by AlexandrB »

EGreg wrote: post #261
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re retrospectively assuming consent? Gross.

No, the consent was given, recorded, and never acted upon. It had no expiration date. Many of those people are still using the app today.

Most consent doesn't work like this in people's minds (never mind what you "recorded"). I'd be furious and immediately flag as spam and review the app 1 star (if possible) for good measure.

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#297

Post by projektfu »

avaer wrote: post #55

This post rubs me the wrong way. Don't get me wrong, I'm a FA customer. But this makes it seem like FA feels entitled to people's attention. Google is getting in the way of that, so they are complaining about the system. Yes, unscrupulous opportunists + Google + AI (in that order) have rotted the email system into a byzantine husk of its former useful self, especially for promotion, but I don't understand why FA is m…

Something like, "We have only good intentions! It's not like we're selling penis pills!"

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#298

Post by TeMPOraL »

echelon wrote: post #83
em-bee wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so the only way to grow a business is to sell to people who tolerate spam and avoid those who don't?

They complain a lot less. This is why B2B is easier than B2C. A consumer will pay $10/mo and ask for the moon. Threaten to leave. Get angry at an email. A business will drop $10k no questions asked and your product can be garbage. As long as it solves or attempts to solve a pain point. Emails won't be seen as spam. Except by ICs/eng, perhaps.

> A consumer will pay $10/mo and

> ask for the moon. Threaten to leave.

That's normal business thing. What significantly helps reducing this, though, is the business is not promising the stars and engaging in all kinds of dark patterns with deals, cancellation friction, etc.

> Get angry at an email.

Particularly e-mail they did not ask for, and is not directly related to the thing they're paying $10/mo for.

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#299

Post by ozgurds »

This mainly depends on what is the general lifecycle of those emails and how does it interacted with users. If you are sure that you never spamed any users before , then we should think about how the google spam labeling works. For example if you send a bulk email for a mailbox of many emails and those emails were labeled as spam then it may cause this situation maybe. Is there a way to get life cycle of your email box from google maybe ?

Re: We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

#300

Post by SunshineTheCat »

itopaloglu83 wrote: post #44
Brybry wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they have an easy-to-unsubscribe link in the marketing spam (cannot include logging into the user's account)? I have a generic name gmail account and people with my name frequently accidentally use my email address when signing up for stuff. When I get unsolicited mail which doesn't include a simple unsubscribe link then I just report as spam instead.

I think most of them are spamming you and you’re being nice to attribute to mistakes. Also, a lot of companies nowadays keep adding weird email topics that you need to constantly unsubscribe from. If I signed up and turned off all subscriptions, then anything they send is marked as spam immediately. The lack of cost in sending email makes it easy for them to keep abusing all the time.

Another one I've been seeing more often is a missing unsub link and instead a "Manage Email Preferences" link.

Which of course you click and then have to go through a number of hoops to log in, confirm Email address, authenticate, etc.

At this point, I just mark those as spam as well.

Post reply on HN