Google Is Eating Our Mail • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#301

Post by ketralnis » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 5:20 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…

> 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)

Google initially federated with XMPP, until you had critical mass and shut out the rest of the Jabber/XMPP ecosystem.

Of course now you seem intent on killing your _own_ messaging product so it's hard to divine any self-consistent intent here.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#302

Post by luckylion » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 5:20 PM UTC

mattkrause wrote: post #130

sergiosgc wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While’s gmail’s filtering is obviously neither your responsibility nor under your control, you also can’t really fault people for using one of the most popular email services on the planet. Why not? Popularity does not imply quality. If it is a poor service, you can (and should) fault people for using it.

People's choice of email provider has very little bearing on their ability to do (e.g.) biology or economics research. Plus, most career centers actively advise students (i.e., many applicants) to sent up a professional-sounding gmail (or similar account) accounts. In short, it makes no sense. More broadly, grad school admissions--and, even moreso, faculty hiring--is already full of unwritten rules, backdoors, and ta…

> It emphatically does not need more of those, especially petty ones related to email.

What's the alternative? Making sure that the recipient gets the message by sending a courier to his home address?

I remember when a buddy of mine, back in the pre-email days, applied for a job at a company. About a week later, he received a letter, asking him to call them. Turns out, he forgot to put his contact info into the application, but they were interested enough to look up his name in the phone book (they also have/had street addresses were I live) and write him a letter, hoping it would reach the right person. "Always put your contact into into an application" isn't a petty rule, and neither is "use an email-provider that doesn't randomly reject messages" in my book.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#303

Post by Tempest1981 » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

southerndrift wrote: post #283

DuskStar wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

Great idea. Since many of us rarely check Spam.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#304

Post by 0x262d » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #238

maxaf wrote: post #9

> I'm sure there is no malicious intent behind this How can anyone be sure of this? This is only one of Google’s practices that seems to follow a pervasive pattern of eroding open internet standards while presenting Google’s own proprietary implementation as somehow superior. Eventually, the open standard loses all meaning because the most popular implementation does not actually adhere to it. Meanwhile, Google reaps…

Email in Gmail isn't used for ad targeting, so this line of thinking doesn't follow well.

imagine thinking this

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#305

Post by 0x262d » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 5:24 PM UTC

blamestross wrote: post #54

maxaf wrote: post #9

> I'm sure there is no malicious intent behind this How can anyone be sure of this? This is only one of Google’s practices that seems to follow a pervasive pattern of eroding open internet standards while presenting Google’s own proprietary implementation as somehow superior. Eventually, the open standard loses all meaning because the most popular implementation does not actually adhere to it. Meanwhile, Google reaps…

Organizations are often best modeled by an optimizing AI system. Often there is no intent behind behavior, simple that behaviors that result in propagation of the meme are preferred by the system. Never ascribe to intent what emergent behavior and individual's apathy can explain.

this is basically equivalent to pretending that as long as no one says "this is my evil plan" before doing something, it's not evil. which even google doesn't bother to try to do anymore.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#306

Post by phinnaeus » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 5:24 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #261

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…

> 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, hea…

I agree completely with everything you said.

It's too bad that Google has no incentive to allow a premium/ad-free experience as that implies having ads is a negative thing, which basically undermines their entire business model.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#307

Post by noncoml » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 5:26 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…

You are a PM, you may “theoretically” care when you see something in HN or some other social media, but the number of people having problems with your product are magnitudes larger than that. Everything is completely filtered out by customer support, even for companies that have good customer support unlike Google, and never reaches your ears.

I am not taking a stab at you personally. I truly believe that you care when you read the story here. But if you really cared enough there would be no story to be reported here.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#308

Post by Zak » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 5:26 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…

> we certainly care a lot about fixing issues like this when we hear about them.

And there's the problem. The only effective way for OP to contact someone who likely has the ability to fix it was to write an article, post it on HN, get upvotes, and hope you happen upon it.

That's not a viable solution for everyone who runs a mail server Gmail falsely identifies as a source of spam. You don't have a good way to hear about issues like this.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#309

Post by 0x262d » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 5:27 PM UTC

maxaf wrote: post #120

blamestross wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Organizations are often best modeled by an optimizing AI system. Often there is no intent behind behavior, simple that behaviors that result in propagation of the meme are preferred by the system. Never ascribe to intent what emergent behavior and individual's apathy can explain.

You’re saying that the system’s apparent behavior is by design, but wasn’t that design put forth by employees of the company in question? These aren’t natural phenomena we’re discussing. When a puma tears apart a rabbit, it does so without any influence from the agency of man. Gmail’s “spam filtering” is no such thing: it was deliberately designed to work this way by paid professionals who knew what they were doing.

the next step of analysis is that they behave this way to capture more growth and market share, which they must do under capitalism or lose out to any more ruthless company.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#310

Post by tssva » Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 5:27 PM UTC

Regarding the issue with mailing lists for open source projects this isn't just an issue regarding Gmail. DKIM and DMARC cause no end of problems for mailing lists and it effects mail delivery to all major providers.

Mailman, which most open source projects use for mailing lists, have developed work arounds to address some of the issues. Unfortunately my experience is that many projects run older versions that don't have these work arounds or if running newer versions they have not been enabled. Most likely because no one has revisited the configuration since initial deployment on an older version. After all they didn't start the project to spend their time being mailing list admins.