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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#361

Post by jasode »

lucb1e wrote: post #134
jasode wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Can confirm, my server is also not accepted by google for years now when mailing someone with a business account. Hey, I remember you were one of the replies[1] in my previous thread that said I was exaggerating the "send emails" issue. Maybe your difficulty with Gmail's mystery filtering algorithm will warn others that depending on personal email servers for reliable outgoing email is a non-trivial endeavor. Perhap…

Good memory! A few things: - My comment in this thread was mainly about gmail for businesses, hence the contrast between "I'm not going to fix their problems and just tell the recipient their setup is broken" and the previous "it's doable". Other mail providers are usually no problem at all, and personal Google accounts are also better. - For email to personal gmail accounts it seemed to be enough to send a few mails…

>I hope not. For what it's worth, I'm still at it and have no plans to stop hosting my own mail!

You misunderstand the point I'm trying to emphasize. I'm not trying to dissuade you from running your own email. There are real benefits to controlling your own email server and it's great you've configured something that works for you.

I'm saying I disagree with how some proponents communicate the drawbacks. They discount (or are blissfully unaware of) the real difficulties of running a personal email server for critical outgoing emails.

In the previous thread and this one, there are several of us with decades of email admin experience saying it is tricky to debug "sender reputation" while the opposing side insists Gmail/MSOutlook spamholes are easy to fix and not a big deal. Therefore, one of the sides misunderstands the realities. With these conflicting accounts, readers contemplating running their own email server will have to decide who is more accurately reporting the state of the email ecosystem for personal servers.

The author (Tomaž Šolc) of the article discussed in this thread had ~15 years experience administering his own email servers and tried to do all the "correct" things as an upstanding citizen of the email ecosystem and yet his emails still suddenly got rejected by Gmail. Readers will have to conclude if he got bit by forces out of his control -- or -- he's incompetent and doesn't know what he's doing. (From my point of view, the author wasn't incompetent and his frustrations with Gmail's filter is a common reality. Maybe this time, he can update DMARC to fix Gmail rejections... for now. But eventually, a new Google AI spam algorithm will mysteriously reject his server's emails again.)

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#362

Post by StreamBright »

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…

> Google has no incentive to fix these kinds of problems.

You mean not to try to actively sabotage the internet that we once knew?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#363

Post by [deleted] »

jolmg wrote: post #219
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.

Fastmail allows for email aliases. These aren't those addresses with a `+` on them, but rather completely different addresses. You can put the family address and generic address in your own or your wife's account and setup a filter so that email to those addresses go to separate folders automatically. That saves you $60/year. If your children don't need privacy from one another (I've no clue how old they are or how w…

[deleted]

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#365

Post by mattkrause »

sergiosgc wrote: post #139
mattkrause wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You seem too focused on the exact scenario of applying to graduate schools, when the OP's comment wasn't circumscribed to that, and my comment certainly was much more generic than that. People's choice of poor quality service provider X impacts their ability to do their tasks when the service is poor. X can be email, insurance, banking, anything you externalize in your life. The fact that a service is popular is a po…

I replied to a comment that started with "Rule #1 if you're applying for jobs or graduate school"

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#366

Post by john37386 »

I'm in the same situation as many people here. Started as a small personal email projects many years ago just to learn. I really enjoyed it, reading all the specs and making it always better year after year. Dmarc felt like a total achievement.

I started to host emails to many friends, small businesses and even a SaaS I developed. The subscription needs an email validation and I'm aware that the activation email ends up in the Spam folder for the new customers using Google emails. This activation email has everything from dkim, spf, dmarc, to unsubscribe link, full physical address of the business, etc and still I can't hit a good enough score.

I was thinking to start using Google service to send the activation link and hosting my personal domains, but seeing that I am not alone, I will continue to improve my little email projects.

Thanks all for cheering me up on this. I'm sure we can come up with a solution and I would be happy to help. When do we start?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#367

Post by ljm »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #322
dingus wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 delive…

I've had gmail send the following to the spam folder: - Legitimate class action notices related to Amazon purchases. - Email coming from addresses to which I had already sent email. (!) - Email from my landlord. - Email coming from Google itself. Based on the contents of my spam folder, which I have to check fairly often because of the extreme overaggressiveness, I would be vastly better off if nothing ever got filte…

Before I switched to fastmail, gmail would not believe me when I marked an email as not-spam. They would still get flagged. All I wanted was updates from one band.

That didn’t stop me from repeatedly getting junk from every other record label my email was sold to. It was an endless procession of shit I never subscribed to.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#368

Post by StreamBright »

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…

This is your personal opinion. And there is the experience of those people out there. I believe you that you personally stand for these but I seriously doubt your employer cares. There are many examples of the same issue, like that one with Firefox.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

It is kind of funny to me that other email vendors could implement SMTP and co properly and Gmail _more recently_ started to have issues. Just because of this I started to look for alternatives because I will not stand and watch how an ad-tech company destroys the open internet, even if this will be very inconvenient personally.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#369

Post by sixothree »

marktangotango wrote: post #195
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…

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?

Agreed. How exactly do external developers reach out to google?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#370

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

amenod wrote: post #317
joering2 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not sure why you are being downvoted, you have a point. There is no excuse for the way Google is operating now - poor customer support, the only recourse twits and HN posts. I think it also hurts Google themselves. There is a reason they have trouble competing with AWS. Why should developers trust Google that there will be a person on the other side helping them out when things go wrong? And they always do, at worst…

> they should stop with preferential treatment of those who shame them publicly

That's the only way companies care in the 21st century, 3 weeks on an email thread, one tweet and suddenly everyone cares.

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