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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#391

Post by Chlorus »

cookiecaper wrote: post #374
jrockway wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A biz that can't deliver to gmail is a terrible smell though. If anything, it means that teams are probably too independent and that there is no central approval process for things like sending emails. For example, a lot of companies use products like Greenhouse. I am sure this will send email from your domain on your behalf. If you don't know what you have to talk to the DNS administrators to add a bunch of TXT re…

> They blamed me and said that they weren't interested in a programmer that couldn't set up a mail server. Tangent, but this kind of stuff is super annoying and probably happens far more often than anyone wants to admit. A few friends and I have been commiserating re the incompetence of potential employers who've rejected us because of their own misconfigured environments or fundamental misunderstandings of the syste…

> the traceback showed he had a broken half-Py2/half-Py3 install.

Hey, at least they're _trying_ to migrate to 3 :P

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#392

Post by mullingitover »

Gmail can be pretty aggressive with spam filtering, but I'm very happy with the bias toward flagging things as spam. Spam was such an infuriating problem, and lots of marketers would happily push the line if they didn't live in terror of being blacklisted by Google. If only Google could the legacy telephone networks like they run Gmail.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#393

Post by drngdds »

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…

>Gmail’s spam filtering is just a pretext for passing all email through a machine learning system

It can't be just that. Spam filtering makes email in general much more usable, and Google of course wants Gmail to be an attractive product.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#394

Post by acomjean »

Xamayon wrote: post #329
jandrese wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just small fries getting hit by this. Google regularly refuses to deliver mail from backerkit.com to my account, by far the most popular Kickstarter fulfillment support service. I frequently have to contact Kickstarters and ask them to manually send me mail because Google is refusing to accept it, which is annoying and wastes their time. I wish Google had a way you could tell it "messages from these people/d…

Google Apps (or whatever it's called now after the last dozen name and service changes since "Postini") does offer a whitelist function, but as far as I can tell it's there only to placate users. Whitelisting domains or individual email addresses globally, or per user seems to have no bearing at all on whether they will show up in your inbox... Postini used to work flawlessly, it's hard to imagine how they could have…

It’s AI above all else. It seems instead of a rule that says all emails from these people are ok, they’re too reliant on ai filtering based on the content. They’re probably trying to prevent spoofing.

I use gmail and they know who is sending. I got an email today with a gmail flag saying “this user sent from a different email address previously”

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#396

Post by sbov »

mullingitover wrote: post #392

Gmail can be pretty aggressive with spam filtering, but I'm very happy with the bias toward flagging things as spam. Spam was such an infuriating problem, and lots of marketers would happily push the line if they didn't live in terror of being blacklisted by Google. If only Google could the legacy telephone networks like they run Gmail.

Flagging as spam is different. The OP is talking about rejecting it before it even gets to your inbox.

If gmail is improperly flagging a message I get as spam, I can create a filter to never send it to spam. If they're rejecting it like the OP talks about, if I want to stay with gmail I have no way to get that email.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#397

Post by tlogan »

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…

And all parents with kids in SF public schools should note that all emails from noreply@sfusd.edu (bulletins, etc.) are marked as spam.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#398

Post by rurounijones »

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…

So apart from the hang-wringing going on here. What can the original poster do?

They have literally shown what they have tried to do and it is not enough.

If this poor guy is a "false positive" then what is his path to resolution? It looks like he doesn't have one and saying "Yeah, that sucks" or "Because you made it on hacker news we will investigate" isn't helping all the other "small fry" out there.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#399

Post by B-Con »

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…

You're over-thinking it. GMail's market pretense is large. The number of edge cases like this in the entire world combined is a rounding error to them. It would likely be easier to fix problems to minimize bug reports and keep community good standing than increase GMail's user base by 0.001%.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#400

Post by kreetx »

russh wrote: post #381
tankenmate wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally I wouldn't +1 a message because it doesn't really seem to add much to the message. But in this case I will (even though it might earn me ire from some). If I could highlight the parent in bold I would. I've run mail servers since the mid 90's and the experience above exactly mirrors my experience. And my takeaway is the same, GMail just doesn't seem to care. I understand that GMail can't give away too much i…

Add me to the "I've run mail servers since the mid 90's and the experience above exactly mirrors my experience." list.

I think all of you should start some kind of a movement so that this could be heared better at GMail's end.
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