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

Google Is Eating Our Mail

tablix.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 720 posts

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#41

Post by FakeComments »

cptskippy wrote: post #29
dralley wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't even have to be doing it deliberately; as you say, the lack of incentives to fix such issues will cause a gradual evolution in that direction.

I feel like as they leave more and more up to the algorithms, we suffer. I've been having this ever increasing in frequency issue where Gmail Search just doesn't working. Not that it doesn't return search results but rather that it returns what I know to be incorrect results. I have an email with some account information that I access a couple times a year at most but will consistently need at least once a year. Just…

I’ve made a career out of going “a bad business plan + computers is still a bad business plan”.

It’s not just Google.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#42

Post by jopsen »

laurentl wrote: post #10
pettycashstash2 wrote: post #2

Add another perspective to this. Once I updated my phone, and google would not accept new google Authenticator codes after set up. Locked out of 15 years of email.

I had a fright last time I changed phones. After restoring my backup onto the new phone, I was about to wipe the old one; I did a final pass through my apps just in case... and saw that Google Authenticator configuration did not carry over to the new phone (which makes sens from a security perspective but is a PITA to manage). I had to re-enroll my device with all the services on which I use MFA. After this episode I…

Print the QR codes, put them inside a plastic bottle and bury them 6 feet down in your parents backyard under the cover of darkness.

-- the more elaborate, the more cool you feel doing it :)

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#43

Post by greenyoda »

reaperducer wrote: post #25
upofadown wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indifference that causes a business problem turns into not-indifference. Indifference that does not cause a business problem remains indifference. No one ever calls a meeting. There is a lot of evil done in the world that comes from this simple and straightforward principle. You don't have to have an evil plan to end up doing evil. Personally I see this as just more Google incompetence. Gmail has just become bad. If…

Personally I see this as just more Google incompetence. Gmail has just become bad. If you want to get all your mail you have to use something else. It's like we're going back to the days when each e-mail service only trusted messages from its own users, and if you wanted messages to go to another network, you had to use an e-mail gateway. Can I get my ...!killer!jolnet bang path back?

I don't think this is a general problem with e-mail services. If you use an e-mail provider that's a paid service rather than a pipeline into an ad company, you actually get good service and a customer support team that has an incentive to fix your problems. (I've been very happy with Fastmail for many years.)

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#44

Post by AJ007 »

reaperducer wrote: post #23

The last time a company screwed with e-mail at scale was Earthlink. Remember for a couple of years, every time you'd send a message to someone at Earthlink, you'd get an automated rely demanding that you verify yourself before the message would go through? Now I can't remember the last time I saw an @earthlink.* e-mail address. Google has apparently learned from that and put the "error" in the 550 messages, where the…

If enough expected messages don’t show up, users are going to start thinking gmail is broken. The problem for Google is that they are not the only trusted brand consumers interact with. I’ve seen a lot of stuff start ending up in spam that shouldn’t be there. If enough password resets, customer service responses, and order confirmations aren’t delivered, it looks like Google has a problem. If it doesn’t even make it to the spam box it makes Google look really bad.

Google has definitely been changing things, everyone presumes it’s some rogue ML system. My company had solid Gmail delivery for almost 10 years, and at a fairly large volume. Now we can’t get it delivered any more. Very close to showing users a message not to use Gmail.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#46

Post by Funes- »

rc_mob wrote: post #30
sneak wrote: post #11

I have run a private mailserver for over 20 years, and I have the same problem. There's no telling what Google will let through. I have a second account at a medium-sized email provider, basically paying them for access to the email deliverability cartel.

We need a new message protocol

So Google--or any other big corporation--can take it over as well? I don't think coming up with yet another open protocol is the solution.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#48

Post by petercooper »

Lest anyone think Gmail is less susceptible to problems because of the sheer volume of mail they handle (so any problem gets a lot of 'eyes' on it), they had an amusing and long-standing bug that meant any email containing a link to any domain name starting with "0x" automatically went to spam.

You could literally have two long standing, legitimately used accounts send an email to each other containing a link to a URL like http://0xANYTHINGHERE.com/ and it would be insta-spammed. I suspect it was a hard coded rule to avoid people using "long IP" URLs to circumvent other filters.. except there are lots of legitimate 0x domains that aren't long IPs.

It was fixed sometime in the past year but I got a lot of use out of it in talks I've given about email deliverability over the years.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#49

Post by awinder »

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 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 idea for the better part of a decade, at least.

Post reply on HN