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Google seems to have broken email forwarding

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Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#41

Post by wpietri »

rybosome wrote: post #28
jmount wrote: post #5

Obviously good email (deep in a conversation) being declared "spam" has been a problem with my business for some time also. I figure Google takes all email in a 2 step process (either intentional or accidental) 1: get a good fraction of the world on GMail 2: intermittently declare any non GMail mail spam ( greatly lowering the utility of non GMail). This isn't about any mass mailings or even mailing lists. This is ab…

This seems more like a bug than something intentional. What I find more interesting (and am somewhat saddened by) is that a bug such as this causes people to leap to the conclusion that it is part of a malicious, anti-competitive plot.

Sadly, it doesn't have to be malicious to be anti-competitive. Back in AT&T's monopoly days they were at their most destructive not when they were scheming, but when their size let them not give a fuck what they were doing to other people as long as it was good for them.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#42

Post by ibz »

jimrandomh wrote: post #24
jmount wrote: post #5

Obviously good email (deep in a conversation) being declared "spam" has been a problem with my business for some time also. I figure Google takes all email in a 2 step process (either intentional or accidental) 1: get a good fraction of the world on GMail 2: intermittently declare any non GMail mail spam ( greatly lowering the utility of non GMail). This isn't about any mass mailings or even mailing lists. This is ab…

For some reason, gmail classifies nearly all of the transactional email I get from Amazon (order acknowledgements, shipping notifications, etc) as spam, and no matter how many I catch and un-mark, it won't stop. Spam classification is a hard problem, but I don't think they've put the false-positive/false-negative tradeoff in the right place, and they really need some safety valves like offering to whitelist an addres…

I always mark Amazon mail as spam. Could it be that if a lot of people mark a certain kind of email as spam, Google just treats it as spam?

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#43

Post by blfr »

protomyth wrote: post #39
blfr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a general issue with delivering mail to Gmail users. This is not even a mailing list. He is using Gmail as a backend to his own mail setup. His employees want to receive mail sent to @dnalounge.com in their Gmail inboxes. It's a non-standard configuration and brittle. You can't really expect them to support it for free. Google offers a couple of supported ways to do it. Most prominently: pay for Google Ap…

"He is using Gmail as a backend to his own mail setup" No, he is using a normal forward for those who want to receive their mail at gmail. He is not using gmail as his backend. You should read the original article.

I did read the article and that's exactly what he's doing. He forwards everything to Gmail, and then allows users to send from Gmail via his SMTP server (or maybe doing some spoofing but it wouldn't look so clean). Essentially outsourcing hosting of inboxes (but just inboxes) to Gmail.

I run my own mail server, but most of my employees use Gmail. So I have forwarding set up: employee@dnalounge.com simply forwards to employee@gmail.com. When sending mail using their Gmail account, they set their From line to employee@dnalounge.com. (Google lets you do this if you jump through some hoops to verify that you can actually receive mail at that account.)

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#44

Post by hudell »

And to make it worst: Google don't run filters on messages that goes to the spam folders, so you can't even use that.

I always wanted to do the opposite: Run a filter on the spam folder to delete emails that I know for sure that really are spam, so I wouldn't need to delete them manually.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#45

Post by shiggerino »

Gmail is horrible in so many ways. Complete disregard for the MIME structure of the emails. All parts that aren't text/plain or text/html gets bumped to the bottom, even if they are clearly declared as inline. And then there's the infernal top posting they force on you. To get to one attachment I had to page through a wall of unsnipped irrelevant garbage, if they want to force an obnoxious posting style, at least put the attachments right below and together with the top-level message, not all the way at the bottom.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#46

Post by copsarebastards »

I've long supported a proof-of-work concept augmented with whitelisted keys for email spam filtering.

There are basically two cases here:

1. The sender is sending one email to one receiver. The sender computes the proof of work and sends it along with the message. This takes some time, but typically it can be done in the background. Waiting few seconds between sending and receiving an email is typically not an issue, and in fact many email clients wait for some time before sending anyway to allow "undo send" functionality. Rather that doing this computation on the mail server, it should be done on the sender's client, so that the server doesn't get overloaded with proof-of-work computations.

2. The sender is sending many emails to many receivers (a mailing list). In this case when the receiver signs up for the mailing list, the sender sends a request for a whitelist token to the receiver's mail server. IF the user accepts the request, the receiver's mail server returns the token and then the sender sends all further communication with the token instead of with a proof-of-work. This solves a few problems: a) Receivers opt in rather than opting out of receiving communications. The ubiquitous pre-checked "send me spam" checkbox loses its effectiveness. b) Receivers can revoke tokens at any time. c) Senders who are sending large amounts of legitimate mail don't have to compute a proof-of-work for every email they send.

Receivers simply drop email which doesn't come with either a proof-of-work or a whitelist token. This drives up the cost of sending large numbers of spam emails because each spam email requires a large amount of computation. And even in cases where a spammer has a large amount of computation at their disposal (botnets are a common case) it makes it easier for servers to distinguish between mailing lists and spam: a large number of identical emails could be either, but mailing list mailings should come with a whitelist token.

Doing things this way would mean we can drop these terrible DKIM and SPF systems that both fail to prevent spam and make it difficult to send legitimate mail.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#47

Post by throwawayaway »

jimrandomh wrote: post #24
jmount wrote: post #5

Obviously good email (deep in a conversation) being declared "spam" has been a problem with my business for some time also. I figure Google takes all email in a 2 step process (either intentional or accidental) 1: get a good fraction of the world on GMail 2: intermittently declare any non GMail mail spam ( greatly lowering the utility of non GMail). This isn't about any mass mailings or even mailing lists. This is ab…

For some reason, gmail classifies nearly all of the transactional email I get from Amazon (order acknowledgements, shipping notifications, etc) as spam, and no matter how many I catch and un-mark, it won't stop. Spam classification is a hard problem, but I don't think they've put the false-positive/false-negative tradeoff in the right place, and they really need some safety valves like offering to whitelist an addres…

well i've started marking ebay, linkedin and google+ stuff as spam. i'm sure somebody else did amazon the same favour...

so... sorry? :)

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#48

Post by specialp »

lucb1e wrote: post #7

Google has always had issues with legitimate e-mail the spambox, but then again, I have yet to see a spam filter with no false positives. Google just errors a lot more on the side of classifying email as spam compared to most email services (more false positives, but less spam in the inbox). What makes this even more annoying is that they hide the spam folder so that users don't even know that it exists anymore. I al…

The problem now is that GMail is so big, it becomes "well your emails are being filtered in GMail so you need to fix it". With smaller providers it would be that they were being too aggressive with email filtering. Fixing the problem is sometimes very hard with large providers as you really have nobody to contact for help or whitelisting. You can do all the best practices for sending emails (SPF, DKIM etc) but that will not help if you get filtered or blocked for some arbitrary and unknown reason.

So for this reason people give up and either send their emails through well known mail senders or switch their users to services like GMail. This is sad as perhaps the last communications medium with open standards is being forced proprietary due to the difficulty in dealing with the large email providers. My company switched to GMail for our email, and Mandrill for sending out our mailing list although we have competent sysadmins.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#49

Post by DanielBMarkham »

I was looking into using email for rich content delivery yesterday as part of this "Watch me program" thing I'm doing. How difficult could it be to send rich html to somebody on email?

Turns out, freaking difficult. For one of the simplest protocols in the world, email is now a byzantine disaster. Different clients render things differently, different providers block or don't block things -- and that's not even getting into trusted domains and spam issues, which you end up depending on third parties to assist.

Add into this mix Google's notorious black-box/impenetrability/lost-in-space-customer-support? I don't see an optimistic future for you.

I'd rather go back to hand-coding COM in C++ that become a network email engineer. That's got to be a brutal job. You're dependent on so many moving pieces and you control so very little.

Re: Google seems to have broken email forwarding

#50

Post by protomyth »

blfr wrote: post #43
protomyth wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"He is using Gmail as a backend to his own mail setup" No, he is using a normal forward for those who want to receive their mail at gmail. He is not using gmail as his backend. You should read the original article.

I did read the article and that's exactly what he's doing. He forwards everything to Gmail, and then allows users to send from Gmail via his SMTP server (or maybe doing some spoofing but it wouldn't look so clean). Essentially outsourcing hosting of inboxes (but just inboxes) to Gmail. I run my own mail server, but most of my employees use Gmail. So I have forwarding set up: employee@dnalounge.com simply forwards to…

And that is the description for a fairly normal "forward all my mail to my personal inbox" scenario. Its not rocket science and it is not using gmail as his backend. We do it with part-time faculty.
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