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Why does Gmail hate my domain?

bitbin.de

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Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#41

Post by voltagex_ »

MichaelCrawford wrote: post #12
runin2k1 wrote: post #6

That's all a bit presumptive and inflammatory for what amounts to pure speculation on the part of the author. Google stands to lose a lot more from a potential PR disaster for burning former customers who move away from hosting than they do from trying to convert a tiny portion of users to a free mail hosting service.

My own cousin blackholed my gmail because gmail sends so mych spam. I had to ask him to configure an exception just for me. If you dont want to receive spam use lafn.org. I dont know how one gets an account there but I expect it doesnt cost anything. If you want a full VPS use http://prgmr.com/ - "we dont assume you are stupid.". Its a hosting service operated by neckbeards for the benefit of their fellow neckbeards.…

I would like to use prgmr.com because I appreciate the no-nonsense way they seem to do business but (especially with the now-worthless Australian Dollar) they're so much more expensive than DigitalOcean.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#42

Post by codezero »

I've had the same problem myself.

My best guesses as to why my domain has been dinged:

1) It's on a VPS, that IP may be flagged already

2) I often use a VPN, and sometimes send emails out through my server using it. This probably raises the red flags.

3) It's a non-standard TLD, .co

4) I don't use any Google services with that email address/domain (I assume doing so adds some level of measurable trust)

5) I'm not in the address book of a lot of gmail users, because this is my private server, that I use only for job seeking, and personal communication.

This has really done damage in the past. I've applied for jobs, and heard back weeks after they hired someone, letting me know, woops, I ended up in their spam folder.

Trying to meet with a friend? I can't email them, I need to use Facebook or Gmail... welp.

This is super annoying. I kind of understand why it happens, but it's just a little sad that building your own fort, so to speak, is so impossible.

Things I tried to do to mitigate this:

1) Made my web domain https only (why not?)

2) set up DKIM and SPF (didn't seem to have any effect)

3) proper SMTP authentication, secure port only

4) Reached out to Google via the typical forms they offer, and heard nothing, obviously.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#43

Post by arihant »

raintrees wrote: post #39

Anecdotal information: I run my own mail server and manage a number of small business clients who have mail servers. Email trust is getting more and more tedious. Recently I was resolving a domain registrar issue with Network Solutions. They required forms filled out and signed, a copy of a utility bill from my client, a copy of my ID... I bundled up everything and emailed them the scans. I contacted them 5 business…

An spf record only helps preventing emails sent from phishing servers. It is inherently meaningless to spam filters if the trust with the domain owner itself is misplaced.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#44

Post by seiji »

ceejayoz wrote: post #3

If the domain is bitbin.de and the mail server is hosted on the same server, it's probably Hetzner being scorched-earth for deliverability, just like any other major hosting provider will be. Email from AWS, Rackspace, Heroku etc. get a drastically higher starting spam score because people fire up servers there to spam. Running the email through something like Amazon SES or Mandrill would probably be helpful. Both ha…

Amazon SES or Mandrill would probably be helpful. Both have generous free tiers.

But you are still sending all your outgoing email through an external 3rd party. Not ideal. Also, these days every email is a top-reply orgy of all correspondence ever sent, so your SMTP relay essentially gets a copy of your entire conversational inbox (via "QUOTE ALL THE THINGS" reply garbage) as well as your outbox.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#45

Post by pekk »

smhenderson wrote: post #26
arihant wrote: post #18

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." -- Spock. I'd rather have a few geeky people like me not have the fun of self hosting an e-mail server, than waste millions of man hours round the world because of people dealing with spam. If you must hack, however, use something like Mailgun. It is more hacky in a way that you can program your incoming mail the way you want, not just install a mail server with…

Yeah, but we are spending millions of man hours dealing with spam so I don't see how Google messing with this guy is helping (assuming his speculation is correct).

Google puts resources into reducing spam and does reduce spam, so it would be even worse than it is if Google didn't do anything. The author's troubles may be side effects of some of the things Google does at scale to filter out spam.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#46

Post by hueving »

pekk wrote: post #29
techsupporter wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That...doesn't make any sense. The author doesn't appear to be spamming or doing any kind of mailing list traffic. He is an individual communicating with other individuals. That's kind of the whole point of this Internet thing we have going here. Besides, he's only being singled out by Google; no other providers seem to have a problem with his domain and Google's own headers show that everything is fine.

It's a coherent opinion which makes sense, even if we don't agree with it. The claim isn't that the author is spamming, the claim is that the availability of effective spam filtering ("needs of the many") trades off against and ultimately outweighs the author's reasons for running his own small web server for his personal email ("needs of the few").

No, the opinion is not even logically valid because there is nothing that shows Google's punishment of his server is required to reduce spam.

It's like eliminating poverty by killing all poor people. Yes, it would work, but the side effects are worse than the outcome.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#47

Post by spinlock »

lm741 wrote: post #23

I hit a similar problems when sending automated internal emails to a Google Groups address at my company. The problem was fixed by adding the following footer: "To unsubscribe, email ."

Uh oh. I created an "unsubscribe" filter a while ago to get rid of spam. It's been great for keeping my inbox clean but I just don't see stuff with an unsubscribe line anymore.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#48

Post by Animats »

Notice the comment on the story:

"I had the exact same problems in the past. For me it helped just to register and immediately cancel a trial of Google Apps for the domain. It’s annoying to have this as a necessary step but at least it was like that done in just a few minutes (after I tried to find a contact email of Google for a much longer time). I tried it because I had other domains on the same server which didn’t had this issue. All domains which weren’t filtered had a Google Apps account in the past. So I thought it’s worth a try, and yeah it was solved."

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#49

Post by pekk »

hueving wrote: post #46
pekk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a coherent opinion which makes sense, even if we don't agree with it. The claim isn't that the author is spamming, the claim is that the availability of effective spam filtering ("needs of the many") trades off against and ultimately outweighs the author's reasons for running his own small web server for his personal email ("needs of the few").

No, the opinion is not even logically valid because there is nothing that shows Google's punishment of his server is required to reduce spam. It's like eliminating poverty by killing all poor people. Yes, it would work, but the side effects are worse than the outcome.

Logical validity only means that the argument works given its premises, not that the premises are correct.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#50

Post by _cbdev »

baudehlo wrote: post #36
_cbdev wrote: post #32

I've had mail sent via my own server rejected by gmail because of a missing Message-ID header. The 550 reject message was the standard "Unsolicited Mail detected" text, the same mail was accepted without causing any fuzz once the Message-ID was added.

Why on earth wouldn't your mail server add that for you?

Because I'm writing my own ;)

https://github.com/cmail-mta/cmail if you're interested.

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