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Gmail having issues

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Re: Gmail having issues

#401

Post by JackMcMack »

gpmcadam wrote: post #353

People will suggest running your own mail server, and if you have the time and energy then definitely do that. But the next best thing you can do is simply just use your own domain. That way, you can at least decide to migrate your email elsewhere. Don't use the free domains you get from things like gmail or other providers, because then you have to _change_ your email address, and not just your MX records.

I'm trying (mailcow was easy to set up), but it seems all self-hosted solutions do not support snoozing mails. To me this is a must have feature.

Re: Gmail having issues

#402

Post by lqet »

windexh8er wrote: post #195

Just got this from the ProtonMail team: > Dear ProtonMail user, Starting at around 4:30PM New York (10:30PM Zurich), Gmail suffered a global outage. A catastrophic failure at Gmail is causing emails sent to Gmail to permanently fail and bounce back. The error message from Gmail is the following: 550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. This is a global issue, and it impacts all email provid…

> Because Gmail is sending a permanent failure, our mail servers will not automatically retry sending these messages (this is standard practice at all email services for handling permanent failures).

I fear that this will lead to many lost mails. In my experience, users are often confused by the technical "Mail delivery failed" mails and tend to ignore them or write them off as spam.

Re: Gmail having issues

#403

Post by anuraj »

COVID seems to have possessed Google - Services are down, Android Apps that used to take 24 hours for approval are now taking ages - and as usual no support forthcoming. Is Google unravelling?

Re: Gmail having issues

#404

Post by megous »

jrockway wrote: post #197
megous wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought SMTP was specifically designed for this (with support for multiple MX entries, queuing at the sender MTA side, etc.) and there's an easy hard boundary at the user mailbox level you can use to partition your system. It should not be a problem that gmail is "down". Unless this would be happening for more than a few days, noone would lose e-mail. It's a problem that it's not returning a temporary error code, b…

It is pretty clear that accepting a TCP connection and reading the bytes of the email from the sender is not the problem. Google is bouncing messages with an error like "that user doesn't exist". This would lead one to believe that some instances are having trouble looking up users, and that doesn't scale super easily. If the product guarantees that it will reject invalid email addresses (which is nice of them, not r…

> This basically means that you have on the order of milliseconds to accept or reject the email, so merely starting up a another replica of your SMTP daemon isn't going to mitigate this issue. The chokepoint is querying the list of users to see if you should bounce or accept the email.

You don't have milliseconds. You can take quite some time to handle the client. 10s of seconds for sure. For example default timeout for postfix smtp client when waiting for HELO is 5minutes.

Re: Gmail having issues

#405

Post by [deleted] »

martin_a wrote: post #383
gpmcadam wrote: post #353

People will suggest running your own mail server, and if you have the time and energy then definitely do that. But the next best thing you can do is simply just use your own domain. That way, you can at least decide to migrate your email elsewhere. Don't use the free domains you get from things like gmail or other providers, because then you have to _change_ your email address, and not just your MX records.

10 GB space, 1 tld domain of your choice, 99,9% uptime for 1.85€/month with a setup fee of 10€. Hetzner will take care of everything else for you as it's managed webhosting. https://www.hetzner.com/de/webhosting Just because you can (theoretically) run your own infrastructure does not mean you should. Trust the professionals. You don't do your own surgeries, do you? (not affiliated to Hetzner, just was the first offe…

[deleted]

Re: Gmail having issues

#406

Post by gpmcadam »

oakfr wrote: post #379
fwn wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Services are better in my opinion when you pay for them and you’re not the product. Services also tend to be better if lock-in effects on customers are low. ... and using your own domain for email does reduce lock-in significantly. unrelated: the link in your profile does not seem to work.

Does gmail have such a big lock-in effect on users since it allows them to use the gmail interface with their own email? (i.e. you can split the service and the UI)

I was lucky enough to get in at the ground for the Apps for Business (or whatever name it has now) service when it was free, and I was able to use my own domain for that.

As such, migrating these email addresses was easy enough.

My older @gmail and @googlemail ones though, not so easy. I've been moving each account I have used with these addresses one-by-one, but you never catch them all and even when you do, some services simply will not let you change your email address.

I recall being so excited when Gmail first launched and was one of the first people to get a Beta invite. I regret ever signing up for them now, given the headache it has been to get off it.

Re: Gmail having issues

#407

Post by LeonM »

cutler wrote: post #369
gpmcadam wrote: post #353

People will suggest running your own mail server, and if you have the time and energy then definitely do that. But the next best thing you can do is simply just use your own domain. That way, you can at least decide to migrate your email elsewhere. Don't use the free domains you get from things like gmail or other providers, because then you have to _change_ your email address, and not just your MX records.

The main problem with self-hosting is indiscriminate blacklisting by Google and Microsoft. You only need to be on the same network as some spam artist to end up shunned. The tech giants are our new overlords.

No, it is not. It really grinds my gears if people are spreading misinformation about 'being on the same network as a spammer', 'indiscriminate blacklists' and corporate overlords for being the reason on why their email is not being delivered.

Spam filters have been content driven for a long time now. IP addresses and domain names are ephemeral and so are 'blacklists'. With the amount of spam being send, we would have blacklisted the entire internet by now.

If a spam filter gives false positives, it hurts the receiver just as much as the sender.

The real problem with self-hosting is that the majority of self-hosted e-mail servers are terribly configured. Getting the SMTP server running is one thing, but getting DKIM, DMARC, SPF, TLS and MTA-STS running properly is often overlooked. What was the last time you checked the validity of the TLS certificate of your SMTP server?

Get your server and domain setup properly. Sign your email with DKIM, setup an SPF and DMARC policy and perform DMARC monitoring to spot problems. Setup TLS and an MTA-STS policy service for your incoming email. Throw in SMTP-TLS-reporting for good measure. E-mail servers are not set-and-forget if you want to do it right. And this is not the fault of large corps, it's the spammers who got us in this situation.

It's really easy to blame large services or blaming your email deliverability problems on being on the same IP block as a spammer, but really it's almost always a misconfiguration on your side.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Mailhardener (https://www.mailhardener.com), we do e-mail hardening and solve deliverability issues.

Re: Gmail having issues

#408

Post by cmbailey »

One @gmail.com account shows no email received from 2:17pm ET Dec 15 to 6:05am ET Dec 16. I normally receive ~4 emails per hour, throughout the day and night. After I realized there might be a fault, I sent myself test messages around 6pm ET on Dec 15 and Gmail bounced them with the error:

> 550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try double-checking the recipient's email address for typos or unnecessary spaces. Learn more at https://support.google.com/mail/?p=NoSuchUser x62si100799otb.139 - gsmtp

Re: Gmail having issues

#409

Post by dxdm »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #224
john_moscow wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There used to be times when people didn't care for technicalities like this because the focus was on the person's contribution to the discussion. Now that everyone's replaceable, the popular culture desperately tries to shift focus into arguing about pronouns and terms. Watch out, this is a road to nowhere. Forcing others to use the right pronoun won't build up your retirement fund, but will distract you from worryin…

This is a surprisingly profound and insightful comment so deep in the subthread of, more or less, a shitpost. Thank you, sir, for elevating our collective level of discourse.

> you are being manipulated to not think

This is where it crosses from insightful into conspiracy theory territory for me. People seem perfectly capable of groupthink-deluding themselves. Why cheapen your argument by postulating some master manipulator when it's not necessary for the deeper point you're making?

It will only lead to people focussing the discussion to challenge this particular aspect, or them disregarding all you've said, instead of engaging with the actual meat of the argument.

Re: Gmail having issues

#410

Post by 8fingerlouie »

627467 wrote: post #400
himinlomax wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they normally successfully deliver to gmail, it's safe to assume a large number of people who do receive their emails want to receive them.

This is very charitable. How many people live with the nuisance of mailing (they un- or knowingly subscribed to) VS those who actually go through the trouble of unsubscribing/mark as spam in hope to rid of the from inbox?

I normally just delete mailing list mails. I don't even read them.

This year i decided to do "something" about it, so every mailing list mail received in my inbox that i don't want/care for gets an unsubscribe. It has already reduced my daily mails by a somewhat large amount. It's hard to say exactly how much, but i estimate around 10 emails less every day.

Most of the unsubscribed lists are from companies where i've purchased something andthe seller took the liberty of subscribing me to their mailing list. Those are mostly pre-GDPR that i've just never gotten around to dealing with.

The execption is of course obvious spam mails, to which unbsubscribing will probably do more harm than good.

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