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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#411

Post by johnsea »

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…

Thank you for the reply. Wouldn't it, somehow, be possible for Google to provide a place where one can go when such problems occur? Maybe paid (in order to scale). As is one feels completely powerless and negative emotions will be caused.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#413

Post by syntheticnature »

judge2020 wrote: post #206
syntheticnature wrote: post #159

Google? Any large organization. I help a small non-profit run their site in my free time, and Google's actually been the nicest about our oldschool forwarders and Mailman lists. Despite being on no public blacklists, AT&T domains drop us at the border, with the only appeal process being via email, and I've never heard back. AOL and Yahoo? Flip a coin. Of course, email forwarding turns out to suck, but we're just goin…

FYI Google offers free GSuite basic for nonprofits: https://www.google.com/nonprofits/offerings/apps-for-nonprof...

Indeed, the free GSuite is the plan.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#414

Post by luckylion »

gtirloni wrote: post #350
ok_coo wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the part that's going to bite them when antitrust comes around. They are largely unaccountable and there's no real way to get a hold of a human being unless you shame them on social media and it gets enough traction.

If you're a paying customer, you definitely can get a human being to look at your problem. The difficulty in this case is the people operating SMTP servers are not paying customers, the free Gmail users are not paying customers and the GSuite paying customers don't think it's their problem (after all, the spam filters works quite well these days and lots of people are on Gmail, making the problem very small in the re…

> If you're a paying customer, you definitely can get a human being to look at your problem.

Doubt. We're paying ~$10k/month on ads. The Ads API is rate limited, but it's either broken or has arcane logic, so about every 4-6 weeks, the usual workload will trigger it and we're shut out for 12-24 hours. Can talk to ad support whenever I want, but all they are good for is optimizing campaigns and explaining the UI. No option to get to technical support, no option for ads support to escalate.

Of course, we might not be a large enough customer, but it certainly isn't about "paying".

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#415

Post by ModernMech »

cpeterso wrote: post #388
thaumasiotes wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your comment motivated me to check my Gmail spam folder and 10% (3 out of 30) were false positives, two of which were pretty important. :(

Me too. I found an invitation for an on-site job interview I would have 100% missed if they had not called me as well.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#416

Post by lossolo »

dingus wrote: post #299
prlambert wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 have similar experience and of course if you send exactly the same message but from gmail account, then it's not a spam for gmail anymore..

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#417

Post by gtirloni »

luckylion wrote: post #414
gtirloni wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a paying customer, you definitely can get a human being to look at your problem. The difficulty in this case is the people operating SMTP servers are not paying customers, the free Gmail users are not paying customers and the GSuite paying customers don't think it's their problem (after all, the spam filters works quite well these days and lots of people are on Gmail, making the problem very small in the re…

> If you're a paying customer, you definitely can get a human being to look at your problem. Doubt. We're paying ~$10k/month on ads. The Ads API is rate limited, but it's either broken or has arcane logic, so about every 4-6 weeks, the usual workload will trigger it and we're shut out for 12-24 hours. Can talk to ad support whenever I want, but all they are good for is optimizing campaigns and explaining the UI. No o…

Here's the form to make a complaint about customer support:

https://support.google.com/google-ads/contact/aw_complaint

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#418

Post by jboy55 »

If I recall my time at a main-sleaze email sender, some ISPs will send SMTP retry requests on random incoming email to see if there is a functioning SMTP server on the other side of the originator's email. Often times, spammers won't care about the email that's being sent, so won't respond, or in cases where they are hiding the origin, won't be able to respond.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#419

Post by necovek »

jpadkins wrote: post #372
imhelpingu wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow since you're so concerned and helpful, here's a tidbit: Everyone who has tried to run a personal mail server in past five years can't because of gmail.

how do you tell the difference between a personal mail server and a spammer?

It's not really that hard.

Personal email server will send ~100 emails a month (maybe 1000 if they are extra prolific). Roughly half of those emails will be in reply to emails that originated on your mail server (you can link those with basically unique message-ids that you generated). There will be a bunch of extra safety measures on the server (reverse DNS, SPF records, no open relay...).

Spammers, on the other hand, will send thousands of messages every hour. And have none of that "other" stuff.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#420

Post by wtfrmyinitials »

necovek wrote: post #402
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…

One of the problems is the pure mechanics of how SMTP works: anyone can send an email with any "from" address, and filtering on people/domains in the "from" field is basically pointless if you want to catch spam. What Google is likely doing is checking the domain of the originating IP in the SMTP "envelope", but that also gets tricky with outsourced email services or internal IPs. I do not use Gmail, so these are jus…

> anyone can send an email with any "from" address, and filtering on people/domains in the "from" field is basically pointless if you want to catch spam.

Isn’t this the exact thing that DKIM is designed to fix?

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