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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#421

Post by pembrook »

drngdds wrote: post #393
maxaf wrote: post #9

> I'm sure there is no malicious intent behind this How can anyone be sure of this? This is only one of Google’s practices that seems to follow a pervasive pattern of eroding open internet standards while presenting Google’s own proprietary implementation as somehow superior. Eventually, the open standard loses all meaning because the most popular implementation does not actually adhere to it. Meanwhile, Google reaps…

>Gmail’s spam filtering is just a pretext for passing all email through a machine learning system It can't be just that. Spam filtering makes email in general much more usable, and Google of course wants Gmail to be an attractive product.

I find it mind-blowing that Gmail's algorithm doesn't lean more on users to train the spam filters...instead of top-down arbitrary keyword filters & rules that constantly result in false positives.

Apparently human users are trustworthy enough to train 4,000 lb self-driving cars to not kill humans via CAPTCHA. Why the hell can't we rely more on humans to train the spam filter?

It could solve literally every issue with email deliverability today. It's clear the current algorithms are simply not sophisticated enough to do this job properly. Hell, gmail can't even properly discern the difference between an "Update" and a "Promotion." Every dev-related newsletter I'm subscribed to (all of which I want to receive) randomly alternates between those two tabs each week.

To be honest, I highly doubt Google is using any sophisticated Machine Learning algorithms inside Gmail. It doesn't seem like a big priority for them. The space is ripe for a competitor to come in.

I would LOVE to have an email address where I was 100% confident in the spam filter, didn't hide a large portion of my emails behind disappearing tabs, and had more control over what categories my messages go to. Any alternatives out there I should be using?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#422

Post by munchbunny »

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…

Thanks for sticking your neck out. When these kinds of articles happen, it often feels like a witch hunt.

How extensively does the Gmail team test interoperability with other mail systems? From my personal experience, one sin committed by many teams who in say they play nice with the ecosystem is to neglect to test integration against other players in the ecosystem. It's annoying to test and slows down development pace, so frequently no developer wants to do it. This leads to a situation where it may be unintentional, but there is definitely a "favored client."

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#423

Post by munchbunny »

marktangotango wrote: post #195
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…

Secondly, we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our users. This is so deeply disingenuous and at odds with so many peoples experience it’s absurd. Or satire?

I had a similar reaction to that statement. Google tends to make the happy path quite pleasant, but the moment you stray from it, things get kafkaesque very, very quickly.

Saying this from firsthand experience as a customer of Google's B2B offerings, Google earned its bad reputation on the enterprise side.

Saying this after a good number of years as a PM: when you spend 40-50 hours a week thinking about your product, it's really easy to get lost in the weeds and forget that your users see your product from a totally different perspective than you do. I see this all the time because it's very, very difficult to avoid this problem.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#424

Post by mattkrause »

luckylion wrote: post #302
mattkrause wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People's choice of email provider has very little bearing on their ability to do (e.g.) biology or economics research. Plus, most career centers actively advise students (i.e., many applicants) to sent up a professional-sounding gmail (or similar account) accounts. In short, it makes no sense. More broadly, grad school admissions--and, even moreso, faculty hiring--is already full of unwritten rules, backdoors, and ta…

> It emphatically does not need more of those, especially petty ones related to email. What's the alternative? Making sure that the recipient gets the message by sending a courier to his home address? I remember when a buddy of mine, back in the pre-email days, applied for a job at a company. About a week later, he received a letter, asking him to call them. Turns out, he forgot to put his contact info into the appli…

A courier is clearly a little over the top (though maybe not totally absurd: a faculty search costs tens of thousands of dollars).

I would expect both sides to make a bit of effort. Applicants should check their spam folders and follow up, especially if there's a known timeline (American grad school offers need to be extended and accepted by the 15th of April, for example).

Institutions should maybe not rely on only an unreliable, unacknowledged form of communication. Since the applications usually collect phone numbers and addresses, a phone call or letter would be a very reasonable follow up; neither costs more than 50¢ to use. I think all of the PhD programs that accepted me did call and it seems like a good way not only to notify, but to actively recruit.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#425

Post by necovek »

awinder wrote: post #253
megous wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have it the wrong way. Noone can make it so that gmail accepts their e-mail. It's the gmail's job after it receives the connection to process the SMTP commands and deliver the message to you. I mean, assumming that the sender doesn't have broken SMTP client or doesn't follow standards. It's gmail's user's problem if they don't accept mail or check their Junk folder or use an e-mail provider that they can't contac…

You can absolutely make it so that gmail accepts your legitimate email if you're delivering email at high scale. A lot of people here running their own email servers would have no problem with the same emails getting delivered if they were hosted on any decently-sized platform, because part of the cost / value of those platforms is that there are human beings doing relationship management with counterparts at Google,…

> thats what the original article is running into, it doesn't matter if you've been delivering off the same IP for years if you're only sending small amounts of traffic

That suggests a simple solution to the problem that can be done on the gmail side: for any small mail server (to pull a number out of my behind, say less than Even if someone attempts to game the system and creates a number of servers, for an effective spam campaign it means a large number of servers, costs go up.

It might be worth experimenting with "abusing" this behaviour to put your small server on the Gmail whitelist. Start sending a large number of generated emails to a @gmail.com mailbox, log in and ensure none of it ends up in spam (ideally automate that too :), and there we are. Anyone have any idea how many emails that is? :)

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#426

Post by Zelphyr »

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…

> It's like we're heading back to the days when people didn't know the difference between AOL and "the internet."

I hate to say it, I really do, because I used to respect Google and liked their products, but if you imagine combining the perception of "AOL is the internet" with the way Microsoft acted up to the mid-2000's and I think you have Google.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#427

Post by shawnz »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #403
amenod wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you are being downvoted, you have a point. There is no excuse for the way Google is operating now - poor customer support, the only recourse twits and HN posts. I think it also hurts Google themselves. There is a reason they have trouble competing with AWS. Why should developers trust Google that there will be a person on the other side helping them out when things go wrong? And they always do, at worst…

Their customer support is just fine. Only trouble is, we're not the customer, we're the product. (And no, I'm not interested in hearing about how that's a hackneyed worn-out cliché, or whatever, given that it's a true statement. Downvote and move on.) A big part of the problem with Google taking everything over is that only in very limited situations -- the service formerly known as YouTube Red, for instance -- are w…

> I'm not interested in hearing about how that's a hackneyed worn-out cliché

Well, it's a hackneyed worn-out cliché. Without the users there's no viable product. That's what makes them the customers and that's why they need adequate customer support. The fact that you pay for the product with ad impressions rather than dollars doesn't change anything about that dynamic.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#428

Post by hrez »

benou wrote: post #231
mcsb4 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's simply not true we have no incentive to fix this I just happen to have set up an email server and encountered the same problems with Google as described in the article. I own the IP since quite some time, it is not on any black list, reverse DNS is set up etc. but Google rejects email as spam. And this even happens when the gmail account has added the sender in his address book and has send the first email to…

> Use your AI to put email into the spam folder. Refusing it outright is a case for the European Commission which hopefully will slap you another few billions of fine onto the wrist until you remember to play nicely with the other kids. I prefer getting a bounce than ending in the spam folder by far. Lots of relatives on Gmail never look into the spam folder so I never know if they get to see my email or not and I en…

That's as a sender (even that reasoning is questionable). As a receiver, would you rather never received an important email from some org instead of finding it in your spam folder?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#429

Post by marcinzm »

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.

Based on the number of hacker news posts from people who pay them money and are locked out of their accounts by automated systems with no recourse I'd say that's utterly false.

Maybe you meant to say "if you pay them enough money" which is true. But most people don't have that much money to pay them.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#430

Post by jrockway »

cookiecaper wrote: post #374
jrockway wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A biz that can't deliver to gmail is a terrible smell though. If anything, it means that teams are probably too independent and that there is no central approval process for things like sending emails. For example, a lot of companies use products like Greenhouse. I am sure this will send email from your domain on your behalf. If you don't know what you have to talk to the DNS administrators to add a bunch of TXT re…

> They blamed me and said that they weren't interested in a programmer that couldn't set up a mail server. Tangent, but this kind of stuff is super annoying and probably happens far more often than anyone wants to admit. A few friends and I have been commiserating re the incompetence of potential employers who've rejected us because of their own misconfigured environments or fundamental misunderstandings of the syste…

Yeah, you hate to see it. Sometimes you are so far behind in hiring that you can't even get out; there is nobody to ask about that half-Py2/half-Py3 install. It is unfortunate.
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