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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#431

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#432

Post by danielparks »

usefulcat wrote: post #339
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…

> Or do they want all of us to start doing the same? An increase in public shamings probably means that public shamings become less news- or interest-worthy. So an increase in shamings might not have as much effect as you might expect.

That’s true, but I don’t think we're anywhere near there yet. Especially when it comes to the mainstream — most people outside of tech don’t have any idea this is a problem.

(FWIW, I don’t seem to have this problem in a significant way, but that might be because I have DMARC set up.)

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#433

Post by gtirloni »

marcinzm wrote: post #429
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. 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.

I'm not saying Google's support is stellar but there's a lot of misinformation going around. It's become a meme to say you can't reach a human at Google, they will shutdown new apps after an year, etc.

Have you had direct experience with Google support? My experience has been pretty regular but maybe I'm an outlier.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#434

Post by preinheimer »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #322
dingus wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'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…

> - Email coming from Google itself.

If email coming from google itself got special treatment there would be masses with pitchforks complaining about that.

You've made a lot of good points, but I don't think that's one of them.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#435

Post by lucb1e »

jasode wrote: post #361
lucb1e wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good memory! A few things: - My comment in this thread was mainly about gmail for businesses, hence the contrast between "I'm not going to fix their problems and just tell the recipient their setup is broken" and the previous "it's doable". Other mail providers are usually no problem at all, and personal Google accounts are also better. - For email to personal gmail accounts it seemed to be enough to send a few mails…

>I hope not. For what it's worth, I'm still at it and have no plans to stop hosting my own mail! You misunderstand the point I'm trying to emphasize. I'm not trying to dissuade you from running your own email. There are real benefits to controlling your own email server and it's great you've configured something that works for you. I'm saying I disagree with how some proponents communicate the drawbacks. They discoun…

Fair points. I don't have much to add to your comment, so I'll just say that I was nodding along with every paragraph. Thanks for clarifying what you meant to emphasize, I think I understand now!

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#436

Post by luckylion »

gtirloni wrote: post #417
luckylion wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Thank you, but I and pretty much everybody at the company has given up months ago. We've tried everything we could (well, I guess we should've tried to go viral on HN or twitter...) and it got ignored again and again.

It has become a bit of a rite of passage when somebody new arrives, they see the error ticket for the first time and are eager to dig into it and solve a long standing problem. It's like a trust fall, only the lesson is not to trust, and you learn that lesson by falling.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#437

Post by craftinator »

craftinator wrote: post #276
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…

So will you fix OP's problem then, prlambert?

If you downvote, please reply and explain your position. I simply asked if this Gmail PM is going to fix the problem with Gmail in the comments about that problem. So who is upset with my comment and WHY.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#438

Post by necovek »

wtfrmyinitials wrote: post #420
necovek wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This was a response to a complaint about not receiving emails from some "people/domains" even when whitelisted, and I highlighted how this can be hard for a service to detect reliably.

So yes, DKIM will help a receiving server know for sure, but a receiving server still needs to accept emails from non-DKIM-enabled servers, and perhaps that's why whitelisting didn't work for the parent.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#439

Post by zwkrt »

mintplant wrote: post #348
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…

> - Email coming from Google itself. Yep. I missed an invitation to a Google-hosted event at a conference I attended because the email (from an @google.com address, no less) got caught in Gmail's spam filter.

This is a problem with ML approaches, right? Instead of water boiling at "100C" it boils at "99.98C +- 0.04C". Normally this is ok, but sometimes it isn't!

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#440

Post by Operyl »

craftinator wrote: post #437
craftinator wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So will you fix OP's problem then, prlambert?

If you downvote, please reply and explain your position. I simply asked if this Gmail PM is going to fix the problem with Gmail in the comments about that problem. So who is upset with my comment and WHY.

Potentially because you came off a bit aggressive, and because he already explained[0] that they had an analyst looking into this.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19759411

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