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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#451

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

khawkins wrote: post #39
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 now regularly seeing search results bury political pages which seem to run counter bay area political views. I'll search the terms on Bing and DuckDuckGo and the page I'm expecting will be the first hit, but on Google it'll be on page 3 or 4. Clearly they keep the hit in the search results for plausible deniability, but they're trying to influence people by suppressing speech. Given that Google is becoming synony…

>I’m now regularly seeing search results bury political pages which seem to run counter bay area political views.

This has been a well known occurrence. I’m think about all those pictures of “Hillary Clinton is” [0] typed into each search engine and Google was polar opposite of all others.

I think one needs to be pretty obtuse to not see Google is “curating” results to fit an ideology.

Everyone should be mad at that even if they believe in the same things.

EDIT: Well... apparently some people don't believe me, so I just re-tested. "Hillary Clinton i" in four engines.

I couldn't use "Hillary Clinton is" because "for some reason" Google guessing completely stops working when you type "is" after her name - can someone find me another phrase besides "Hillary Clinton" that "breaks" the search fill when "is" gets added? No? Well.. That sure seems like Google is "curating" then.

[0] https://i.postimg.cc/MTkdFb14/Hillary-Clinton-I.png

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#452

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

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."

You’re right.

And it’s a small thing, but I’ve really been trying to correct myself when I use google as a verb. I’ve been trying to say “search it” instead.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#453

Post by feanaro »

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…

I'm someone in exactly the same situation as the author of this blog post. I appreciate your well-meaning response, but the bottom line is that Google will have to offer a way for a real two-way communication channel for email administrators or be considered as acting in bad faith.

There needs to be a way to inspect what caused mail delivery so we are able to fix it. There needs to be a way to provide feedback to Google about mail that was wrongly rejected. If you can push this forward internally, please do it.

This is a far too regular occurrence to just ignore: it is a rule that delivering email to gmail from outside is unreliable, not an exception.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#454

Post by gergles »

jbergstroem wrote: post #59

I'm also one of those oldfarts that insists on hosting my private emails for me and a few friends. I've owned the ip since early 2000's and have had zero "spam"/blacklist incidents. One trend I've been noticing is that Microsoft/Outlook have regularly started to block me. I have to contact their abuse which takes a day or so to get unblocked. To date, I've done so >10 times: hotmail-com.olc.protection.outlook.com[104…

Don't worry, you can fix all of this by joining the ReturnPath Protection Racket™^W^W "Sender Certification Program" that will let you pay to guarantee your mail ends up in the Inbox at all the major players.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#455

Post by sandworm101 »

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…

>> I would be vastly better off if nothing ever got filtered at all.

There are layers of filtering beyond what appears in your spam folder, layers that block obvious spam long before it gets anywhere near your account. If every email ever sent to your address wound up in your spam folder you'd beg for filtering.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#456

Post by xtiansimon »

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…

Just to be clear, your comments are refering to problems with Gmail's Spam filtering. Isn't that a different issue than what the OP is saying--that his mailserver is being blocked? In other words, emails from his mail server wouldn't even make it to Spam folder.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#457

Post by kevingadd »

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…

How can you seriously argue you have no network effects when Gmail has repeatedly added (to be fair, somewhat useful) features that basically only work on Gmail, like AMP emails or expiring/deletable emails? Sure, other vendors could go out of their way to reimplement AMP and shove it into email but really?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#458

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

#459

Post by thaumasiotes »

sandworm101 wrote: post #455
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…

>> I would be vastly better off if nothing ever got filtered at all. There are layers of filtering beyond what appears in your spam folder, layers that block obvious spam long before it gets anywhere near your account. If every email ever sent to your address wound up in your spam folder you'd beg for filtering.

I'm prepared to believe this. But it's not a defense of gmail's policies -- this suggests that in fact nothing would be lost if gmail eliminated the spam folder and delivered everything that would have gone there to your inbox instead. So why are they doing this?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#460

Post by fpierfed »

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…

This is totally my experience as well. It got so bad that I gave up operating my email server.

Anyway, Gmail is getting some heat in this thread and rightfully so. We should however not forget that Microsoft and Yahoo are just as bad if not worse in this respect.

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