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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#461

Post by LocalPCGuy »

ericol wrote: post #285
asark wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think (some of them) may think that's true, but their internal reward structures and top-down priorities are clearly set up such that it's not, in practice. There's no other reason it could be so bad.

I live in Argentina. Few years back, an ex government official from the previous government was caught in the act of hiding 8 million dollars in a church. My partner's auncle was also an ex government official from the previous government. He was in charge of the country's office for regulation work in rural areas. Up to that point, he was a complete believer that the government he was part of, was there to really ch…

As I started to read this, I SOOO wanted it to continue on like this:

> I have this 8 million from the church, but I need to get it out of the country in order to spend it ...

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#462

Post by prewett »

FakeComments wrote: post #41
cptskippy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like as they leave more and more up to the algorithms, we suffer. I've been having this ever increasing in frequency issue where Gmail Search just doesn't working. Not that it doesn't return search results but rather that it returns what I know to be incorrect results. I have an email with some account information that I access a couple times a year at most but will consistently need at least once a year. Just…

I’ve made a career out of going “a bad business plan + computers is still a bad business plan”. It’s not just Google.

I'm curious how you make of career of not doing a bad business plan.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#463

Post by throwaway2048 »

tedunangst wrote: post #318
marktangotango wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How many people don't experience problems sending to gmail? Do you think blog posts criticizing and praising gmail deliverability are in equal proportion to users' experiences?

I don't really care about how many people it is, I primarily care they are fucking up my mail, with absolutely zero recourse or transparency whatsoever, just a total black hole.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#464

Post by Neil44 »

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…

Bounce handling depends on the error code, 5xx is usually a permanent error so the bounce is immediate. Mailbox doesn't exist etc. Its not going to exist later either. IIRC 4xx is effectively try again later because something is wrong right now that might get fixed. Mail server out of disk space, you're greylisted etc. So try again later. Those can take a few days to give up retrying.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#465

Post by jasonvorhe »

That's the price you're paying for a) self hosting and b) relying on decentralized protocols that don't have sensible abuse protections.

People hosting their own servers enabled wide spread abuse due to misconfigurations. Because everyone could do it and because defaults were shit for decades, stuff like open relays were common. People defaulted to the wrong ports. Almost no one bothered to offer STARTTLS/Transport Encryption. Spam would have killed mail by now if it hadn't been for major players like Google, GMX, Hotmail/Outlook/etc.

Back in the day, greylisting was commonly regarded as a best practice, leading to the impression that email is unreliable and prone to latencies.

I'm sorry it's this difficult to host mail by yourself nowadays, but I'm happy to have a spam-free inbox every day and if this is the price for that, I'm sure about 1-2 billion people are willing to pay it.

I'm quite astounded that there have been no updates to mail protocols in the last couple of years to at least mitigate the most common issues, but all I see are band-aids that are complex to setup and horrible to debug in case of issues.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#466

Post by thaumasiotes »

preinheimer wrote: post #434
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. 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.

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

I disagree. I think in the absence of that point, it would have been hard to say this:

> It doesn't look intentional (look at that fourth category!)

But also, I think special treatment for trusted actors is a completely appropriate way to handle email delivery, and I also think it's appropriate for gmail to trust themselves to be sending legitimate mail. Blocking their own email makes them look totally incompetent. They absolutely should whitelist themselves. And they should have a way for you to be whitelisted too, if you want to send email.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#467

Post by yeahitslikethat »

zwkrt wrote: post #439
mintplant wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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!

If something happens a trillion times a day with .00001 error rate, then 50 MILLION things went wrong, affecting, say 50,000 people.

50 of them blast twitter and it seems the world is collapsing.

The world is resilient.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#468

Post by jdmoreira »

silversconfused wrote: post #284
jdmoreira wrote: post #65

I had exactly the same kind of problems when I tried to set up a new mail server. In the end I just gave up and started using mailgun as a relay.

Can you tell us a little more about your setup? I have a home email server, incoming only because of ISP restrictions, and I would love to make it into a real email server for my family and business.

It's just smtp relay really, nothing fancy. I still run my own mail server but I relay outbound over to mailgun

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#469

Post by jonnycomputer »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #86
redm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wholly agree with your statement. I would add that, sadly, its like this with most things Google: 1) vague descriptions of the problem, 2) impossible to get support or talk to anyone, 3) severe consequences (because of the ubiquity of Google’s platforms i.e. search, Gmail, Android, Chrome). Anyone who’s had a safe browsing problem, an App Store issue, or, heaven forbid, an AdSense issue will attest. As far as it re…

Break up Google/Alphabet. Way past time.

My comment didn't deserve net +19 upvotes.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#470

Post by jcbrand »

tedunangst wrote: post #318
marktangotango wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How many people don't experience problems sending to gmail? Do you think blog posts criticizing and praising gmail deliverability are in equal proportion to users' experiences?

I'd be surprised if there are any self-hosters who never had any of their emails ending up in Gmail's spam folder.

Disclosure: I've been self-hosting for 5 years.

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