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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#471

Post by throwaway2048 »

LeonM wrote: post #68

I run a mail monitoring service [0], and we hear this complaint every now and then. A couple of things that regularly seems to trigger false positives in spam algorithms: - no or misconfigured SPF and/or DKIM - no or misconfigured reverse-DNS - automatically included footer texts (confidentiality, copyright, safe a tree don't print, etc) - regular automatic replies from the domain (such as out of office notifications…

You can satisfy all of this, have an IP with an absolutely spotless reputation that you have personally controlled for years that has never sent spam, and still be arbitrarily shitlisted with zero recourse whatsoever.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#472

Post by badsectoracula »

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.

Before switching to shared hosting from my VPS (one reason being that i didn't want to bother with email maintenance and didn't want to have a separate service just for email), i had my mail with (badly configured) Spamassassin that wouldn't delete mail, just add a "SPAM" prefix in the topic. My mail isn't exactly commonly known, but still is one i have for years and was made public thanks to me releasing an Android app once (after which, spam increased dramatically).

Even after running it for years, Spamassassin never marked a legitimate mail as spam, so i'm pretty sure that if i wasn't too lazy to configure it to move it to a spam folder, it'd work fine. Stuff did pass through it (at a ratio of one every four or so) but i was fine with deleting those.

What i'm trying to say is that from personal experience, i'd be fine with a spam filter that errs on the side of not marking stuff for spam and me deleting whatever goes through manually. Having to see a bit of spam mail is small cost for losing mail i'm actually interested in.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#473

Post by the_jeremy »

Chlorus wrote: post #194
i_dont_know_ wrote: post #6

As someone who runs their own personal mail server, this annoys me to no end. I set up DKIM, SPF, and reverse-DNS records and resented every moment of it. Even after all that, there's some chance that an email from my server will be marked as insecure/spam or otherwise just not be delivered because Google has come up with some new brilliant mail security/auth/permission scheme that the world has to adopt tomorrow or…

Uh, SPF was being developed long before Gmail was a thing and was pushed for by at least 1 other (Yahoo) mass mail provider, as was reverse DNS verification. If you're going to be salty at someone, it should be the spammers.

Perhaps he was indirectly referring to MTA-STS[1] that Google sponsored, co-authored, and recently released in beta?

[1]: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/04/gmail-making-em...

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#474

Post by thaumasiotes »

yeahitslikethat wrote: post #467
zwkrt wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think an average of 1,000 mistakes per person-affected-by-mistakes is realistic here. I'd bet it's closer to 1.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#475

Post by rukuu001 »

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.

Recently we recovered a GSuite account that was still in the trial period! We hadn't even entered billing info :)

The process took a while (about a week) but we did get the account back.

Things have changed a little bit since Google just presented a wall for support requests to bounce off.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#476

Post by influx »

ModernMech wrote: post #415
cpeterso wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Likewise I found they filtered an e-mail from my bank about my car loan.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#477

Post by insulanus »

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 glad you have your heart in the right place.

However, as one of the PMs in charge of one of the most important messaging applications on the planet, you cannot claim the following without stating your reasons:

> Gmail does not, inherently, have any network effects

Yes, compared to facebook, and within the context of messaging apps, gmail's network effect is weaker. But the fact that the very existence of the gmail monolith can kill off small mail servers (not implicitly, but by failure to deliver messages), is a real problem.

I understand it's a difficult problem. It's not a gmail scale problem, but the effects, times the number of small mail servers is important, because those small mail servers will be what is left if any of the big players in this ecosystem collapse.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#478

Post by shawnz »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #444
shawnz wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well, it's a hackneyed worn-out cliché. Without the users there's no viable product. That's what makes them the customers No, that's what makes them "users." The customers are the advertisers who actually pay money to Google. You can rest assured that they don't have to post a cri de coeur on social media to get a response from Google when something goes wrong. IMO, a company that does its level best to act like vita…

> No, that's what makes them "users." The customers are the advertisers who actually pay money to Google.

I understand your idea. But in my opinion this is a useless and unconventional definition of the word 'customer'. The customer is the one who receives a service in exchange for compensation. In this case the service is gmail and the compensation is ad impressions. The fact that Google can sell those ad impressions is secondary to that dynamic. If there were no users willing to provide that compensation in exchange for access to gmail, then there'd be no product, and there'd be no secondary market for selling those advertisements. Meanwhile even with no advertisers there would still be a product, and there would still be other avenues for monetizing it.

> You can rest assured that they don't have to post a cri de coeur on social media to get a response from Google when something goes wrong.

Are you sure about that? A quick google for "adwords support experiences" gives quite a number of telling stories to the contrary. Besides, there are several orders of magnitude more users than there are advertisers, so obviously it's going to be much easier for users' issues to get lost in the noise. And obviously no advertising agencies are going to be getting any sympathy by complaining on Twitter.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#479

Post by rock_artist »

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…

Exactly. Like Google's services compatibility with non-Chrome browsers.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#480

Post by sumosudo »

danielparks wrote: post #432
usefulcat wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

hmmmm, so do I and still my emails are unsolicited.
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