Gmail marking email from me as spam • Hacker News Board

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#51

Post by petre » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 6:35 AM UTC

tipsysquid wrote: post #12

sdan wrote: post #8

Google's making us play by their rules: 1. Our ML models see that your emails spam? You're spam. 2. You're using Tor or a VPN? Here's 10 reCaptcha's. 3. Don't use Google Webmaster or use AMPs? Good luck finding your page on the 1st page. 4. Youtube video includes education hacking tutorials? Demonetized. Obviously some alternatives are moving to Fastmail and using Duck Duck Go, but we need Google to stop this "my way…

For those of us that can, we must vote with our dollars. To divorce ourselves from Google is expensive and painful, but to ignore it is catastrophe

Goog luck with that, Gmail is free.

We could probably start to divert all gmail and outlook originating mail to the spam folders on our mail servers in retaliation.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#52

Post by viraptor » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 6:37 AM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #7

The attitude of the replies he gets lower down in the thread is shocking. I hope whatever mailing list that is doesn't have any kind of good reputation, because it seems like the consensus opinion there is shockingly anti-cooperative, anti-internet, "me before the network", even going as far to say "if Google thinks you're a spammer then you probably are". How things have changed.

That's a meeting of technical and moral view. I'd love for corps to have no impact on people, for distributed knowledge and resources, for everyone being in control of their data, and general socialist direction.

But the technical answer to "why is my email landing in spam" is still "follow best practices, build up reputation, and you'll be fine... unless Google decides otherwise, which they can". Posting about how unfair that is is not going to change anything.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#53

Post by amelius » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 6:37 AM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #13

sdan wrote: post #8

Google's making us play by their rules: 1. Our ML models see that your emails spam? You're spam. 2. You're using Tor or a VPN? Here's 10 reCaptcha's. 3. Don't use Google Webmaster or use AMPs? Good luck finding your page on the 1st page. 4. Youtube video includes education hacking tutorials? Demonetized. Obviously some alternatives are moving to Fastmail and using Duck Duck Go, but we need Google to stop this "my way…

"Moving to Fastmail" is such a popular alternative that if they ever get to any kind of reasonable size we'll be in the same position all over again. That should not be the suggestion. Many smaller providers encourages the competition necessary for an open network, not a small number of huge providers.

The problem is that smaller companies may not have an appropriate budget for security.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#54

Post by usr1106 » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 6:40 AM UTC

jtagx wrote: post #34

For some reason, Google also marks "Google Alerts" notifications as spam. They contain spammy search results, but the email comes from Google. At least they are consequent in not white-listing their own services :)

Gmail also marks messages from gmail or other google services as spam. Gmail also marks all legitimate mails from Paypal as spam (phishing). I use several email addresses and google accounts, but in the end I forward most mails into the same gmail box. Their spam filters cannot handle the concept of forwarded mail correctly.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#55

Post by cnst » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 6:42 AM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #4

Is this problem unique to Gmail? Do owners of self-hosted mail servers also have problems sending mail to Yahoo, Outlook, AOL, iCloud? Do these providers have a better mechanism for getting yourself un-blocked?

The problem is that Gmail and G Suite essentially have monopoly on email nowadays. Even some pretty big companies are amongst the users. All startups are using G Suite. As are many billion-dollar companies like Twitter, Arista Networks, Netflix, WeWork, a16z, YCombinator. What do you do if you can't email any of the people at all these corps?

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#56

Post by petre » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 6:45 AM UTC

agravier wrote: post #48

odysseus wrote: post #31

This guy has an odd (seemingly nonsensical) quote in his email signature. To a machine learning algorithm, it might look kind of like the random nonsense some spammers put in spam to corrupt Bayesian filters. He might want to try temporarily taking out that signature if he’s using that as part of his emails.

He tests this particular hypothesis here: https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08825.html

He could have ruined his reputation with that signature?

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#57

Post by osamagirl69 » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 6:46 AM UTC

LeoPanthera wrote: post #4

Is this problem unique to Gmail? Do owners of self-hosted mail servers also have problems sending mail to Yahoo, Outlook, AOL, iCloud? Do these providers have a better mechanism for getting yourself un-blocked?

On fastmail I haven't seen a single legit e-mail marked as spam, whereas it happened nearly weekly under gmail. In the last year I have not seen a single (non-mailing list) spam e-mail show up in my inbox, and I have received ~10k spam e-mail this year.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#58

Post by telesilla » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 6:48 AM UTC

thih9 wrote: post #44

clairity wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but it's not expensive. there are other free email services, or you can pay for decent email hosting for a few bucks a month.

Could you post examples? In my opinion free email services either belong to other big corporations or provide lower quality service than gmail. Few bucks a month add up and can be considered expensive by many. I don’t like google and I pay for a different email account. I just wanted to remind that gmail may be hard to quit and that costs are subjective.

Protonmail is my choice, it supports client-side encryption. Custom domain $5 a month - unlike Google you are not paying with your private data.

https://protonmail.com

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#59

Post by petre » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 6:49 AM UTC

gscott wrote: post #30

cnst wrote: post #2

I'm actually having a similar problem recently, although my messages are declined at the SMTP stage, "due to the very low reputation of the sending domain", which I attribute to the output of certain cron jobs being sent towards my own Gmail account — it seems like my whole primary domain name has subsequently been blacklisted a few weeks ago: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21340460 * https://mailman.nanog.or…

In testing different mail servers I find that Gmail will treat them differently based upon there hello line. I can't remember which one was accepted most but there is a difference. Also you need to look into if others on your netblock are sending spam. If you are on the same netblock as a spammer then gmail will treat you as if you are the spammer. This site is very useful if you have your own mail server https://www…

Heh, I get a recapcha from that site. The irony.

Re: Gmail marking email from me as spam

#60

Post by Freak_NL » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 6:50 AM UTC

dajonker wrote: post #46

Email is not the same it has been for years/decades. These days you need to use all the security tools available, most notably TLS and DKIM, set a strict DMARC policy, and don't do anything unexpected such as sending lots of emails out of the blue. Email is all about reputation: it can take a lot of effort to build trust, but just one bad move and it's all gone.

> […] and don't do anything unexpected […]

From the comments here I get the impression that this means, “don't do anything Google's machine learning environment cannot interpret”, which has the added drawback of not ever knowing if you are doing something it considers unexpected.