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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#501

Post by jstsch »

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…

My properly configured DKIM/SPF/etc mailserver, with a 10-year old IP, still gets email redirected to gmails spam folder more often than not. Even replies to emails from gmail addresses, with reply-to-id's.

That's the box I use for my personal email. Out of principle. I believe in a distributed/federated net. It just means that I can't expect that emails I send actually get delivered. Sigh.

My experience for business has been that you simply have to bite the bullet and be on outlook.com or gmail.com. Or you can't expect that regular email always arrives. What everyone in the corporate world expects of course.

I've heard this story from everyone I know that operates their own mailserver. No hyperbole. I would be tremendously happy if Google would spend some serious (and visible) effort on this. Thanks Paul.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#502

Post by tomComb »

joering2 wrote: post #290
prlambert wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely sorry to hear that. Our analysts are looking into the issue described in the article, hopefully we find something we can fix that will resolve this.

Since you profile claims you are from Google, you should know by helping here you really doing disservice to everyone else having same problems. Hacker News is not a “gmail customer support hotline center”. You have billions of dollars to setup a system or heck the whole state of the art department to help people with their gmail problem. So you will help two people on HN bitching at gmail.. what about all those that…

In his first post (above) he said that he is from Google but he is not acting in any official capacity here.

It is not Google support, it is just an employee giving some insight on his own time.

What is wrong with that?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#503

Post by wingworks »

cpeterso wrote: post #388
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…

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. :(

I've recently started checking quite regularly my spam folder as I've noticed more and more legit emails ending up there. One of them being support emails from TradeMe (one of New Zealand's biggest sites), keep getting put into spam, even after multiple "mark as not spam", along with some other kinda important emails from TradeMe. I've had to put in manual filters to force an email from TM to skip the spam.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#504

Post by zzo38computer »

I use my own SMTP server for receiving, but for sending I use the ISP's server (I think I have seem to have read somewhere that not only Google but some other services as well, will not accept mail from dynamic IP addresses). I have not had problems that I know of, so far. Please tell me of whatever mistake I may have made of such thing.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#505

Post by tomComb »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #449
toomim wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, AMP for Gmail only works in Gmail. https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/bringing-power-amp-...

This is unfortunately technically untrue, as Google has beaten Outlook and Yahoo and Mail.ru into submission and into supporting it. It's still a huge security risk, and an inherently proprietary email spec Google designed and implemented without community input and deployed despite significant community resistance. But technically, it works outside of Gmail.

> as Google has beaten Outlook and Yahoo and Mail.ru

Microsoft and Verizon are hardly vulnerable timid players.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#506

Post by tomComb »

phinnaeus wrote: post #306
pdonis wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gmail's success is entirely predicated on the health of the global email ecosystem That depends on what you define as "health". > Email itself, of course has a huge network effect, and that is because you can email anyone in the world, regardless of what email system they use If that's the case, then why does Gmail system explicitly thwart this objective, as described by this very article? > If we lose an open, hea…

I agree completely with everything you said. It's too bad that Google has no incentive to allow a premium/ad-free experience as that implies having ads is a negative thing, which basically undermines their entire business model.

They have G Suite, and they also tried a more consumer oriented version but no one wanted to pay.

I would love it if more of the Internet were based on payments and micro-payments but consumers have voted decisively against that.

I try to sell people on the idea of paying for news but extremely few are willing even for something that critical.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#507

Post by noego »

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…

> Gmail does not, inherently, have any network effects

In an ideal world, yes. Unless Gmail makes it harder for anyone using a different provider to communicate with Gmail users. In which case you've effectively "encouraged"/forced everyone else to use Gmail to take advantage of the Gmail network. This seems to be exactly what's happened to the author. This is very similar to the complaint voiced recently by the Mozilla leader as well.

I don't doubt that you as an individual have very good intentions. But individual intentions do not translate well to organizational priorities. The best way to prevent Gmail-lock-in in the long term is to have more diversity and competition in this marketplace.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#508

Post by awinder »

necovek wrote: post #425
awinder wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can absolutely make it so that gmail accepts your legitimate email if you're delivering email at high scale. A lot of people here running their own email servers would have no problem with the same emails getting delivered if they were hosted on any decently-sized platform, because part of the cost / value of those platforms is that there are human beings doing relationship management with counterparts at Google,…

> thats what the original article is running into, it doesn't matter if you've been delivering off the same IP for years if you're only sending small amounts of traffic That suggests a simple solution to the problem that can be done on the gmail side: for any small mail server (to pull a number out of my behind, say less than Even if someone attempts to game the system and creates a number of servers, for an effectiv…

IP churn is a huge problem with email that everyone has to fight, these are the emails you’re getting from like list sellers and the like. And you don’t have to even have to spin up new hardware or vms, you can be in something like aws where you’re attaching new network interfaces, go and do your damage, spin it down and up goes the next one. This actively happens all of the time right now and it happens because you can profitably do it.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#509

Post by feanaro »

AJ007 wrote: post #44
reaperducer wrote: post #23

The last time a company screwed with e-mail at scale was Earthlink. Remember for a couple of years, every time you'd send a message to someone at Earthlink, you'd get an automated rely demanding that you verify yourself before the message would go through? Now I can't remember the last time I saw an @earthlink.* e-mail address. Google has apparently learned from that and put the "error" in the 550 messages, where the…

If enough expected messages don’t show up, users are going to start thinking gmail is broken. The problem for Google is that they are not the only trusted brand consumers interact with. I’ve seen a lot of stuff start ending up in spam that shouldn’t be there. If enough password resets, customer service responses, and order confirmations aren’t delivered, it looks like Google has a problem. If it doesn’t even make it…

> The problem for Google is that they are not the only trusted brand consumers interact with.

The solution to this is to start tarnishing this trust by word of mouth when talking to non-technical users. I take every opportunity to put Google in a bad light until they change their behaviour.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#510

Post by rhizome »

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…

Secondly, we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our users

Holy shit, GMail's going away? This is the kind of thing we're told just before a Google product is killed.

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