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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#511

Post by tomComb »

bluGill wrote: post #190
vbezhenar wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you suggest free email provider with similar level of service which allows to use your own domain?

Free is not possible. Someone needs to pay for email, servers need to be repaired/replaced every few years, the power bill needs to be paid, someone needs to ensure that the latest exploit doesn't compromise the server. You are paying for your email, the only question is how. I use fastmail because the payment is direct: I give them a few bucks each month. With free email (gmail) the payment is not direct. They are d…

> With free email (gmail) the payment is not direct. They are doing something to get money, but what is unknown.

I guess you mean something uknown and nefarious.

And you are more comfortable with Qihoo 360, the Chinese company that owns Opera/fastmail?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#512

Post by mbrameld »

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

If you reject most non-Gmail messages it does!

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#513

Post by arendtio »

dahart wrote: post #485
craftinator wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you downvote, please reply and explain your position. I simply asked if this Gmail PM is going to fix the problem with Gmail in the comments about that problem. So who is upset with my comment and WHY.

Apologies for unsolicited advice, but since you’re newish... Downvotes don’t mean anyone’s upset, there’s a large variety of reasons people downvote. Same is true of upvotes, there are lots of different reasons for them. Try not to take either personally. Downvotes don’t require explanation, just like upvotes don’t require explanation. It’s a great idea to be curious and seek ways to avoid downvotes, always good to a…

While I know those guidelines, I still hate it when people get downvoted and there is not a single response (unless the comment obviously offends the guidelines). I mean, especially because people are voting for various reasons you can't even be sure that you broke the rules when you get downvoted and if the person has no clue what is wrong with his comment he doesn't know what to change.

So thank you for explaining the situation to craftinator :-)

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#514

Post by panic »

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…

Every single person inside of an institution can care deeply about something, but that doesn't mean the institution as a whole will act as if it cares. Think of Google as a huge animal made up of individual people. The people can perceive and act on their immediate surroundings, but only by forming larger structures (like teams or orgs) are they able to act on the world at Google's scale.

Really, it's not about incentives; it's about perception. Just like you can't act at Google's scale on your own, you can't perceive the effects of Google's actions on your own. You care about fixing issues when you hear about them, but how do you hear about them? What can the Google-animal see, and what is it blind to?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#515

Post by 9HZZRfNlpR »

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…

If you deeply care what is the proper way of letting you know about it? I'm sorry but calling these relationships caring is rubbish. If Linus himself said that no one in the mail team listens, then what do the devs that are not the most popular name in the open source world have to do?!

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#516

Post by djsumdog »

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've written a similar article to this a few years back, so this isn't a new problem and obviously little has been done to fix it:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made...

I have SPF, DKIM, reverse DNS, DMARC .. all the things, and yet I still get e-mail dropped.

Will you guys fix Postmaster tools for small servers? What can I do to send e-mail to my friends?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#517

Post by preinheimer »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #466
preinheimer wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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 legiti…

If they whitelisted the major players in the space, I'd worry that the problem would get _much_ worse for everyone else.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#518

Post by preinheimer »

pfranz wrote: post #441
preinheimer wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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.

I don't think that has anything to do with Google needing special treatment. It shows that the company who made the rules and has every privilege to follow them isn't able to.

I think that's a fair interpretation and a good point.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#519

Post by vbezhenar »

necovek wrote: post #419
jpadkins wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you tell the difference between a personal mail server and a spammer?

It's not really that hard. Personal email server will send ~100 emails a month (maybe 1000 if they are extra prolific). Roughly half of those emails will be in reply to emails that originated on your mail server (you can link those with basically unique message-ids that you generated). There will be a bunch of extra safety measures on the server (reverse DNS, SPF records, no open relay...). Spammers, on the other han…

Spammers can buy cheap VPS and setup all this stuff with scripts. So I don't think that it really helps. It's good to have it (to prevent spoofing), but I'm not even sure that Gmail will use wrong SPF record to deny e-mail, it's not really part of SMTP, those are just optional additions.

But volume is a good argument. I don't think that spamming could be cost-effective with something like 100 e-mails per day from a single IP-address. So why not just let small servers pass every filter in the world (may be except reverse-dns record) as long as they are small? The danger should not be very big.

Of course I might be missing something, I have no idea how spammers really operate. Or may be Google just don't care about personal servers at all.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#520

Post by walterbell »

dhess wrote: post #406
kreetx wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think all of you should start some kind of a movement so that this could be heared better at GMail's end.

That's a great idea. I've run my own mail servers since 1999. I'd happily join a union of independent mail operators with the purpose of lobbying Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to treat us as first-class citizens.

Start a mailing list? Or is there an existing one for this topic?
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