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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#531

Post by mostlysimilar »

gtirloni wrote: post #350
ok_coo wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the part that's going to bite them when antitrust comes around. They are largely unaccountable and there's no real way to get a hold of a human being unless you shame them on social media and it gets enough traction.

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.

I may not be giving them money directly, but my use of their products contributes to their billions in ad revenue. Without us free users providing eyeballs for their ad network they would be significantly less rich.

It's upsetting that the default response to complaints about Google's terrible customer service is "if you don't pay them you aren't a customer." Most of their value comes from us, it most certainly isn't a one-way relationship.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#532

Post by eq_sd_ »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #322
dingus wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the response. From someone who has operated a mail server since 2002, it comes across that Gmail does not care about cooperating with small but legitimate mail servers. SPF, DKIM, reverse DNS, no blacklists, no open relay, longtime ownership of IPs, etc etc. Using various mail testers returns a 10/10 deliverability score. And yet, messages sent to Gmail always go into the spam folder, or are never delive…

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've also had email from a Google recruiter go to the spam box...

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#533

Post by vbezhenar »

dest wrote: post #528
vbezhenar wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hosting my mail on $1 VPS right now. It's hard for me to justify paying more. I hate to setup that mail stuff, it's too tricky and takes a lot of time, but still not worth paying extra.

Pro-tip: do some backups. Cheap VPS can disappear overnight.

This tip is good for almost any service. Gmail could ban you any minute. I doubt that they'll allow to get backups after that.

May be if I'm paying some money to some local company in my city, I can have some confidence, because I can come to their office and yell at them until they return my data to me. But they can just be incompetent and lose it, so even in this case I better do backups.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#534

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#535

Post by jrnichols »

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…

one would think that Gmail would be smart enough to not flag a reply to an email sent from a Gmail user as spam, but no. it flagged it. :/

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#536

Post by pdonis »

tomComb wrote: post #506
phinnaeus wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> consumers have voted decisively against that

No, they haven't; they've been given no opportunity to vote. Such an opportunity would be, for example, Google offering its basic search service for pay to users. Of course they would have to offer some incentive, some benefit that free users (more precisely, ad-supported users) don't get, but we already know how that works: the obvious benefit is no ads. I would certainly pay for an ad-free Google.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#537

Post by AceJohnny2 »

arpa wrote: post #355
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…

You know what's really funny? That even with that overly agressive spam filter, once in a while (once a quarter maybe), it somehow manages to miss obvious BuY@@NiGERiAn@@Vi@gRa-Cia1is type of emails... which, by the way, my morally outdated spamassasin marks as spam.

"morally outdated" ?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#538

Post by nekitamo »

hedora wrote: post #191
khawkins wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm now regularly seeing search results bury political pages which seem to run counter bay area political views. I'll search the terms on Bing and DuckDuckGo and the page I'm expecting will be the first hit, but on Google it'll be on page 3 or 4. Clearly they keep the hit in the search results for plausible deniability, but they're trying to influence people by suppressing speech. Given that Google is becoming synony…

Any examples? (DDG fan here; curious to know if it is filter bubbling, or something else.)

One example is the story of the sons of John Kerry and Joe Biden partnering together to form a private equity fund which received money from the Chinese government, and then using that money to acquire strategically sensitive assets, in some cases partnering with firms accused by the US government of hacking US companies for intellectual property:

https://nypost.com/2018/03/15/inside-the-shady-private-equit...

They did all this while their fathers were undertaking sensitive high-level negotiations with the Chinese government.

If you try Googling for keywords related to this story, Google will claim to have indexed thousands of related pages, but will only serve 33 search results: https://www.google.com/search?q=biden+kerry+Rosemont+Seneca+...

If you enter the same keywords into Bing you will be served thousands upon thousands of search results without any of Google's limiting or censorship: https://www.bing.com/search?q=biden+kerry+rosemont+seneca+He...

One interesting thing to note is that most of the websites which picked up this story are right-wing, and that Google appears to simply be blacklisting non-mainstream right-wing websites from its search results. Whether or not this is due to any implicit ideological bias on Google's part is uncertain.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#539

Post by [deleted] »

badsectoracula wrote: post #472
sandworm101 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 Androi…

[deleted]

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#540

Post by jrnichols »

brlewis wrote: post #89
awinder wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be a fair sentiment for an educational institution (you're not directly making money from email sending / hopefully admissions marketing doesn't have this problem), but as a candidate I'd be extremely concerned if a company I was going to work with A) couldn't deliver to gmail and B) held the view that it was everyone else's problem. As it is you're statistically leaving half the candidate pool at the door,…

In the past year or so, pulling non-spam out of my gmail spam folder has become routine. Previously it was very rare that legitimate mail ended up in my spam folder, including personal mail from my father from an email address he's been using for decades. A biz that call's gmail's problem gmail's problem is not a terrible smell.

the fact that the spam folder is now hidden down under an additional menu makes the problem even worse.

users don't even know that it's there.

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