Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Is Eating Our Mail

tablix.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 720 posts

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#551

Post by fataliss »

jbergstroem wrote: post #59

I'm also one of those oldfarts that insists on hosting my private emails for me and a few friends. I've owned the ip since early 2000's and have had zero "spam"/blacklist incidents. One trend I've been noticing is that Microsoft/Outlook have regularly started to block me. I have to contact their abuse which takes a day or so to get unblocked. To date, I've done so >10 times: hotmail-com.olc.protection.outlook.com[104…

Ever tried https://protonmail.com/ ? I wonder if they face the same kind of challenged?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#552

Post by gerdesj »

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…

Thanks for wading in.

"Gmail does not, inherently, have any network effects" - you do and you can't help it.

I've been doing email for quite a while (20 odd years) and I don't find Gmail refusing my customer's email for silly reasons too often.

I have had some odd rejections from Gmail (int al) and no-one to talk to. You opine that Postmaster tools are under-invested in but actually miss the real point:

You (G) seem to under-invest in people and put too much faith in magic (AI/ML/nonsense). I really am not a Luddite (I'm giving the tyres on my smart new Node-RED home IoT thingie a good talking to via Javascript right now) but please don't forget ... "memento homo")

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#553

Post by criddell »

st3fan wrote: post #445
prlambert wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Firstly, Gmail's success is entirely predicated on the health of the global email ecosystem. That simply is not relevant anymore if 99% of email is on Gmail. I want to echo the exact same issues as the original author. Running my own email servers since the 90s I recently just “gave up” - no single indication about spam issues. All green on several tests. But Google rejects mail. Zero help or tools from google to g…

> That simply is not relevant anymore if 99% of email is on Gmail.

He says elsewhere that more email is sent via Exchange servers than GMail.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#554

Post by Lunatic666 »

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 very much want to believe that Google cares about small email providers and self-hosters. I believe that you care personally, but have a look at the documentation. All the help articles target bulk-hosters, the documentation doesn't even mention humans! The case that a human wants to send an email to another human, which is the very reason email was created in the first place, is not even covered or planned, so I'm pretty sure Google doesn't care about collateral like us, who have fun caring about their own email servers, playing by the rules and doing everything to not be on blacklists.

Why not count the amount of emails coming from those domains and give them a "softer" filtering algo if it's below a certain threshold? Or open a whitelisting program where you can go full Google on people who violate the terms? I think there are (automatable) ways to solve this problems, but only if Google understands that emails are for human interaction, not to receive ads.

(Edited for typos)

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#555

Post by jrnichols »

silversconfused wrote: post #279
craftyguy wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, if you don't want to commit yourself to yet another walled garden, there are quite a few other email providers that to choose from.

Please list a few. I need 3 personal inboxes, 2 home business inboxes (bills, etc), and the ability to make new inboxes for stupid startup prototypes you buy a domain for, hack on for a few days with dreams of huge sales, and then forget about for a year until the domain expires. You know, normal hacker stuff.

https://mxroute.com/ maybe?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#557

Post by jayalpha »

jayalpha wrote: post #556

Self hosting email is a pain in the butt. Try fastmail infomaniak.com (can also buy email for external domain) gandi.net (email included in domain)

PS: From the comments of the link

"We run small hosting company, if any domain blocks our clients mails we block theirs and problem gets solved magically." :-)

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#558

Post by jrnichols »

rootusrootus wrote: post #55

Reminds me of Spamhaus. Are they still around? When I worked for an ISP we had to deal with them regularly. They'd happily hold you hostage over a single e-mail.

yes, they are, and they've been really really good. haven't seen any of the behavior you refer to. ever. now SORBS on the other hand... doesn't really exist anymore (fortunately) but spamhaus has been great.

especially when used as a filter in Postscreen.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#559

Post by tomComb »

nmjenkins wrote: post #547
tomComb wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

FastMail hasn't been part of Opera for over 5 years now, since well before Qihoo bought most of what was left of Opera: https://fastmail.blog/2013/09/25/exciting-news-fastmail-staf...

Oh, good. Thanks for pointing that out. I used fastmail for many years and am glad to know that it ended up independent.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#560

Post by tty2300 »

dingus wrote: post #299
prlambert wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 have everything set up correct and gmail even accepts 90% of my emails but every now and then it randomly marks one of my emails as spam. A gmail user emailed me first and I replied with a text email no links and that gets marked as spam.
Post reply on HN