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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#561

Post by umeshunni »

joshuamorton wrote: post #238
maxaf wrote: post #9

> I'm sure there is no malicious intent behind this How can anyone be sure of this? This is only one of Google’s practices that seems to follow a pervasive pattern of eroding open internet standards while presenting Google’s own proprietary implementation as somehow superior. Eventually, the open standard loses all meaning because the most popular implementation does not actually adhere to it. Meanwhile, Google reaps…

Email in Gmail isn't used for ad targeting, so this line of thinking doesn't follow well.

The fact that you're being downvoted for stating the facts is a good indication of HN's groupthink.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#562

Post by hueving »

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…

>Firstly, Gmail's success is entirely predicated on the health of the global email ecosystem.

It absolutely does not. It is so large now that what the parent poster said is the real case. It has such dominance that people are pressured to switch to Gmail or Google apps to get stuff reliably delivered to the massive percentage of email users.

This is exactly like an IE6 PM coming on extolling the virtues of open standards and how they are critical to the success of internet explorer.

Seriously think about it (assuming you are even posting in good faith). If Gmail's success was "entirely predicated on the health", do you really think Postmaster tools and other interoperability efforts would have so little investment?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#563

Post by m463 »

zwkrt wrote: post #439
mintplant wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Email coming from Google itself. Yep. I missed an invitation to a Google-hosted event at a conference I attended because the email (from an @google.com address, no less) got caught in Gmail's spam filter.

This is a problem with ML approaches, right? Instead of water boiling at "100C" it boils at "99.98C +- 0.04C". Normally this is ok, but sometimes it isn't!

Denver is just a small minority of the US and we just can't please everyone.

(afaik in denver water boils at 95C)

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#564

Post by cptskippy »

FakeComments wrote: post #483
prewett wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how you make of career of not doing a bad business plan.

You get hired to be the subject matter expert on economic models, then you remind executives who consult with you that their plans don’t get better just by adding computers (or fancy math of any form). Eventually, even when you get fired because they tired of you being a nag, you write down all the times your nagging was right, and someone else hires you to be the math nag, because corporations have accepted they nee…

> There’s easier ways to make money with the same skill set.

Yes but some people really love to nag.

I work in enterprise for similar reason, I really like sighing at things.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#565

Post by m463 »

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 think the SPAM folder is a separate issue (although important)

The article discusses mail not being accepted by google/gmail in the first place.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#566

Post by baudehlo »

tomComb wrote: post #499
mintplant wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Email coming from Google itself. Yep. I missed an invitation to a Google-hosted event at a conference I attended because the email (from an @google.com address, no less) got caught in Gmail's spam filter.

Yup, I've had the same thing. Just kinda amusing and ironic since I didn't happen to care about that event but it makes one nervous about relying on spam filtering. On the other hand, once you train it a bit, it is mostly remarkable good. For me, switching from fastmail.fm (which was pretty good itself) to Gmail gave me a big improvement in spam control.

Super curious about this response saying on gmail you have more control, because from where I am the “mark as spam” button does nothing but move things to the spam folder. In theory it should learn from that but when someone used my email address to sign up for AT&T no amount of marking things as spam will stop their emails landing in my inbox.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#567

Post by baudehlo »

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 recently missed an email from the UK government regarding a passport application, it went to Spam. Talk about missing the mark!

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#568

Post by PenguinCoder »

wingworks wrote: post #503
cpeterso wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet, in my own none Gmail hosted email (fastmail), I currently have 2/55 false positive spam emails. I very rarely ever check it. To note I usually get one actual spam (non newsletter blog spam) to my actual inbox, a month.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#570

Post by will4274 »

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 Google recruiters (@google.com email addresses) go to spam. I considered this a high level indicator that Google spam filtering is incompetent, not malicious - if it was malicious, they would at least be able to get their corporate emails through.
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