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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#591

Post by calibas »

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.

Up until recently it was used for ad targeting.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#592

Post by Dylan16807 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #519
necovek wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

You can't automate your way out of paying for a domain, too, and that costs significantly more than an IP.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#593

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

Buge wrote: post #582
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I’m now regularly seeing search results bury political pages which seem to run counter bay area political views. This has been a well known occurrence. I’m think about all those pictures of “Hillary Clinton is” [0] typed into each search engine and Google was polar opposite of all others. I think one needs to be pretty obtuse to not see Google is “curating” results to fit an ideology. Everyone should be mad at that…

Google has milder suggestions for Donald Trump, just like for Hillary Clinton: https://i.imgur.com/0KkKTpJ.png > can someone find me another phrase besides "Hillary Clinton" that "breaks" the search fill when "is" gets added? Jeb Bush: https://i.imgur.com/xrxrEy2.png https://i.imgur.com/f9OBDDH.png

Good point on Trump. All the same though, it’s clear “the algorithm” gets a heavy hand.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#594

Post by slacka »

amenod wrote: post #317
joering2 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not sure why you are being downvoted, you have a point. There is no excuse for the way Google is operating now - poor customer support, the only recourse twits and HN posts. I think it also hurts Google themselves. There is a reason they have trouble competing with AWS. Why should developers trust Google that there will be a person on the other side helping them out when things go wrong? And they always do, at worst…

> - define, hardcode and publish rules that will lead to successfull e-mail delivery (SPF, DKIM, history,...)

This has existed for years:

https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/checkmx/check?domain=tab...

If your site passes and is not on a blacklist, your email gets delivered.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#595

Post by Fogest »

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 just cleaned out a little over 100 emails in my Gmail spam filter yesterday. About 80% of what was in there were emails from YouTube giving me notifications of new videos people have uploaded that I am subscribed to. These emails never used to go to spam, but slowly over time more and more of them would end up in spam. It's at the point now where almost all of them from YouTube go to the spam folder.

It doesn't make any sense since they are emails from Google, they are emails I even have a filter applied to so that a label is applied to them. Yes I can adjust the filter and choose "never send to spam" but the messages will still show a warning on them saying "This message was not sent to spam because of a filter you have applied".

Sure false positives makes sense, but I don't get how the majority of what is in my spam folder would be emails sent by Google.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#596

Post by jake_the_third »

Chlorus wrote: post #186
OldSchoolJohnny wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Difficult to host smtp?! That's absolutely not true and has never been true. It's difficult to configure and set up in the first place but after that it's just updating. Source: personal experience for decades.

It's not like you'd notice the email you're not receiving, so I'm always a little leery of these "it works perfectly for me!" stories for email stuff.

I though the issue was with getting your mails accepted. Even gmail has no problem sending email to a server that isn't properly set up as long as it is willing to accept.

Can you mention (or link to) situations where gmail refuses to send mails to another domain?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#597

Post by throwaway2048 »

LeonM wrote: post #545
throwaway2048 wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can satisfy all of this, have an IP with an absolutely spotless reputation that you have personally controlled for years that has never sent spam, and still be arbitrarily shitlisted with zero recourse whatsoever.

IP addresses are really insignificant in spam detection because spammers can easily switch to a new IP address. Like with Google's search algorithm, the spam detection algorithms are secret and evolve constantly. So I'm not claiming I know how the algorithm works, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if IP addresses aren't even used anymore in Google's spam detection. So no, you are not 'shitlisted' as you called it. T…

Whatever you care to call it is irrelevant, you jump through all the hoops, and your mail dosen't get delivered.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#598

Post by incompatible »

awinder wrote: post #49
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…

You don't have to switch to gmail, you can pretty reliably switch to a myriad of service providers. You could even solely switch your SMTP server to something hosted and retain message storage on your end if you wanted. It has become very difficult / unwise to host your own SMTP server, though, but that's been true for ages now. Gmail's marketshare is going to make that veeeery obvious, but it really has been a bad i…

Surely someone has to run their own SMTP servers, or there won't be any SMTP servers. So how is it decided who can run SMTP servers and who can not, and is this a good method?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#599

Post by wlesieutre »

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…

Just signed up for two newsletters today, both “Please confirm your subscription” messages went to spam. Corrected it then hit the confirm links. One “subscription confirmed” email went to inbox after that, the other still went to spam.

Guess I’ll find out whether correcting it a second time applies to the actual newsletter messages.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#600

Post by throwaway2048 »

incompatible wrote: post #598
awinder wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to switch to gmail, you can pretty reliably switch to a myriad of service providers. You could even solely switch your SMTP server to something hosted and retain message storage on your end if you wanted. It has become very difficult / unwise to host your own SMTP server, though, but that's been true for ages now. Gmail's marketshare is going to make that veeeery obvious, but it really has been a bad i…

Surely someone has to run their own SMTP servers, or there won't be any SMTP servers. So how is it decided who can run SMTP servers and who can not, and is this a good method?

What the message here is that you, a non-connected nobody, shouldn't try to host it, because they will reject your mail.

This gets couched in it being "hard" like somehow its an insurmountable force of nature.

It isn't.

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