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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#61

Post by tqkxzugoaupvwqr »

rc_mob wrote: post #30
sneak wrote: post #11

I have run a private mailserver for over 20 years, and I have the same problem. There's no telling what Google will let through. I have a second account at a medium-sized email provider, basically paying them for access to the email deliverability cartel.

We need a new message protocol

I fear this will lead to the same problem: If it’s interesting enough for Google, they will offer a free service, gobble up a large number of users, at which point they can hold the new protocol hostage, add their own extensions, and everyone else must follow.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#62

Post by rootusrootus »

cptskippy wrote: post #29
dralley wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't even have to be doing it deliberately; as you say, the lack of incentives to fix such issues will cause a gradual evolution in that direction.

I feel like as they leave more and more up to the algorithms, we suffer. I've been having this ever increasing in frequency issue where Gmail Search just doesn't working. Not that it doesn't return search results but rather that it returns what I know to be incorrect results. I have an email with some account information that I access a couple times a year at most but will consistently need at least once a year. Just…

> I feel like as they leave more and more up to the algorithms, we suffer.

Seems like it ends up working somewhat like China's social credit policy, but without specific intent. As long as you always conform enough to fall into the normal area of the algorithm you're good, but get off towards one edge for any reason and you quietly get [effectively] booted off the 'net.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#63

Post by taneq »

linuxftw wrote: post #24
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…

Define 'people'. We're already there IMO. The kids today don't have any particular understanding of what the internet is and how it works. They view it through walled gardens via the app store.

I used to be 'with it'. Now what I'm 'with' isn't 'it' and what's 'it' is strange and foreign to me. It'll happen to you!

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#64

Post by surgi »

Am I the only one here experiencing that GMail does reasonably good job in filtering out the spam, while I have to visit the Spam folder approximately once a week, just to randomly correct a mail or 2 a month? (not a Google employee)

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#66

Post by cosmin800 »

I've always thought that, I also used to operate my own email server and I've encountered the same problem with other email providers, always the big ones, yahoo (there was a time when yahoo was big in email, at least here), microsoft and now yes, google. What is even worse is that sometimes google just drops the email messages, replies with 250 ok, but the email never gets delivered to inbox or even spam. Definetly the big 4 or 5 or whatever are taking over on all aspects of our life. Actually if I think better about it, they have already done so, there was an article here on hn about blocking google, amazon and ms network blocks, nothing really works as expected without them.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#67

Post by nothis »

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…

The evil part about this is that it needs no one at any step to say it out loud. It just “happens” as a result of Google being big.

Whatever lead to Microsoft being sued for pushing Internet Explorer in Europe and whatnot? Shouldn’t that kick in already for at least some of the recent Google bullshit?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#68

Post by LeonM »

I run a mail monitoring service [0], and we hear this complaint every now and then.

A couple of things that regularly seems to trigger false positives in spam algorithms:

- no or misconfigured SPF and/or DKIM

- no or misconfigured reverse-DNS

- automatically included footer texts (confidentiality, copyright, safe a tree don't print, etc)

- regular automatic replies from the domain (such as out of office notifications)

- the use of embedded images (logos, human signatures, etc)

We sometimes joke that these triggers were built in by the algorithm developers as a means of punishing those who litter their email with pointless texts and images.

[0] https://www.mailhardener.com

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#69

Post by Silhouette »

laurentl wrote: post #10
pettycashstash2 wrote: post #2

Add another perspective to this. Once I updated my phone, and google would not accept new google Authenticator codes after set up. Locked out of 15 years of email.

I had a fright last time I changed phones. After restoring my backup onto the new phone, I was about to wipe the old one; I did a final pass through my apps just in case... and saw that Google Authenticator configuration did not carry over to the new phone (which makes sens from a security perspective but is a PITA to manage). I had to re-enroll my device with all the services on which I use MFA. After this episode I…

When a family member had a phone stolen not long ago, the only major functionality on it that they couldn't quickly and securely disable was the Google stuff.

The procedures for doing so seemed to be unnecessarily complicated and difficult to find when starting, ironically, from a Google search on another device.

Worse, the security policies seemed to be fundamentally flawed, because they kept insisting on some form of authentication based on a trusted device when the purpose of the transaction was to notify them that the trusted device had been stolen.

There has been an unhealthy trend recently of assuming that everyone has a mobile phone and that communications to that phone/number are a good method of authentication, without adequate thought to what happens if the physical device and/or the associated phone number are compromised, or to whether protocols like SMS are really suitable for this sort of application. And some of the really important things, like banks and government services and email providers (which are in practice a gateway to everything else you do online) are often among the worst offenders. I don't know what to do about this, but certainly raising awareness of this kind of problem would be a good start.

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