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Why does Gmail hate my domain?

bitbin.de

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Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#61

Post by mattkrea »

quadrature wrote: post #4
ceejayoz wrote: post #3

If the domain is bitbin.de and the mail server is hosted on the same server, it's probably Hetzner being scorched-earth for deliverability, just like any other major hosting provider will be. Email from AWS, Rackspace, Heroku etc. get a drastically higher starting spam score because people fire up servers there to spam. Running the email through something like Amazon SES or Mandrill would probably be helpful. Both ha…

This seems to also be the case with DO, I setup a mail server on an instance there and can't escape people's spam boxes.

I ran my personal mail server on DO for about a year or so without issue. I would definitely try a new instance--I didn't even know this was a problem.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#62

Post by ceejayoz »

cmwelsh wrote: post #7
ceejayoz wrote: post #3

If the domain is bitbin.de and the mail server is hosted on the same server, it's probably Hetzner being scorched-earth for deliverability, just like any other major hosting provider will be. Email from AWS, Rackspace, Heroku etc. get a drastically higher starting spam score because people fire up servers there to spam. Running the email through something like Amazon SES or Mandrill would probably be helpful. Both ha…

Amazon SES has a pretty poor set of IPs due to the issue you mentioned about firing up servers to send spam. Mandrill is top notch, just like other professional email providers such as Mailgun and Sendgrid.

Are you thinking of EC2?

SES (as with Mandrill, Sendgrid, etc.) runs on a separate block of IPs and is very strict about spam/bounce reports. Very easy to get yourself throttled or cut off entirely.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#63

Post by [deleted] »

chc wrote: post #52
logicallee wrote: post #24

>What can I do except move to a hosted provider ? To answer your question about what you can do, you can send mail to Google legal asking them to accept your mail gmail users - just copy your whole blog post, I'm sure they'll action it right away: Antitrust is serious business. (They already have trouble in the EU for it - https://www.google.com/search?q=antitrust+eu+google - by the way I think it's completely unfoun…

Antitrust is serious business, but seeing as there is no clear antitrust issue here, I'm not sure what you think getting lawyers involved will accomplish other than making it impossible to help you since your case is now an impending legal action.

[deleted]

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#64

Post by kijin »

arrty88 wrote: post #8
quadrature wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to also be the case with DO, I setup a mail server on an instance there and can't escape people's spam boxes.

FWIW, I am able to send mail effectively from my Linode box, (passing SPF and DKIM).

Linode has always been very strict about keeping their IP ranges clean.

The fact that Linode's lowest tier has been $20/mo until recently ($10/mom nowadays) also helps. That makes Linode unnecessarily expensive for people who just want to burn IPs, since they can easily get an IP for $5/mo with DO or even less with low-end VPS providers.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#65

Post by massaman_yams »

ceejayoz wrote: post #51
jsnell wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a server on Hetzner that sends maybe 100k messages a week, and appears to have no problems with delivery. It doesn't even have SPF or DKIM set up. And I'm pretty sure that if messages were not getting delivered, users would complain. At least that's exactly what happened the one time there was a configuration screwup [1] that made some email providers reject mail from that server. So I don't know if that theory…

> I run a server on Hetzner that sends maybe 100k messages a week, and appears to have no problems with delivery. That volume (assuming non-spammy content, of course) would over time build up a positive reputation for your IPs, outbound addresses, and content. A new or low-volume IP on Hetzner is going to have a harder time overcoming the initial suspicion Gmail saddles it with.

That's probably more true in general than it is in this particular case. Gmail does IP reputation differently than other major ISPs, and domain/content reputation are very different beasts entirely.

Gmail's approach with a low-reputation IP is generally to throttle it aggressively; mail still gets through, just not very quickly if you're sending in bulk.

Domain reputation is not initially distrusted unless it's a brand-new domain (registered in the last 30 days or so), and generally doesn't come into play unless there's very unusually poor metrics (think sky-high spam complaints) associated with the domain. Content reputation is applied in a similar manner.

The headers I'm looking at should most likely give Gmail enough distinct identifiers to work with to isolate it from broader reputation issues at Hetzner, but the post only included partial headers, so I can't quite say that conclusively.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#66

Post by chc »

[deleted] wrote: post #63
chc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Antitrust is serious business, but seeing as there is no clear antitrust issue here, I'm not sure what you think getting lawyers involved will accomplish other than making it impossible to help you since your case is now an impending legal action.

[deleted]

> What do you mean there is "no clear antitrust issue" here? Most of OP's contacts use gmail, but gmail refuses his legitimate outside mail.

But Google does accept almost everybody else's email, including many actual commercial competitors, and there is no reason to believe anyone at Google is deliberating singling OP out or even knows who OP is, so I can't imagine where you're seeing anticompetitive behavior.

> Since email is an open protocol, and since his mail server is easy to verify and sends no spam (as he outlines at long length in his blog post), this really is quite blatant. Imagine if, early in the millennium, Internet Explorer refused to connect over http with servers that weren't IIS.

This is more like if Internet Explorer failed to connect to some random Joe's homebrew personal server but could connect to most other people's just fine whether or not they were using IIS. That's not anticompetitive behavior, it's just a bug, and in fact there were many things that Internet Explorer did not handle correctly.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#67

Post by massaman_yams »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #22

The author jumps to an unfounded conclusion which is pretty irritating and probably will make everybody who could help him not want to help him. That said I've never seen a DSN like the one in the screenshot. It certainly is not generated by the gmail spam checking system, because gmail does not bounce spam. Gmail either rejects spam at SMTP DATA time, or delivers it to spam folders.

It's entirely true that Gmail accepts mail at much higher rates than other major ISPs, and that their default handling of unwanted mail is to place it into the spam folder - but the truth is they can and will bounce mail if it's bad enough. It's just extremely uncommon for most people - even email marketers - to ever run into a situation where that happens.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#68

Post by pki »

MichaelCrawford wrote: post #59
pki wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

use mailchimp or sendgrid or sailthru instead of self hosting it.

If I include graphics in my mail, are the graphics hosted by an http server or included in each mail?

it is generally up to you, you can inline them (MIME/base64? in the message) or remotely serve.

it'll usually serve remote http pixels for "open tracking" either way though

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#69

Post by [deleted] »

chc wrote: post #66
[deleted] wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

> What do you mean there is "no clear antitrust issue" here? Most of OP's contacts use gmail, but gmail refuses his legitimate outside mail. But Google does accept almost everybody else's email, including many actual commercial competitors, and there is no reason to believe anyone at Google is deliberating singling OP out or even knows who OP is, so I can't imagine where you're seeing anticompetitive behavior. > Sinc…

[deleted]

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#70

Post by chc »

[deleted] wrote: post #69
chc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you mean there is "no clear antitrust issue" here? Most of OP's contacts use gmail, but gmail refuses his legitimate outside mail. But Google does accept almost everybody else's email, including many actual commercial competitors, and there is no reason to believe anyone at Google is deliberating singling OP out or even knows who OP is, so I can't imagine where you're seeing anticompetitive behavior. > Sinc…

[deleted]

Your antitrust case hinges on the fact that a random commenter on a blog suggested their personal folk remedy of signing up for Google Apps. I would love to see an antitrust that has been lost over less.

Again, Google accepts email from a huge number of sources, including major competitors, of which the OP is not one. Many people here even report running their own mail servers and experiencing success sending to Gmail. What kind of anticompetitive behavior is that? There is no indication that this is anything more than a bug.

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