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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#611

Post by muppetman »

ma2rten wrote: post #587
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…

- Email coming from addresses to which I had already sent email. (!) That is understandable. It is hard to validate if an email is authentic. SMTP has no authentication built in. Gmail can't just blindly accept all emails from addresses that you have already sent an email to. EDIT: Look at this example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol#... Anyone can connect to relay.example.com and pretend…

Not if you use SPF/DKIM/DMARC they can't, that's the whole point of those various additions.

All those "I hacked your email and send you a message from you account" I don't get, because I have a DMARC policy that says if you don't pass SPF/DKIM then you get rejected. So try as the spammer might to connect to my mailserver and pretend to be me, they can't, because my mailserver sees they're not authenticated, and the mailserver they're sending from isn't in my SPF records, isn't signing the message with my DKIM key and therefore it gets rejected at the SMTP level.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#613

Post by craz8 »

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 sent mail from my personal gmail to my company email (different user) for expenses

Since money was involved, I paid attention and followed up

Our finance person found many emails in Spam that were important and should not be there

On the other hand, my personal Spam folder is certainly full of crap I never want to see. But now I don’t trust the system, so I have to scan them anyway

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#614

Post by drivebycomment »

Silhouette wrote: post #69
laurentl wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Are you suggesting any random person without any authentication proof to be able to just sign people out of their devices ? That would be a broken security.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#615

Post by carte_blanche »

vbezhenar wrote: post #164
Tepix wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right response to this problem - for gmail users - would be to switch to a different email provider. After all, if you are not receiving important mails because Google decides to block them for inexplicable reasons, you are getting an inferior, faulty service. (For me gmail is inferior regardless as my privacy is violated)

Can you suggest free email provider with similar level of service which allows to use your own domain?

Yandex.com does all that.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#616

Post by mirimir »

slacka wrote: post #585
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…

First of all, if you check this site: https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/checkmx/check?domain=tab... It is not to be set up correctly. Now in your case, you failed to mention DMARC records. ALL of the big cloud email services have required that for years. Your SMTP server checklist is straight out of 2005. This entire thread reminds me of the guy who pulled out of a desk drawer an Analog Startac cell phone and blame…

What does this mean?

> error SPF must allow Google servers to send mail on behalf of your domain.

So you must let Google spoof your domain? That seems crazy.

ProtonMail has the same error:

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

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#617

Post by jodrellblank »

yeahitslikethat wrote: post #467
zwkrt wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

If something happens a trillion times a day with .00001 error rate, then 50 MILLION things went wrong, affecting, say 50,000 people. 50 of them blast twitter and it seems the world is collapsing. The world is resilient.

If there are 50,000 people and 50,000 people experience problems, that's bad.

If there are 5 million people and 50,000 experience problems, that's fine?

Isaac Asimov's comments about world population increase involved something about this; the more people there are, the more each individual is dehumanised and rendered irrelevant (my paraphrasing).

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#618

Post by SXX »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #537
arpa wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what's really funny? That even with that overly agressive spam filter, once in a while (once a quarter maybe), it somehow manages to miss obvious BuY@@NiGERiAn@@Vi@gRa-Cia1is type of emails... which, by the way, my morally outdated spamassasin marks as spam.

"morally outdated" ?

I would make an educated guess that "arpa" is from EX-USSR and their native language is Russian. It's direct translation of idiom "морально устаревший" which literally means something is:

* Available for decades.

* Far from being top notch technology.

* Sometimes of course it's literally mean outdated. Like if you run older CentOS or Debian with decade-old packages.

So it's doesn't mean SpamAssassin is bad, but it's very far from state-of-the-art ML technologies that Google might have.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#619

Post by johnklos »

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 call bullshit. Google has flaunted their complete disregard for RFCs time and time again. Try to send an abuse complaint to abuse@ any domain that's hosted by Google. You can't. Try to correspond with a human. You can't.

Content filters should never be applied to abuse addresses, yet Google happily ignores this and never even replies to abuse complaints sent to @gmail.com or @google.com.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#620

Post by philshem »

pandemicsoul wrote: post #546
robbrit wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ProtonMail has a free tier. It's definitely not the same level of service as Gmail, but I prefer it to being so dependent on the big G juggernaut for a critical service. Downsides: * spam detector is a bit aggressive, sometimes legitimate emails make it in there. * features are limited unless you pay. Full disclosure: I pay for their Plus product. My rationale is that I pay twice as much per month for Netflix yet ema…

I'd argue that if ProtonMail's spam filter is too aggressive then basically you're in the same place you were with Gmail, aren't you? (Except now you're paying?)

So far with PM my outgoing mails have consistently made it to inboxes (which is why I switched from zoho)
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