Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Is Eating Our Mail

tablix.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 720 posts

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#621

Post by badpun »

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.

Sometimes error rates, even nominally low ones, are bad. Would you like to have your IV changed by a nurse with 0.001 error rate?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#622

Post by travbrack »

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…

Datapoint: Ive run a small exchange server with fewer than 500 users for 5 years and have never had an issue delivering to Gmail except a couple times when we had legit issues on our end.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#623

Post by anticensor »

skookumchuck wrote: post #525
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…

Google could fix this rather simply. Have an opt-in system whereby anyone sending you email is charged a penny. (Of course, this will initially mean the sender will need to get a google account, but as this catches on more email providers will provide this service.) Split the revenue between the recipient and Google. I don't mind spending a penny to send an email, I don't send enough to make any difference. But to sp…

You have just reinvented postage stamp.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#624

Post by Faark »

Fogest wrote: post #595
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…

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 mak…

> 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

It makes a lot of sense... people use the spam button as a lazy man's unsubscribe. Youtube adding the bell button, making mail opt in is probably a response to that.

I actually give Google a lot of cred for not simply white-listing its own domains. Though spammers would probably find ways to abuse it and make them look bad anyway.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#625

Post by kreetx »

walterbell wrote: post #520
dhess wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great idea. I've run my own mail servers since 1999. I'd happily join a union of independent mail operators with the purpose of lobbying Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to treat us as first-class citizens.

Start a mailing list? Or is there an existing one for this topic?

I think you should have a web page where you list your issues, show how you've done all the normal things to be considered a well-behaved mail domain. And then perhaps report your experiences with iinteracting with gmail support on the matter.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#626

Post by skookumchuck »

anticensor wrote: post #623
skookumchuck wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google could fix this rather simply. Have an opt-in system whereby anyone sending you email is charged a penny. (Of course, this will initially mean the sender will need to get a google account, but as this catches on more email providers will provide this service.) Split the revenue between the recipient and Google. I don't mind spending a penny to send an email, I don't send enough to make any difference. But to sp…

You have just reinvented postage stamp.

Exactly. Except the USPS doesn't share revenue with me.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#627

Post by amelius »

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…

Also, a lot of big companies don't even allow their employees to use Gmail, but I suspect they are allowed to send email to people on Gmail.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#628

Post by deno »

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…

That’s what SPF[1] is for, and optionally DMARC[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMARC

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#629

Post by laughinghan »

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…

    we will make mistakes
Completely understandable.

What I don't understand: why aren't these false positives sent to the recipient's Spam folder? Why else does that folder exist?

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#630

Post by rodgerd »

kreetx wrote: post #400
russh wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add me to the "I've run mail servers since the mid 90's and the experience above exactly mirrors my experience." list.

I think all of you should start some kind of a movement so that this could be heared better at GMail's end.

Even if it isn't deliberate, even if gmail give a fuck, as can be seen from the first (and so far only) response from anyone at Google, they're so far in the Google "We're better than everyone else and always get it right because we're geniuses" RDF that it literally doesn't matter. They can't believe that they're the problem.
Post reply on HN