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Google Is Eating Our Mail

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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#671

Post by knorker »

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…

> - Email coming from Google itself.

To be fair, sometimes Google does send spam.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#672

Post by derefnull »

Thanks for writing this up, this mirrors my experience setting up a modern email server for personal & business use.

I currently self-host for non-mission-critical email, use FastMail for business, and continue to use google apps for personal/mission-critical.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#673

Post by mmargerum »

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…

GMail is placing email from other users in the same google suites domain into spam which makes 0 sense since google knows they all belong to the same gsuite account.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#675

Post by twoelfer »

theWheez wrote: post #297
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.

Any tips for somebody looking to move to my own smtp server? It's been on my mind a few months, and I want to move away from gmail to my own server or to another service, preferably one I pay for.

I personally use MDaemon which runs on windows Server and has a nice configuration ui. Have been using that for our small company for 20+ years.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#676

Post by reitanqild »

tomComb wrote: post #506
phinnaeus wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely with everything you said. It's too bad that Google has no incentive to allow a premium/ad-free experience as that implies having ads is a negative thing, which basically undermines their entire business model.

They have G Suite, and they also tried a more consumer oriented version but no one wanted to pay. I would love it if more of the Internet were based on payments and micro-payments but consumers have voted decisively against that. I try to sell people on the idea of paying for news but extremely few are willing even for something that critical.

> They have G Suite, and they also tried a more consumer oriented version but no one wanted to pay.

I have paid them for years for photo storage. Looking for somewhere to move it in case their AI suddenly decides it doesn't like me (I've already went through a reCaptcha party after trying to dig up some documentation for some special error messages that I felt should be out there somewhere.)

> I would love it if more of the Internet were based on payments and micro-payments but consumers have voted decisively against that.

Didn't have a chance at all to vote.

They could have earned a lot more on than than than they do from me not clicking on the dumbest ads I know about.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#677

Post by flurdy »

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 also have a 15+ years old set of mail servers and I host mail domains for 10ish friends and family. In fact, I once wrote how to set this up (http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix)

I no longer use Gmail myself but half of my users relay some aliases to their main Gmail account. No problems with that, except my servers continuously get rate limited by Google:

    Our system has detected an unusual rate of 421-4.7.0 unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our 421-4.7.0 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily 421-4.7.0 rate limited. Please visit 421-4.7.0  https://support.google.com/mail/?p=UnsolicitedRateLimitError to 421 4.7.0 review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines.
I have the normal anti-spam features set up (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, Postgrey, Spamassassin, etc) so most spam gets rejected but not all. But several of my users have very common English names as their aliases that are already guessed and added to many spam databases.

This leads to family phoning me all the time to say my server is broken when it is just Google throttling everyone's emails. I frequently have to check Postfix queues and clear some obvious spam or just pointless Facebook update emails which seems to be the majority... (Yes your email admin can read your email...)

The only way to improve is to constantly remind my family to not sign up to all crap, use not so common aliases, and try to keep tightening my anti-spam configurations. But we really are not talking about a lot of emails. Probably less than a hundred per day spread across 5-ish end accounts of which 95% is probably legit. Yet Google is treating me as some totally open relay. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#678

Post by zlynx »

baudehlo wrote: post #567
cpeterso wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment motivated me to check my Gmail spam folder and 10% (3 out of 30) were false positives, two of which were pretty important. :(

I recently missed an email from the UK government regarding a passport application, it went to Spam. Talk about missing the mark!

A spam filter can't whitelist government email. My personal SpamAssassin filters out spam from government servers all the time. The latest was from somewhere in Quebec.

You'd think the various governments would put more effort into computer security. They appear not to care, though.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#679

Post by zlynx »

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…

It turns out DMARC isn't actually required. Having it might help your acceptance score, but gmail and outlook don't actually require it.

I know because I haven't set up DMARC for my email domain, and my email still gets accepted by everyone.

I believe it helps that I accept on TLS with a valid certificate, and I used Google's postmaster site verification.

Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail

#680

Post by joshuamorton »

Sabinus wrote: post #602
umeshunni wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you're being downvoted for stating the facts is a good indication of HN's groupthink.

Just because Google stopped scanning email for ad targeting two years ago doesn't detract from the fact that it was their practice for ten years previously. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html

Sure, but GP contended that

> Gmail’s spam filtering is just a pretext for passing all email through a machine learning system. Sure, one possible signal emitted by that system is whether a message is spam or not. Perhaps this determination is conflated with wether the message is useful for ad targeting

And well, that's clearly not the case if Google moved from doing both ad targeting and spam to just spam. The evidence is literally Google moving in the polar opposite direction from the nefariousness that they suggest.

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