Gmail is rejecting valid content as spam and it never hits my spam folder. If I was not expecting an email as I was in this case, I would be totally oblivious. Something is up with the spam filter recently. They might have decrease the tolerance for spam and as a result a lot of legitimate traffic is being hit in the cross fire.
Google Is Eating Our Mail
711–720 of 720 posts
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#712Earlier quoted context omitted.
As in signed up for AT&T service? If so it's because it's not spam - it's misdirected mail, but there are tens of thousands of other Gmail users who think that messages almost identical to those are things they absolutely want to receive.
If there is no business relationship between AT&T and that user, the U.S. Can Spam Act defines it as spam. Shame on AT&T for not validating their customer's email address. I too get the same type of spam from AT&T.
My point is that absent information that Google simply does not have no matter how creepy they get, there's literally no way they can identify such messages as spam - exactly the opposite in fact because probably 99.999% of such messages that they process are explicitly not spam.
The only way Google would have to identify that this message was not for you would be to get the subscriber information from AT&T and cross-reference it with name and address information they had for you - and even then most of the time they'd probably be wrong (e.g. if the email is coming to you but the account is actually in a family member's name).
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#713Earlier quoted context omitted.
I too self-host and have done for decades. When I had a problem that may perhaps have been like this, Google disabled the relevant part of them spam filter and made an issue in some internal tracker. I write "Perhaps" because my report was a lot more specific. Google sells mail+spam filtering+more as a product, with a seven-digit number of paying customers, each of which pay per month and user. What more incentive co…
> I write "Perhaps" because my report was a lot more specific. How did you even get your report to be read by an engineer at Google? This seems impossible unless you have some kind of business connection.
That bit is easier for me than for you, perhaps, since gmail implements about four RFCs I've written ;)
That bit isn't the MSB, though. The MSB is that they do care about fixing interop problems with everyone, they just don't read mail from randoms. I think they assume is that if a problem is their fault it will show up on their monitoring graphs, and watch their error graphs instead of their postmaster inbox.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#714Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?)
The issue described in the OP is email not even making it to the spam folder. If it at least makes it to ProtonMail's spam folder, that's an improvement.
Yep. And if I mark an email as "not spam", that address gets white-listed and doesn't go back to the spam box.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#715Google eats everything
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#716Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I lost my Signal conversation history as well and had to be re-added to all group conversations (another PITA). How do you store seed values in password managers? More specifically: how do you export them from Coogle Authenticator? (I’ve not found that option). And how do you import them again?
I'm unaware of any options to export, that would be a security issue. To store the seed values, simply store the text provided for use if you can't use the qr code.
ISTR at least one service (AWS or Google) asking for the first 2 codes after scanning the QR code, probably to sync. So I always assumed simply re-scanning the QR code wouldn’t be enough but maybe it is this simple.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#717Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fastmail [EDIT: Sorry, missed the 'free' in there. Guess you get what you pay for]
I would love to pay FastMail for my family’s email. I have myself, my wife, my four children, one family address and one other generic address. 8 emails would cost me $240 a year at a minimum. If they could solve for my situation and not charge me that kind of money, I would switch from Gmail immediately.
Migadu is the place to go--they charge for traffic, not mailboxes. I'm in a similar boat with lots of domains, aliases, and mailboxes. My family comfortably fits in their "mini" plan, $48/year.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#718I've also hosted my own email for several years now, on several domains. The one thing I have that does not appear to be listed is a DMARC policy. As the comments on the blog post suggest, configuring DMARC works. I have no problem delivering to either Gmail or Outlook.
I don't think it's unreasonable to be strict regarding DMARC delivery. My MTA has a fairly strict SPF configuration - any email with an invalid spf result is rejected. This can come about because a legitimate company has misconfigured their spf records (happened twice in all the years I have hosted, discussions via postmaster@ helped them configure their dns correctly), but 99.999% of the time it is a spammer. What is worse is that rejecting email for domains without any SPF records can still result in valid email being lost, in 2019.
In this specific case, I don't think Google are "being evil". They're trying to reduce spam in the email ecosystem and they're doing it by using standards they themselves adhere to (Gmail send me reports of dmarc statistics each day google domains receive email from my box).
On the other hand, I do of course support either self hosting, or using another provider so as to ensure we do not end up with a Gmail monopoly. If I did not self host, I would find another provider like (but may not) Fastmail, Posteo etc (I would have to seriously review the options, which I haven't done).
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#719Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm unaware of any options to export, that would be a security issue. To store the seed values, simply store the text provided for use if you can't use the qr code.
ISTR at least one service (AWS or Google) asking for the first 2 codes after scanning the QR code, probably to sync. So I always assumed simply re-scanning the QR code wouldn’t be enough but maybe it is this simple.
The underlying technology behind (almost?) all of these is TOTP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_One-time_Password_a...) which pretty much just depends on both systems having clocks that are reasonably close to synced. The initial value is basically a random number generator seed, and given the seed and a number of iterations (based on the time differential from a set starting point) calculating a code is fairly simple.
There would be problems on fully-isolated systems experiencing clock drift, but on any modern Internet-connected system using NTP or on any cell phone with time synced to the network it shouldn't be a factor. The most likely problem scenario is probably a corporate network using only an internal time source that drifts.
Doing a single code as validation only makes sense to catch transcription errors since in case of problems someone could end up locked out of an account.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#720Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It was annoying, but didn't feel like it was as big of a deal. Perhaps because email itself wasn't as big of deal back then? Phone calls and snail mail were used with a lot more regularity back then.
Heh. I’ll be honest, that sounds a lot like a millennial projecting onto all the old people in this thread. Sure there’s an element of truth to it, but email was insanely popular before the iPhone too...
>like a millennial projecting
Well, I am almost 40, so not really a millennial at all, but a gen x'er. And I remember being in college and going days, maybe weeks without checking email. I also remember my university giving me an a .edu address, which I was technically supposed to use (supposedly there was important information sent to it from professors), but never logged into once.