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Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

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Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#81
post #79
post #32

The most damning thing about this is they didn't test their email infra w/ Google Workspaces. Imagine what else they didn't test.

yeah, because the whole world uses Google workspaces, right /s

That and MS Office are pretty darn popular. Not the whole world, but a very decent percentage of your users.

Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#82

10 percent of the effort in building software compatibility with open source file specifications is dealing with knowing the specifications. 90 percent of the effort is dealing with errors in generated files by less worthy software programs. The RSS spec is one way. RSS readers do a fine job of interpreting files done the right way. Publishers don’t always do a good job with publishing error free RSS files. So RSS re…

One that always irks me to no end, is every time I see someone ham fisting csv handling by hand instead of using an established, well-sourced library. They almost always fail at commas or newlines in quoted text... It's one of the more annoying things.

Currently working on replacing a couple decades old system, and my csv output is using a library that isn't quoting all the strings that don't require quotes... so I'm forced to do it (for compatibility) with the other system this csv is going to. (sigh).

Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#83

10 percent of the effort in building software compatibility with open source file specifications is dealing with knowing the specifications. 90 percent of the effort is dealing with errors in generated files by less worthy software programs. The RSS spec is one way. RSS readers do a fine job of interpreting files done the right way. Publishers don’t always do a good job with publishing error free RSS files. So RSS re…

My personal fork of ttrss, from 2005, is a dodgy patchwork of fixes for badly formatted RSS. I can't imagine trying to host a service that deals with RSS feeds from random sites at scale.

Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#84
post #12

My pet peeve are services that go out of their way to include a text/plain alternative message part but send something useless, such as the message without the key link. One time I seriously ran into a service just send a short one-sentence note along the lines of "this is a plain text email" as the plain text part. If you don't want to support plain text, maybe just don't send the alternative part?

I find the ones that try to be cute the most frustrating because these appear on the new message notifications so I can't just delete them straight from the notification.

We'd love to share this exciting announcement but you'll a different email app.

Although I guess the argument will be that email clients should use AI to summarise the HTML into a plain text summary.

Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#85
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is at least less arbitrary than Microsoft. Microsoft will decide an email is spam today, and tomorrow the exact same email is perfectly fine. I think Google relies more and more on sending IP and domain reputation rather than content.

Deliverability to Microsoft famously took a dive a bit over a year ago due to random arbitrary failures within their infrastructure causing DMARC/DKIM problems which they clearly were having problems diagnosing. Even with a six-figure email spend and weeks of troubleshooting the best response we could get from our mail provider was that they were having problems getting traction with Microsoft on the issue.

Worth mentioning is that there are several email umbrellas under Microsoft... including the newer office/365, the slightly older outlook.com hosting, the old corp hosting and hotmail and sub-properties... each with different rules and services to determine spam in inconsistent ways between them.

One of my main emails is still on a "free" outlook.com hosted with a personal domain that I never shifted to paid 365. I've also got an MTA server (mailu) of my own that I've been testing with... my own email under outlook.com is literally the only one of the MS systems I can't seem to deliver to, the rest work fine. Same for google.com for that matter... kinda wild.

Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can argue that you not obligated to use message-id but if you don't use it you should blame only yourself that your messages are not accepted. In requiring message-id I would side with google (though in general I think they anti-spam is too aggressive and lacks ways to report false positives). Full RFC compliance (as in not only MUST but also SHOULD unless you have a very good reason) is the easiest part of makin…

> if you don't use it you should blame only yourself that your messages are not accepted I think it's a gray area - If the receiver declines your message because "Message-id" is required - then I blame the receiver; because that's not true - If the receiver declines your message because "most systems do include it, and it's lack of presence is highly correlated with spam email", then it's on the sender Admittedly, th…

Does it even matter when in reality it's more likely that this is intentional anti-competitive behavior by Google?

They once made all emails from my very reputable small German email provider (a company that has existed and provided email services long before Google existed) go into a black whole - not bounce them back or anything like that, mind you, their servers accepted them and made them disappear forever. I was in contact with the technicians then to get the problem fixed and they told me it's very difficult for them to even reach anyone at Google. It took them several days to get the problem fixed.

Of course, no one will ever be able to prove an intention behind these kind of "technical glitches." Nothing of significance ever happened when Google had large optics fiber connections with NSA installed illegally and claimed to have no knowledge of it, so certainly nothing will happen when small issues with interoperability occur and drive more people to Gmail.

Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#87
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can argue that you not obligated to use message-id but if you don't use it you should blame only yourself that your messages are not accepted. In requiring message-id I would side with google (though in general I think they anti-spam is too aggressive and lacks ways to report false positives). Full RFC compliance (as in not only MUST but also SHOULD unless you have a very good reason) is the easiest part of makin…

On the other hand, by erroneously treating a SHOULD as a MUST, I would say that Google is the one who's not RFC-compliant

[deleted]

Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#88
post #13

> Viva.com's outgoing verification emails lack a Message-ID header, a requirement that has been part of the Internet Message Format specification (RFC 5322) since 2008 > ... > `Message-ID` is one of the most basic required headers in email. Section 3.6. of the RFC in question ( https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5322.html ) says: +----------------+--------+------------+----------------------------+ | Field | Min | Max…

The official definition of SHOULD per RFC2119: 3. SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course. Not sure how the people at Google interpreted this about the message-id

Google interpreted it that way because it drives more people to use gmail.

Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#89
post #42

I have some level of sympathy with Google here, which isn’t something I often say. I recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail and by and large I’m happy with it. But I’ve been surprised by the amount of spam and (particularly) phishing emails I get in a regular basis. Google might be too strict in its filtering but it does serve a legitimate purpose.

Fastmail seems to go through periods where they're a little slower to adjust to new spam techniques, and they do rely on users filtering somewhat. About twice a year a few will slip through, but if I report them as spam they soon stop.

I've been a happy customer otherwise for years, for what its worth.

Re: Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

#90
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you don't use it you should blame only yourself that your messages are not accepted I think it's a gray area - If the receiver declines your message because "Message-id" is required - then I blame the receiver; because that's not true - If the receiver declines your message because "most systems do include it, and it's lack of presence is highly correlated with spam email", then it's on the sender Admittedly, th…

I think it's the latter. But, in either case, you're right in that you get the same result. Now, let's assume that if it is the latter (it's spam related), and Google were to accept the message, but then internally bin the message, it would be worse. At least in this case, they are bouncing the message. Because of this, the sender is at least aware that the message wasn't delivered. Also, the author was able to get t…

> Also, the author was able to get their mail delivered to a personal gmail.com address. The issue was with a Google Workspace custom email domain. This further makes me think of this as a security/spam related issue. Google is clearly capable of processing the message without a Message-id, they are just refusing for business customers.

That's the annoying part to me.

An email is an email. By applying different rules for rejection on different mailboxes, gmail creates a system where it's harder for would-be implementers to test compliance.

If tomorrow gmail creates a new type of mailbox, will there be a third set of rules to have your message delivered?

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