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Why does Gmail hate my domain?

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Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#91

Post by BorisMelnik »

massaman_yams wrote: post #71
stbenjam wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, may have to pay Google the $5 (or thereabouts?) to host my mail for a month and consider it a cost of freedom from them long term. After 2+ years of hosting my domain myself, it doesn't seem possible to build up enough reputation with them personally.

If the Google Apps anecdote is true, it's likely to be a design flaw in their anti-spam systems - think of the number of spammers who could register domains, associate them with a $5 google apps account, and spam millions of Gmail recipients. If you think about the kind of metrics/outcomes the Gmail anti-spam team uses to measure success, it's hard to imagine a scenario where that would be good for them. What this lo…

you are absolutely right, and this will most likely be fixed tomorrow morning as a result of this thread.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#92

Post by hobarrera »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #22

The author jumps to an unfounded conclusion which is pretty irritating and probably will make everybody who could help him not want to help him. That said I've never seen a DSN like the one in the screenshot. It certainly is not generated by the gmail spam checking system, because gmail does not bounce spam. Gmail either rejects spam at SMTP DATA time, or delivers it to spam folders.

> Gmail either rejects spam at SMTP DATA time, or delivers it to spam folders.

This is a million times better. Meanwhile, microsoft accepts it, sends it at passed on DMARC reports, but discards the mail silently without it even reaching the spam mailbox.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#93

Post by reitanqild »

stonogo wrote: post #83
brobinson wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Gmail isn't known to use any public IP-based blacklist for deliverability Good to know! I bet they have their own internal ranking system which is far more accurate than the public blacklists.

I'm curious to know why you think they'd be any more accurate than public blacklists. About a fifth of the spam that hits my domains originates from gmail servers, and the majority of people I know complain (when asked) about gmail's tendency to spam-bin legit mail.

> majority of people I know complain (when asked) about gmail's tendency to spam-bin legit mail.

I observed a former boss, who was very technically competent otherwise, using "mark as spam" instead of delete.

I guess if he could underestimate that button so can a million other people.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#94

Post by cvs268 »

Part of the gmail's spam filtering appears to be "crowd-sourced". People clicking on "Report Spam" or "Not Spam" on your emails in their gmail-inbox.

How about asking a few of your friends to select your emails in their gmail spam folders and click "Not Spam". Hopefully that gets the ball rolling and the situation improves...

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#95

Post by mortenlarsen »

I feel your pain. I have had similar problems over the last 15 years that I have been running my own mail server, but mostly with hotmail when they were the gmail of their time. (they would accept the mail and then silently drop it)

I would maybe change the SPF record to fail instead of soft-fail (~all to -all).

I have a @gmail.com account that I use for testing whenever I change something.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#96

Post by massaman_yams »

brobinson wrote: post #86
stonogo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious to know why you think they'd be any more accurate than public blacklists. About a fifth of the spam that hits my domains originates from gmail servers, and the majority of people I know complain (when asked) about gmail's tendency to spam-bin legit mail.

I would wager that Google handles a large enough cross section of all email traffic such that their internal statistics on the trustworthiness of domains/ips would rival any other blacklist system. I've never had issues inboxing on gmail accounts using SPF/DKIM/DMARC + Sendgrid, even when sending 125,000+ emails (legit!) per day.

Accuracy in spam filters is a difficult thing to measure, particularly if you don't have access to internal metrics on filter performance.

The primary limiting factor for most blacklists is not scale, but simply the fact that most of them have no more than a few data sources - most commonly spamtrap data. It's useful, but it's not a comprehensive enough data point to accurately evaluate mail.

Having dozens or hundreds of data points available - things like how many recipients open a message and spend time reading it, how quickly they seek out a message when initially opening their inbox, or a sending domain's pagerank - gives Google a considerable edge in assessing overall mail quality.

(Caveat: outbound filtering is often more difficult than inbound filtering - perhaps in part because there are fewer data points available when assessing outbound mail.)

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#97

Post by ciaoben »

Hi, I'm Nicolò and I work in the deliverability team of Qboxmail.com. We have run into similar problems in the past. The reason of the behavior of Gmail with your domain is not easy to understand, a theory could be that in the past someone has used it for sending spam, and even if it was not your server, you are paying for this.

The solution we have used, it was bring Gmail to understand that your emails have been sent from a real user. You can simulate a conversation between your domain and other Gmail accounts. Send a first email, with a realistic text, to a Gmail account, if it goes in spam, mark as safe (remove it from spam), and reply to it, always with a realistic text. Continue to simulate a normal conversation, sending 4/5 emails between the 2 account. Re-do the operation from another Gmail account, but this time do the opposite: start from the Gmail one.

It not bulletproof, but it has worked in the past for us.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#98

Post by leni536 »

ciaoben wrote: post #97

Hi, I'm Nicolò and I work in the deliverability team of Qboxmail.com. We have run into similar problems in the past. The reason of the behavior of Gmail with your domain is not easy to understand, a theory could be that in the past someone has used it for sending spam, and even if it was not your server, you are paying for this. The solution we have used, it was bring Gmail to understand that your emails have been se…

So the way to get off from spam blacklists is to send spam mails between two addresses? Looks reasonable.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#99

Post by calgoo »

hobarrera wrote: post #88
pki wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is generally up to you, you can inline them (MIME/base64? in the message) or remotely serve. it'll usually serve remote http pixels for "open tracking" either way though

> it'll usually serve remote http pixels for "open tracking" either way though given how most clients/web-mails filter these by default, is this of any use? Only users which explicitly click on "show images" will get tracked, and the rest won't even show see your email properly.

And GMail for example will proxy the images as well, so they cant be tracked as easily.

Re: Why does Gmail hate my domain?

#100

Post by ciaoben »

leni536 wrote: post #98
ciaoben wrote: post #97

Hi, I'm Nicolò and I work in the deliverability team of Qboxmail.com. We have run into similar problems in the past. The reason of the behavior of Gmail with your domain is not easy to understand, a theory could be that in the past someone has used it for sending spam, and even if it was not your server, you are paying for this. The solution we have used, it was bring Gmail to understand that your emails have been se…

So the way to get off from spam blacklists is to send spam mails between two addresses? Looks reasonable.

You send emails that Gmail looks wrongly like spam. If everything is clean, it is reasonable to think that it is matter of little fixes, and to "help" Gmail to understand that domain doesn't send spam.

There is no way that this method would work id the domain it does actually send spam mails.

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