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Whether by monopoly or sheer blindness, Google leans really heavily towards only letting massive institutions through. I know a few people whose professional w

Whether by monopoly or sheer blindness, Google leans really heavily towards only letting massive institutions through. I know a few people whose professional work involves a lot of delivering explicitly-requested, non-spam emails. With most email providers, they don't go to spam because they aren't spam. If they get flagged as spam servers (usually right after spinning up an instance, when the confidence is low), they can contact someone and get it sorted out. With Gmail? They have extensive lists of tips and tricks to "sneak through" emails that their users specifically asked for. They 'prime' servers with extra-safe traffic to avoid getting frozen in the low-confidence early emails. And they still regularly run into problems. They just don't have the size to be trusted by Google, or to get business contacts to solve the problems that do arise. It's a pretty concerning state of affairs - Gmail will deliver anything sometimes, but it seems to be a very high bar (vastly higher than "not spam") to ensure you don't regularly drop messages.

haroldp 9y ago
This is exactly my experience sending legit commercial emails to gmail. We jump through every hoop, we implement every suggestion, and they drop our email on the floor every time. I have no problem with deliveries anywhere else. They DGAF. The idea that their spam filter is particularly good is ridiculous too. I get more spam to my gmail accounts than to my self hosted mail accounts with greylisting and spamassassin.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  I'm completely confused by Gmail's spam filter. We've already discussed its extreme tendency to false positives, but it's quite good about false negatives - no spam hits my inbox. Except... Google claims >90% of spam never even reaches your Spam box, only the ambiguous messages. So why do I get 10x the spam at Gmail as at any other account? Are they not actually good at detection? Are they just a high value target that gets hit more often? Or (my guess) are they trying to get clever? Google Doc's spellcheck is infamously bad because they're trying to use machine learning approaches without having a simple English dictionary as a fallback. Is Gmail trying to detect solely on email sender/content and totally abandoning approaches like greylisting?
- garaetjjte 9y ago
  >greylisting Don't do that! Emails should be instant, not with stupid greylisting delays.
  - haroldp 9y ago
    I will do that, and you should too. Nothing in the RCFs says emails are supposed to be instant. Reliable, yes. Instant, no. First, greylisting is HIGHLY effective. Something like 95% of email connections are spam. Almost all of them fail without ever hitting disk, via greylisting. If they actually retry, then the chance that the sender IP or email content is in an RBL is MUCH higher, so spam that actually retries will be more likely to be rejected at HELO by an RBL or filtered after it is accepted. The incidence of false positives with grey listing is VERY VERY low. Using greylisting means that very few emails need to be accepted and then filtered. Those are the false positives that really hurt. The sender receives no bounce, and the recipient probably doesn't look at his spam folder every day, especially when it is full of hundreds of junk emails. Greylisting makes email more reliable. In addition, better greylisting systems note senders that reliably retry and automatically whitelist them. My mail server actually delays less than 2% of legitimate emails due to greylisting.

haroldp 9y ago

This is exactly my experience sending legit commercial emails to gmail. We jump through every hoop, we implement every suggestion, and they drop our email on the floor every time. I have no problem with deliveries anywhere else. They DGAF. The idea that their spam filter is particularly good is ridiculous too. I get more spam to my gmail accounts than to my self hosted mail accounts with greylisting and spamassassin.

Bartweiss 9y ago
I'm completely confused by Gmail's spam filter. We've already discussed its extreme tendency to false positives, but it's quite good about false negatives - no spam hits my inbox. Except... Google claims >90% of spam never even reaches your Spam box, only the ambiguous messages. So why do I get 10x the spam at Gmail as at any other account? Are they not actually good at detection? Are they just a high value target that gets hit more often? Or (my guess) are they trying to get clever? Google Doc's spellcheck is infamously bad because they're trying to use machine learning approaches without having a simple English dictionary as a fallback. Is Gmail trying to detect solely on email sender/content and totally abandoning approaches like greylisting?
garaetjjte 9y ago
>greylisting Don't do that! Emails should be instant, not with stupid greylisting delays.
- haroldp 9y ago
  I will do that, and you should too. Nothing in the RCFs says emails are supposed to be instant. Reliable, yes. Instant, no. First, greylisting is HIGHLY effective. Something like 95% of email connections are spam. Almost all of them fail without ever hitting disk, via greylisting. If they actually retry, then the chance that the sender IP or email content is in an RBL is MUCH higher, so spam that actually retries will be more likely to be rejected at HELO by an RBL or filtered after it is accepted. The incidence of false positives with grey listing is VERY VERY low. Using greylisting means that very few emails need to be accepted and then filtered. Those are the false positives that really hurt. The sender receives no bounce, and the recipient probably doesn't look at his spam folder every day, especially when it is full of hundreds of junk emails. Greylisting makes email more reliable. In addition, better greylisting systems note senders that reliably retry and automatically whitelist them. My mail server actually delays less than 2% of legitimate emails due to greylisting.