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> Yet there is no way to get ahold of google other than their product forums, posting and praying to not get a cheap canned response (which is what happened to

> Yet there is no way to get ahold of google other than their product forums, posting and praying to not get a cheap canned response (which is what happened to me). I believe the only way to get relief from Google is to know an insider, who can escalate to someone who can do something. All their public support channels are dead ends. Google sees you as a product, not a customer, and it's customer service skills are so bad that even if you're a real customer you can get the same treatment. Stuff like this is why I switched to used Fastmail with my own domain. > I used to LOVE google back in the early gmail/android days. They were the good guys. What happened? I don't think anything happened. You just hit an important function that they're utterly terrible at.b Despite their success, they're clearly not omnicompetent.

tzs 9y ago
Sometimes you can get that insider by becoming a customer of a different part of the company from the one that is giving you trouble. We had an email problem with a major free email provider that also ran an advertising network (no, it was NOT Google or Microsoft...). Our problem was that they kept deciding all the mail we sent to their users was spam. None of it was actually spam. The only things we were sending were: • receipts for purchases • installation instructions and license keys for whatever the user had just purchased • if the user was on a subscription plan with a term longer than a month, a notice a few days before subscription billing that they were going to be billed • responses to support tickets the user initiated We'd complain to the louts running the email service, and they would fix it...and a month later it would happen again. Each time it took them longer and longer to fix it. Then we realized we were spending a large amount buying ads on their ad network. Our guy in charge of ad buying called up our account rep at their advertising sales department, and asked why the heck we should keep paying them a large amount to drive customers to us, if they were going to make it so we could not communicate with those customers if those customers used their email service? It doesn't take a young Einstein to figure we shouldn't. The account rep put our guy on hold a few minutes, then came back and had conference called in someone high up in their IT department, explained the problem. The IT department head conferenced in the person in charge of mail filtering and told him to put in a white list entry for us, and he wanted it done right away. About ten minutes later we were told it was done, and we never had another problem that I know of with email being misclassified as spam. This disturbed me quite a bit. None of our mail was spam, so no one was harmed by that white list entry. But they had plenty of people using their ad network who were pushing sleazy products and who I greatly doubt only sent non-spam mail. Would they also be able to get white listed just be calling an ad rep and complaining? We never had any spam classification problems with customers who used Google or Microsoft free email services, so have no idea if similar things work there, or if they keep a stronger separation between the ad network and the mail services. In my more cynical moments I wonder if this sort of the thing might be the reason advertising companies run free email services. If they can amass a large number of email users, and they grant exceptions in the spam filters for their bigger advertisers, that provides an incentive to use their ad network over one with a smaller email service or without an email server, so you'll get more customers that you email market to at will.
- MaysonL 9y ago
  We never had any spam classification problems with customers who used Google or Microsoft free email services, so have no idea if similar things work there, or if they keep a stronger separation between the ad network and the mail services. My sister-in-law has a blog, email newsletter, and online store, all of which got blacklisted by Google after a number of her newsletter subscribers marked her letter as spam rather than unsubscribing. The only way she eventually fixed the problem was by finding a Googler contact who was able to get in touch with somebody who could whitelist her. A piss-poor way to run a business.
  - liquidgecka 9y ago
    I was that guy many times (Former Spam, Abuse, Delivery SRE). You have to realize that %95 of the time when people reach out to report that mail that they are sending is getting canned its because they are sending SPAM and don't realize it. Seriously, all day, every day I got reports of "site x is unfairly being canned" only to go look up the data and see that the site is basically funneling hundreds of thousands of emails into the system and most users are making them as spam. We know the normal "I want to unsubscribe but I just click Spam instead" rates. We know an order of magnitude more than that as well, and most the time when people reach out they just don't understand email and how to have decent content people actually want. And sometimes they are a sales rep that work with Pfizer, annoyed that regular correspondence about their top products were going to spam because they contained information about the price of Viagra..
    - Silhouette 9y ago
      We know an order of magnitude more than that as well, and most the time when people reach out they just don't understand email and how to have decent content people actually want. The flip side of this is that many of us know the excuses big email services make about how bad a problem spam is and how our content might be spam and we just don't understand... when the content is the kind of reasonable and necessary communications that 'tzs mentioned further up in this thread. I'm getting awfully bored of bounce messages from apparently credible organisations whose members have signed up, telling me that the legally required and personalised information we have just sent to our customer appears to be unsolicited bulk email. There has been a small wave of these recently, which leads me to think that someone screwed up a scoring system that multiple organisations are using to vet incoming traffic. In any case, that's not a minor mistake, that's an automatic recognition system that is hopelessly inaccurate. It could even be dangerous, for example if a customer isn't getting notifications about payments and forgets they haven't cancelled a subscription, or if some action is required of them if they don't want to accept some change in terms for a service they use.
nikanj 9y ago
You don't have to know an insider. Get your problem to the front page of a major news aggregator, and an insider will contact you promptly. HN seems to work very well, and I've heard good results from Reddit too.

tzs 9y ago

Sometimes you can get that insider by becoming a customer of a different part of the company from the one that is giving you trouble. We had an email problem with a major free email provider that also ran an advertising network (no, it was NOT Google or Microsoft...). Our problem was that they kept deciding all the mail we sent to their users was spam. None of it was actually spam. The only things we were sending were: • receipts for purchases • installation instructions and license keys for whatever the user had just purchased • if the user was on a subscription plan with a term longer than a month, a notice a few days before subscription billing that they were going to be billed • responses to support tickets the user initiated We'd complain to the louts running the email service, and they would fix it...and a month later it would happen again. Each time it took them longer and longer to fix it. Then we realized we were spending a large amount buying ads on their ad network. Our guy in charge of ad buying called up our account rep at their advertising sales department, and asked why the heck we should keep paying them a large amount to drive customers to us, if they were going to make it so we could not communicate with those customers if those customers used their email service? It doesn't take a young Einstein to figure we shouldn't. The account rep put our guy on hold a few minutes, then came back and had conference called in someone high up in their IT department, explained the problem. The IT department head conferenced in the person in charge of mail filtering and told him to put in a white list entry for us, and he wanted it done right away. About ten minutes later we were told it was done, and we never had another problem that I know of with email being misclassified as spam. This disturbed me quite a bit. None of our mail was spam, so no one was harmed by that white list entry. But they had plenty of people using their ad network who were pushing sleazy products and who I greatly doubt only sent non-spam mail. Would they also be able to get white listed just be calling an ad rep and complaining? We never had any spam classification problems with customers who used Google or Microsoft free email services, so have no idea if similar things work there, or if they keep a stronger separation between the ad network and the mail services. In my more cynical moments I wonder if this sort of the thing might be the reason advertising companies run free email services. If they can amass a large number of email users, and they grant exceptions in the spam filters for their bigger advertisers, that provides an incentive to use their ad network over one with a smaller email service or without an email server, so you'll get more customers that you email market to at will.

MaysonL 9y ago
We never had any spam classification problems with customers who used Google or Microsoft free email services, so have no idea if similar things work there, or if they keep a stronger separation between the ad network and the mail services. My sister-in-law has a blog, email newsletter, and online store, all of which got blacklisted by Google after a number of her newsletter subscribers marked her letter as spam rather than unsubscribing. The only way she eventually fixed the problem was by finding a Googler contact who was able to get in touch with somebody who could whitelist her. A piss-poor way to run a business.
- liquidgecka 9y ago
  I was that guy many times (Former Spam, Abuse, Delivery SRE). You have to realize that %95 of the time when people reach out to report that mail that they are sending is getting canned its because they are sending SPAM and don't realize it. Seriously, all day, every day I got reports of "site x is unfairly being canned" only to go look up the data and see that the site is basically funneling hundreds of thousands of emails into the system and most users are making them as spam. We know the normal "I want to unsubscribe but I just click Spam instead" rates. We know an order of magnitude more than that as well, and most the time when people reach out they just don't understand email and how to have decent content people actually want. And sometimes they are a sales rep that work with Pfizer, annoyed that regular correspondence about their top products were going to spam because they contained information about the price of Viagra..
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    We know an order of magnitude more than that as well, and most the time when people reach out they just don't understand email and how to have decent content people actually want. The flip side of this is that many of us know the excuses big email services make about how bad a problem spam is and how our content might be spam and we just don't understand... when the content is the kind of reasonable and necessary communications that 'tzs mentioned further up in this thread. I'm getting awfully bored of bounce messages from apparently credible organisations whose members have signed up, telling me that the legally required and personalised information we have just sent to our customer appears to be unsolicited bulk email. There has been a small wave of these recently, which leads me to think that someone screwed up a scoring system that multiple organisations are using to vet incoming traffic. In any case, that's not a minor mistake, that's an automatic recognition system that is hopelessly inaccurate. It could even be dangerous, for example if a customer isn't getting notifications about payments and forgets they haven't cancelled a subscription, or if some action is required of them if they don't want to accept some change in terms for a service they use.

nikanj 9y ago

You don't have to know an insider. Get your problem to the front page of a major news aggregator, and an insider will contact you promptly. HN seems to work very well, and I've heard good results from Reddit too.