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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 s

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.
- liquidgecka 9y ago
  Oh I know.. trust me. I used to work in the team that handled that very problem and yet right now I can't get google to stop spam processing mails that fetches from my private IMAP server for my wife's gmail account. Everybody I know that was in that team has abandoned Google in the decade since I was there so I no longer have an easy in to figure out what is going on. The problem is that for every single technical, competent person trying to reach google, there are 20 technical incompetent people who "know exactly what the problem is" (and don't), and 1,000 people who have a legit support problem that can be resolved with a google search, and 1,000,000 people who are just going to waste your time completely. =/ The moment you have direct support you have to respond to all of the above. There is no way to create a support team that just handles the clueful people. I was on the dns contact email address which should be relatively hard to find right? Yea it was spam central with free energy devices, complaints about the government, etc. Its impossible to provide human support at the level that google is playing. =/
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    The moment you have direct support you have to respond to all of the above. There is no way to create a support team that just handles the clueful people. Sure. But if my little businesses, with only a few people and a modest budget available to do literally everything, can manage to treat our customers with more attention and respect than one of the richest and most powerful businesses in the world, something is wrong. Its impossible to provide human support at the level that google is playing. =/ Sorry, but I simply don't buy that. Google have grown huge and incomprehensibly rich thanks in part to technology but also in part to refusing to communicate with individuals when things go wrong (and, frankly, hoping they don't actually get called on it because it's not efficient for every little advertiser to sue for that $50 back when Google served their ads on obviously inappropriate sites or whatever). Like Facebook and other big organisations which have become highly influential through their scale and pseudo-monopoly status, Google now need to hire, train and support people -- lots of people -- in order to provide an acceptable level of communication if those dealing with them have problems. If they can't do that then IMHO they should be sued, regulated or otherwise impaired until sufficient incentive/deterrent exists. The cost of letting these huge, influential organisations literally destroy businesses or wreck lives through their negligence is simply too high to allow the status quo to continue.

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.

liquidgecka 9y ago
Oh I know.. trust me. I used to work in the team that handled that very problem and yet right now I can't get google to stop spam processing mails that fetches from my private IMAP server for my wife's gmail account. Everybody I know that was in that team has abandoned Google in the decade since I was there so I no longer have an easy in to figure out what is going on. The problem is that for every single technical, competent person trying to reach google, there are 20 technical incompetent people who "know exactly what the problem is" (and don't), and 1,000 people who have a legit support problem that can be resolved with a google search, and 1,000,000 people who are just going to waste your time completely. =/ The moment you have direct support you have to respond to all of the above. There is no way to create a support team that just handles the clueful people. I was on the dns contact email address which should be relatively hard to find right? Yea it was spam central with free energy devices, complaints about the government, etc. Its impossible to provide human support at the level that google is playing. =/
- Silhouette 9y ago
  The moment you have direct support you have to respond to all of the above. There is no way to create a support team that just handles the clueful people. Sure. But if my little businesses, with only a few people and a modest budget available to do literally everything, can manage to treat our customers with more attention and respect than one of the richest and most powerful businesses in the world, something is wrong. Its impossible to provide human support at the level that google is playing. =/ Sorry, but I simply don't buy that. Google have grown huge and incomprehensibly rich thanks in part to technology but also in part to refusing to communicate with individuals when things go wrong (and, frankly, hoping they don't actually get called on it because it's not efficient for every little advertiser to sue for that $50 back when Google served their ads on obviously inappropriate sites or whatever). Like Facebook and other big organisations which have become highly influential through their scale and pseudo-monopoly status, Google now need to hire, train and support people -- lots of people -- in order to provide an acceptable level of communication if those dealing with them have problems. If they can't do that then IMHO they should be sued, regulated or otherwise impaired until sufficient incentive/deterrent exists. The cost of letting these huge, influential organisations literally destroy businesses or wreck lives through their negligence is simply too high to allow the status quo to continue.