4 ms·

>The “extinguish” with GMail is also well underway - it’s infamous for having an extremely strict spam filter for incoming emails from people who run personal o

by jahvo 8y ago

>The “extinguish” with GMail is also well underway - it’s infamous for having an extremely strict spam filter for incoming emails from people who run personal or niche mail servers And thank God for that. That's why their antispam is sooo good.

akerl_ 8y ago
Yup. Between the spam filtering and their Inbox mobile app, I now actually have an email experience that doesn't make me dread incoming messages.
sdoering 8y ago
Exactly. Because enforcing monopolies like that is a good thing? Isn't it?
- jahvo 8y ago
  Gmail won because it fixed the biggest pain points with HTML email and spam. And so many years later nobody has come even close. That's not their fault.
  - ubernostrum 8y ago
    And now you get to wonder what ideas people might have come up with, that you'd have loved, but got shut down immediately because Google doesn't let people break in with new ideas. Being the best available option is good. Using a dominant position to try to ensure nobody is ever allowed to compete with you again in the future is bad, and in theory illegal.
    - lallysingh 8y ago
      How would this play out in email? Users can have more than 1 email account, and even just forward from their old acct to their new one.
      - ubernostrum 8y ago
        How would what play out? If Google blackholes mail coming from new ("untrusted", therefore "spammy") providers, how does a new provider gain traction in the market? They already do this with other services. YouTube is probably the single most-DMCA'd site on the internet, for example, but still gets prime search-result real estate. But if you try setting up a competing video site, Google will count how many DMCA notices it gets to take down links to your site, and penalize you in search results for being a no-good horrible copyright-violation-enabler. Google is very very good at setting up situations where the rule for their property is different from the rule for everyone else, and for some reason it always favors the Google property...
        SquareWheel 8y ago
        Youtube surely does get a lot of DMCAs, but the vast, vast majority of copyright disputes are handled with a system meant to preclude DMCAs. Secondly, do you have any evidence that DMCA claims are a ranking factor? Google search actually goes out of its way to point to sources showing takedowns, implying they do not agree with them. Thirdly, Youtube has millions of incoming links. It's going to do pretty darn well in ranking no matter what.
        dhimes 8y ago
        Google's mobile support was horrific when they started penalizing other sites for a bad mobile experience.
        SquareWheel 8y ago
        Desktop and mobile searches are indexed separately, so they could hold high desktop rank even if mobile faltered. Though I'm not sure which service you're referring to specifically. In most cases I would still expect inbound links to be very high, offsetting any mobile penalty.
        ubernostrum 8y ago
        YouTube gets special promotion in Google SERPs, because it's a Google property. So it gets to live way up top. And yes, Google has admitted that DMCA notices received for results to your site is something they'll factor in to rankings for non-Google properties: https://searchengineland.com/dmca-requests-now-used-in-googles-ranking-algorithm-130118 https://searchengineland.com/dmca-requests-now-used-in-googl...
  - takluyver 8y ago
    And because Google realised they could afford to give you 1GB space when everyone else was offering ~10-20 MB, and because they launched it cleverly, with restricted signups making a gmail.com address a desirable thing. But the complaint isn't about how GMail got to a dominant position, it's about what it does with that position.
  - CM30 8y ago
    Isn't their HTML/CSS support atrocious? I mean, it might be a bit better than Outlook, but as far as HTML emails are concerned, it's more mobile browsers which have made it actually usable again: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/email-client/gmail/ https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/email-client/gmail/
- SquareWheel 8y ago
  Letting people spoof emails by ignoring SPF records isn't ideal either.
megous 8y ago
You will never know or be able to judge until you get on the other side of it. The worst are companies who use gmail to accept unsolicited email from job applicants. It's not a great first impression if you are asked to write something up (on a Careers page) and send it to some address and then are 5xx rejected and your email is blackholed and not even delivered to a SPAM folder. Funny thing is that the 5xx message tells you to contact their gsuite admin to change some settings. :D I guess to get blackholed again.
jcranmer 8y ago
Google didn't invent the reputation-based antispam, or the DNS blacklisting, or all the annoying antispam features that make running your own email server difficult. The only thing Google added to the mix was applying its famous quality of customer service (or rather, lack thereof) to the problem.
- crummy 8y ago
  At the time I signed up for Gmail they had by far the best antispam filter I'd seen (online or local). I would regularly have ~1000 spam emails per month in my spam box and false positives or negatives were extremely rare (~1/year?)
  - superkuh 8y ago
    How would you know about the emails to you that were blocked and false positives?
    - crummy 8y ago
      They went into the spam box.
- jahvo 8y ago
  They invented using those things right, so I don't get spam.
amelius 8y ago
I sure hope mail will not end up like chat, e.g. in a number of isolated services. Having federated e-mail is more important to me than the feature of spam filtering.

by jahvo 8y ago

akerl_ 8y ago

Yup. Between the spam filtering and their Inbox mobile app, I now actually have an email experience that doesn't make me dread incoming messages.

sdoering 8y ago

Exactly. Because enforcing monopolies like that is a good thing? Isn't it?

jahvo 8y ago
Gmail won because it fixed the biggest pain points with HTML email and spam. And so many years later nobody has come even close. That's not their fault.
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  And now you get to wonder what ideas people might have come up with, that you'd have loved, but got shut down immediately because Google doesn't let people break in with new ideas. Being the best available option is good. Using a dominant position to try to ensure nobody is ever allowed to compete with you again in the future is bad, and in theory illegal.
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    How would this play out in email? Users can have more than 1 email account, and even just forward from their old acct to their new one.
    - ubernostrum 8y ago
      How would what play out? If Google blackholes mail coming from new ("untrusted", therefore "spammy") providers, how does a new provider gain traction in the market? They already do this with other services. YouTube is probably the single most-DMCA'd site on the internet, for example, but still gets prime search-result real estate. But if you try setting up a competing video site, Google will count how many DMCA notices it gets to take down links to your site, and penalize you in search results for being a no-good horrible copyright-violation-enabler. Google is very very good at setting up situations where the rule for their property is different from the rule for everyone else, and for some reason it always favors the Google property...
      - SquareWheel 8y ago
        Youtube surely does get a lot of DMCAs, but the vast, vast majority of copyright disputes are handled with a system meant to preclude DMCAs. Secondly, do you have any evidence that DMCA claims are a ranking factor? Google search actually goes out of its way to point to sources showing takedowns, implying they do not agree with them. Thirdly, Youtube has millions of incoming links. It's going to do pretty darn well in ranking no matter what.
        dhimes 8y ago
        Google's mobile support was horrific when they started penalizing other sites for a bad mobile experience.
        SquareWheel 8y ago
        Desktop and mobile searches are indexed separately, so they could hold high desktop rank even if mobile faltered. Though I'm not sure which service you're referring to specifically. In most cases I would still expect inbound links to be very high, offsetting any mobile penalty.
        ubernostrum 8y ago
        YouTube gets special promotion in Google SERPs, because it's a Google property. So it gets to live way up top. And yes, Google has admitted that DMCA notices received for results to your site is something they'll factor in to rankings for non-Google properties: https://searchengineland.com/dmca-requests-now-used-in-googles-ranking-algorithm-130118 https://searchengineland.com/dmca-requests-now-used-in-googl...
- takluyver 8y ago
  And because Google realised they could afford to give you 1GB space when everyone else was offering ~10-20 MB, and because they launched it cleverly, with restricted signups making a gmail.com address a desirable thing. But the complaint isn't about how GMail got to a dominant position, it's about what it does with that position.
- CM30 8y ago
  Isn't their HTML/CSS support atrocious? I mean, it might be a bit better than Outlook, but as far as HTML emails are concerned, it's more mobile browsers which have made it actually usable again: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/email-client/gmail/ https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/email-client/gmail/
SquareWheel 8y ago
Letting people spoof emails by ignoring SPF records isn't ideal either.

megous 8y ago

You will never know or be able to judge until you get on the other side of it. The worst are companies who use gmail to accept unsolicited email from job applicants. It's not a great first impression if you are asked to write something up (on a Careers page) and send it to some address and then are 5xx rejected and your email is blackholed and not even delivered to a SPAM folder. Funny thing is that the 5xx message tells you to contact their gsuite admin to change some settings. :D I guess to get blackholed again.

jcranmer 8y ago

Google didn't invent the reputation-based antispam, or the DNS blacklisting, or all the annoying antispam features that make running your own email server difficult. The only thing Google added to the mix was applying its famous quality of customer service (or rather, lack thereof) to the problem.

crummy 8y ago
At the time I signed up for Gmail they had by far the best antispam filter I'd seen (online or local). I would regularly have ~1000 spam emails per month in my spam box and false positives or negatives were extremely rare (~1/year?)
- superkuh 8y ago
  How would you know about the emails to you that were blocked and false positives?
  - crummy 8y ago
    They went into the spam box.
jahvo 8y ago
They invented using those things right, so I don't get spam.

amelius 8y ago

I sure hope mail will not end up like chat, e.g. in a number of isolated services. Having federated e-mail is more important to me than the feature of spam filtering.