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Gmail marking email from me as spam

• Bnshsysjab 7y ago
  Subbing to this, I’m having this exact issue. I’ve got dkim, dmarc, spf, the TLS flay and rdns. No other tested mail server blocks me, just gmail. I’ve googled and cannot find a legitimate way to determine why I’m marked as spam or how to unmark it. I’m coming from a fresh domain and have no intention of ever spamming. Googles support, or lack thereof, will hopefully be their downfall.
• jakub_g 7y ago
  Wild guess but I'm wondering if the problem isn't domain name. *.eu.org looks like a perfect domain to send phishing campaigns from (i.e. perhaps some other subdomains of it were caught sending spam and his domain got a penalty as a side-effect?)
• jokoon 7y ago
  I think there's a gmail filter where lets you prevent some mail from being market as spam...
• teekert 7y ago
  I feel like there is no way to do this. I was once very happy when I finally got my own basement email server to work (I tried it off and on for years before often giving up), running on Arch. For some time I was the happiest person in the world, I could send emails of >100 mb to my wife, have unlimited storage, unlimited aliases (which can even go to multiple people). I could email my server and make it do things. I was using TLS (whereas me.com and hotmail.com at the time were not!), I was using the internet the way it was intended! But then Outlook.com stopped accepting my emails, they were not even in any spam folders. Several emails later I got a response from someone at MS: We don't know how the filters work, they are black boxes to us. Sorry, try to write emails that don't look like spam... Soon after I gave up on my server. Maybe you can use a third party (paid) smtp forwarding service?
• dazbradbury 7y ago
  I've had multiple legitimate emails from Google employees and their sales teams all end up in my Gmail spam folder, even from senior members of various divisions. I still get spam in my inbox. They definitely know this is a problem and have people working on it - but spam filtering at that scale is much harder than it may appear at first.
  • GordonS 7y ago
    Personally, I find Gmail's spam filtering to be excellent. In the past year or so,. I've had a single false positive, and zero false negatives.
• fastball 7y ago
  Blame spammers, not Google. Google isn't trying to block innocuous emails.
  • daliusd 7y ago
    Why not both? Google can be evil too.
    • fastball 7y ago
      Yeah, but in this case Google isn't being evil. Do you really thing Google wants to intentionally stop your innocuous emails from getting to your mail box? Why in the world would they want that?
      • progval 7y ago
        Possibly to get you to use Gmail instead of self-hosting. (Note: I have no proof they actively want that, I'm just speculating)
        • fastball 7y ago
          The fact that Google emails get caught in Gmail spam should make it clear that such speculation is completely unwarranted.
      • throwaway2048 7y ago
        They have very little incentive to fix the problem.
• cnst 7y ago
  I'm actually having a similar problem recently, although my messages are declined at the SMTP stage, "due to the very low reputation of the sending domain", which I attribute to the output of certain cron jobs being sent towards my own Gmail account — it seems like my whole primary domain name has subsequently been blacklisted a few weeks ago: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21340460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21340460 * https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-October/103817.html https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-October/10381... It also seems that more and more of the mailing list posts end up in the Spam folder, too. For example, I'm subscribed to the nginx list, and recently found that all the mails from one of the core developers are now in the Spam folder in Gmail. Gmail is becoming less and less useful as days go by. If it cannot be used for the mailing lists anymore, and inbound forwarding into the account is so unreliable as well, leaves fewer and fewer reasons to continue using it, especially as it's no longer free as they've stopped their infinite storage growth, so, I now need to pay 1,99 USD/mo because I bought into their infinite storage claims back in the day, and subscribed to way too many mailing lists to fit in 15GB of space.
  • vidarh 7y ago
    The biggest problem to me with Gmails spam filter is that it is so totally hit and miss, and there seems to be no reliable way of ensuring that messages stop going to spam, even from other Gmail accounts, from people on my contact list, that I've persistently marked not spam. At this point the only reason I'm still using Gmail is sheer inertia, and it's a question of when I get time to start untangling myself from it.
    • sneak 7y ago
      Have you tried filter rules?
      • vidarh 7y ago
        Yes. I've also used Google Apps and had it file e-mails from our own users as spam despite settings that's supposed to bypass it. Meanwhile some Gmail addresses I have rarely have this problem, so it's not even consistent across accounts or domains. The most annoying bit (and probably the first untangling from Gmail I'll be doing) is that I have my own domain hosted on Google Apps, but since my main Gmail mailbox is a different one, it's set to forward everything. It's meant to bypass all filtering and just forward. Or so the settings and support claims. It doesn't. I have to regularly log in for the sole purpose of marking things not spam.
• LeoPanthera 7y ago
  Is this problem unique to Gmail? Do owners of self-hosted mail servers also have problems sending mail to Yahoo, Outlook, AOL, iCloud? Do these providers have a better mechanism for getting yourself un-blocked?
  • Scramblejams 7y ago
    In my experience struggling to deliver email from my self-hosted server, Gmail's by far the worst. Not that I haven't had the occasional issue with Yahoo, Outlook and AOL. But here's the key difference: Yahoo, Outlook and AOL actually offer tools to resolve the issue! For small senders like me who fall below Gmail's postmaster tools limits, we have no recourse other than trying to find some sympathetic Google employee and DMing them. The experience really blows. I desperately wish Gmail would offer some sort of registration program that would let me attest to my identity and thereby give my server the benefit of the doubt. I'd happily cough up my private medical records if that meant my family's emails reached Gmail's inboxes most of the time.
    • tambre 7y ago
      If you actually are looking for advice, then in descending importance order: * Enforce a DMARC policy instead of explicitly disabling it. * Enforce a strict SPF policy instead of ~all. * Send over IPv6. Usually stricter rules are applied and not-up-to-snuff emails are rejected at the SMTP level. * Your provider hosts lots of spammers for their size. Consider switching. * Enable MTA-STS. The first two I'd consider obvious glaring mistakes. The next two are less important, but would help. MTA-STS is a nice-to-have. I can't analyse your DKIM setup, since I don't know your selector. Feel free to send me a sample email if interested.
      • Scramblejams 7y ago
        Thanks for giving it a look! Enforcing DMARC and strict SPF tend to screw up mailing lists and forwarding. I don't see how I can enable them without causing a lot of other problems for me and my users. No arguments about my provider. Any tips on how to select a better one? I'm thinking someone who adds some friction to unblocking outbound port 25, e.g. Vultr, might be better.
• gscott 7y ago
  I have the problem of spammers sending emails faking they are from my domain but through hacked computers. So I get thousands of rejects. DMARC shows you where it is happening, spf can cause some of it to get blocked, but you are stuck with anyone can make up email addresses and send them out through other mail servers and in-turn your domain is certainly going to start going to spam due to this.
• clairity 7y ago
  it sucks that even though i haven't actively used gmail in at least 5 years, google is still able to hoover up my personal, and what should be private, info. and this kind of anti-competitiveness, which seems to come to light occasionally and only dimly at that, stinks just as bad. i can't wait until everyone else realizes how insidious a company google is. it's starting to happen. i'm hearing the low rumbles among (non-technical) folks i know. thank goodness!
• LeoPanthera 7y ago
  The attitude of the replies he gets lower down in the thread is shocking. I hope whatever mailing list that is doesn't have any kind of good reputation, because it seems like the consensus opinion there is shockingly anti-cooperative, anti-internet, "me before the network", even going as far to say "if Google thinks you're a spammer then you probably are". How things have changed.
  • viraptor 7y ago
    That's a meeting of technical and moral view. I'd love for corps to have no impact on people, for distributed knowledge and resources, for everyone being in control of their data, and general socialist direction. But the technical answer to "why is my email landing in spam" is still "follow best practices, build up reputation, and you'll be fine... unless Google decides otherwise, which they can". Posting about how unfair that is is not going to change anything.
    • kruczek 7y ago
      > Posting about how unfair that is is not going to change anything. It won't change anything, unless enough people complain. And even just recognizing that things are not right is the first step required to make a change. Of course, I won't hold my breath waiting for Google to change their ways, but I think it is in fact important to make a clear note their is not the right way. As the guy writes: "Maybe it is just so, that big companies ignore small external senders who are sending mail to them, simply because they can, and we can't do anything about this (however, it's always worth trying to check whether we really can't - and that's what I'm doing by posting my issue on this list). But even if we can't do anything about this, we should not pretend that everything is OK, they are correct, and it's the sender's fault. No, on the contrary: we should state it explicitly and clearly that this behaviour is not OK. Maybe we have to live with it; but it doesn't make it less bad."
  • awinder 7y ago
    It’s posted elsewhere in this comment thread but that’s after the point where it becomes clear that he wrapped a moral argument in a technical envelope and people spent a lot of time trying to help him out with the technical argument. Put another way, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
• sdan 7y ago
  Google's making us play by their rules: 1. Our ML models see that your emails spam? You're spam. 2. You're using Tor or a VPN? Here's 10 reCaptcha's. 3. Don't use Google Webmaster or use AMPs? Good luck finding your page on the 1st page. 4. Youtube video includes education hacking tutorials? Demonetized. Obviously some alternatives are moving to Fastmail and using Duck Duck Go, but we need Google to stop this "my way or you don't exist" attitude before they become a huge conglomerate which controls major aspects of many people's lives (which they arguably already do) and leaves everyone (like small companies that don't use Google or just regular people who don't want a Google account) separated from the world they're forming.
  • pluma 7y ago
    Ironically most spam I've been getting recently is from Gmail addresses.
  • xxs 7y ago
    >2. You're using Tor or a VPN? Here's 10 reCaptcha's. I get recapthca ALL the time for just not being logged on and deleting all filthy cookies on exit; and not "honoring" 3rd party cookies at all... and I don't care. Best part is that if you live in a country you don't speak the language you get google services in one of the country official languages -- so what you should do and mark is often unclear. The next best part is a road trip through Europe (edit adding "?hl=en" to the url tends to fix the issue in most of google services) >4. Youtube video includes education hacking tutorials? Demonetized. History is a far greater offender. >1. Our ML models see that your emails spam? You're spam. Years ago, I recall my company hosted gmail started detecting CEO mails as spam... and he was pissed for not getting responses.
    • kalleboo 7y ago
      I was getting really long and annoying recaptcha all the time, presumably because I use Safari which has all that anti-tracking stuff. But lately (past 2-3 months?) I only get a single challenge, I wonder if they've found a way around the protection or if they've just changed the model
• sacrificedcapon 7y ago
  Did you try changing your name to Netflix, Etrade or American Express? I swear, no matter how many times you mark their emails as spam, they eventually wind up back in your inbox ( admittedly in the Promotions section rather than the Primary inbox ).
• pengstrom 7y ago
  Google will of course argue it's for it's users sake. What are the odds that if legislation passes, Google simply lets unnecessary spam through and pretends they can't do better?
• Mistri 7y ago
  I ran into this issue many years ago, and I eventually gave up trying to increase the reputation of my mail server. For all my projects that require mailing, I've now succumbed to spoofing headers using Gmail's SMTP, which surprisingly doesn't go to spam, or using a third party mailing service like AWS.
• unityByFreedom 7y ago
  OP already received a decent reply, > A quick look at Talos Intelligence reports a 1600% increase in email from your domain over the last day; email reputation os 'neutral' at this time. Not good, not bad, but neutral. > Also you're on OVH, about which a quick look through the list's archives will possibly prove instructive. It's reasonably likely (as likely as not) that you're running on an IP in a neighbourhood with some poor neighbours. > As Mathieu pointed out in his second email, building a good reputation takes time. Losing a good reputation is a matter of rather less time and can be influenced by factors outside of your control. The rest of that reply chain is the usual debate: OP. My domain's emails are marked as spam by Gmail REPLY. Their system, their rules OP. I don't accept that Repeat ad nauseam.
  • LeoPanthera 7y ago
    Ah yes. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. A "1600%" increase in email could be explained by 1 email yesterday, and 16 emails today. Which is in fact what he claims lower down in the thread.
    • unityByFreedom 7y ago
      The final exchange between OP and someone who works in detecting spam: https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg09020.html https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg09020.html This is where HN discussion should pick up, not at the beginning where we need to rehash everything.
  • Johnny555 7y ago
    It's actually worse than that: > "Their network; their rules". No, it's not their network. It's our common network. If anybody imposes own rules on their part of the network, we are losing interoperability. Internet loses any sense. He apparently thinks that he (or maybe more accurately "we") should dictate how private companies treat traffic. Despite it's huge footprint, Google does not have a monopoly on email, if they are treating users unfairly, they can switch -- but I use Gmail because their spam filtering is so good. And I'm ok with dropping a few legit emails if it means not seeing spam in my mailbox.
• hansjorg 7y ago
  It's a bit surprising that he got anything through without SPF and an MX record. That seems to be the minimum to get mail into the inbox for a new domain at least, so his domain probably had some positive reputation at one point.
  • cm2187 7y ago
    And that was already the minimum more than 5 years ago.
  • technion 7y ago
    A while back I had someone setup a new domain with office 365 email and a completely broken spf record that only allowed his web server. Gmail accepted everything without a problem. I agree an SPF record is an expected minimum but "use a big provider" is more relevant ime.
• Ballas 7y ago
  I would hazard a guess that this mostly happens when many people mark your messages as spam from your domain. Or if you send enough email to gmail users with certain keywords/phrases.
• bnegreve 7y ago
  I also have my own mail server, and I have the same problem. I'm guessing this is machine learning algorithms confusing correlation with causation once again. Being a small private mail server is strongly correlated with being a spammer. So even if you are not relying any spam, you certainly look like someone that would. And even if you have not done it yet, you will probably in the near future, so they might as well treat you as a spammer right away to avoid potential problems. (analogy with racism intended).
• jen_h 7y ago
  Gonna second whoever said: Use DKIM. I actually check Spam daily now, after finding support emails whose logs got snagged in the dragnet & personal stuff — even email from my Dad got shunted to Spam. I still tip the hat, though, to Google, whose algorithms are wise enough to assiduously stow both the “jump on a call” and “donate to my campaign” emails to spam.
  • vidarh 7y ago
    The vast majority of messages in my spam folder are not spam on Gmail at the moment. Most of them are from providers I've semi-regularly tried to get it to recognize as not spam for months or years. Of course Gmail also outright rejects a lot of stuff at the SMTP stage, so their filters are better than they look, but the amount of misclassification is extremely frustrating.
    • jen_h 7y ago
      I have this issue with OSSEC messages (automated messages from an Open Source IDS). Same thing, too, have been marking them as “not spam” for years. I think it’s because I don’t always review them...:/ But just because you don’t always open a message class doesn’t mean it’s spam, Google!
      • vidarh 7y ago
        At one place we even had them start bulk-rejecting messages for our Google Apps domain from a whitelisted source. The entire point of the whitelisting was to allow our internal mail server to forward transactional messages to addresses on our own domain, so it was not even that it was ever reported as spam by anyone, or ever hitting external addresses where I'd understand if Google was more trigger happy. It was ridiculous realising that they basically had no way for even paying customers to tell them that "that e-mail server we told you is ours and we always want to receive all e-mail from no matter how spammy you think it is, using the mechanism you say it there to do exactly that, well, we really mean it". Instead it'd randomly just stop working. [this is a few years ago; who knows, maybe they've fixed it]
  • 7y ago
• odysseus 7y ago
  This guy has an odd (seemingly nonsensical) quote in his email signature. To a machine learning algorithm, it might look kind of like the random nonsense some spammers put in spam to corrupt Bayesian filters. He might want to try temporarily taking out that signature if he’s using that as part of his emails.
  • Scramblejams 7y ago
    Later in the thread he mentions that he's tried with and without the sig.
  • philshem 7y ago
    good catch. In my limited experience, complicated signatures (e.g. hotlinked images), or emails with few words and several links are most likely by gmail to be filtered as spam.
    • sincerely 7y ago
      I get like 50 emails a day entirely made up of hotlinked images from companies trying to sell me shit but god forbid someone have one in their signature. Thanks google.
  • agravier 7y ago
    He tests this particular hypothesis here: https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08825.html https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08825.html
    • petre 7y ago
      He could have ruined his reputation with that signature?
  • invalidusernam3 7y ago
    A bit off topic, but I googled the signature and it seems to be quote from this movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125435/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125435/ Looks like a pretty interesting movie, but a bit strange for an email signature
• jtagx 7y ago
  For some reason, Google also marks "Google Alerts" notifications as spam. They contain spammy search results, but the email comes from Google. At least they are consequent in not white-listing their own services :)
  • usr1106 7y ago
    Gmail also marks messages from gmail or other google services as spam. Gmail also marks all legitimate mails from Paypal as spam (phishing). I use several email addresses and google accounts, but in the end I forward most mails into the same gmail box. Their spam filters cannot handle the concept of forwarded mail correctly.
• unityByFreedom 7y ago
  The final exchange between OP and someone who works in detecting spam: https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg09020.html https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg09020.html This is where HN discussion should pick up, not at the beginning where we need to rehash everything.
• z3t4 7y ago
  I remember when Gmail was new. You got an e-mail that said "hey, we think you are sending spam, please do this". I replied and said that I always send from this domain, so if they think I'm spamming, just block the domain, then they white-listed it instead. I always see DMARC as a solution in these kind of threads, but the problem is that it's trivial for spammers to also setup DMARC. In fact almost 100% of the spam I receive follow the e-mail guidelines better then most legitimate e-mails. We need a new protocol! Where e-mails are opt-in, like with messaging apps, you first need to be introduced.
  • vbezhenar 7y ago
    It might be extremely weird but not impossible, if Google algorithms classify properly setup domain as a suspicious one.
    • cnst 7y ago
      No, not at all. There are reports that even if you use G Suite, and whitelist your own domain to send yourself logs through crontab, your may still have problems with the email deliverability. My own domain was blocked for nothing more than sending myself a list of a few dozen domain names through cron, which Google deems as containing malicious links, even though there are no links present.
• dajonker 7y ago
  Email is not the same it has been for years/decades. These days you need to use all the security tools available, most notably TLS and DKIM, set a strict DMARC policy, and don't do anything unexpected such as sending lots of emails out of the blue. Email is all about reputation: it can take a lot of effort to build trust, but just one bad move and it's all gone.
  • Freak_NL 7y ago
    > […] and don't do anything unexpected […] From the comments here I get the impression that this means, “don't do anything Google's machine learning environment cannot interpret”, which has the added drawback of not ever knowing if you are doing something it considers unexpected.
  • luckylion 7y ago
    > Email is all about reputation: it can take a lot of effort to build trust, but just one bad move and it's all gone. Is it though? That may well be true for small individuals, but the Spam I get these days comes via the large mail providers, Amazon SES, sendgrid etc, and nobody in their right mind is going to block them. "Too big to block" is a thing now, "too big to have to care about abuse reports" is too.
    • dajonker 7y ago
      Yes, the big mail providers are an issue. But it's also an issue the other way around. We use Postmark at my place of work and unfortunately, that doesn't prevent all of our mail from being marked as spam. Some mail gets blocked because it comes from the same IP address as some spam mail. I know that Postmark puts effort in preventing spammers to use their service but Amazon probably doesn't care a lot about people misusing SES.
      • luckylion 7y ago
        Wouldn't that imply that they have a lot of spammers on their network? As far as I understand, the value proposition is both "you don't need to worry about email" and "we have so many customers (sending legitimate emails that are very similar in content) and so little spam, we have great reputation and you're inheriting that reputation". If that doesn't work out, is their reputation not good enough? Is the receiving server too strict? Are those blocks occurring on major providers or for individual servers where an annoyed person might just blacklist an IP if they get spam from them more than once?
• rahuldottech 7y ago
  I have the same problem with my email server. I have valid and properly configured DKIM, SPF and PRT, so I don't know what else I'm expected to do...?
• com2kid 7y ago
  Gmail's ML models categorize plenty of Google's own emails as spam. I honestly don't think they are nefarious, just overly insistent. I remember email before Gmail's spam filters. Everyday was a task of deleting spam first then responding to emails.
  • nindalf 7y ago
    This is the consequence of the spam filters doing a good job. I too remember when consumers would clamour for better spam detections and different companies would hawk products that purported to do so. But now that spam detection mostly works well for most people, it’s a forgotten issue. Now we have people on this thread questioning Google’s authority to filter spam because from their PoV, Google isn’t adding much value to begin with.
    • Crinus 7y ago
      The problem is that Google errs too much on the it-is-spam side. Having to delete a few spam mails isn't a big issue if the alternative is losing legitimate mails because of overzealous filters.
      • Draiken 7y ago
        That may be true for us, tech savvy users. Imagine your grandma getting phishing emails from banks. If only 1% goes through, because Google is a bit more lenient on the detection, I can see the phishing success rate going through the roof. It's a very hard problem to solve.
• djsumdog 7y ago
  I thought this had been getting better. At least more e-mail from my personal server has been getting through to its destinations. I've written about this too a few years back: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/how-google-and-microsoft-made-email-unreliable/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/how-google-and-microsoft-made... ..and I reference the Hostile E-mail Landscape blog post by Ribton (really good btw).. which is gone now and redirects to some bullshit software site (there are archives of it). I've got DKIM, SPF, DMARC, reverse DNS for IPv4 and v6 and I still don't have the volume to show up in the postmaster tools Google has. My own e-mail server occasionally has spam come through. I really don't care. I sometimes mark it to be learned, but honestly I'd rather have some SPAM get through than get HAM marked and placed in the big fucking SPAM bucket I never check. But for big providers and dangers like ransomware, this isn't an option. So we have shitty unreliable e-mail (even on gmail back in 2012; I had delivery issues to other people on gmail). Where does the blame go? The 1% of people who give scammers money, get ransomware infections and click on everything? Over aggressive spam filters? The lack of real e-mail server diversity? Who the fuck knows anymore.
  • skrause 7y ago
    > but honestly I'd rather have some SPAM get through than get HAM marked and placed in the big fucking SPAM bucket I never check. This is why I like that my email provider (https://mailbox.org/en/ https://mailbox.org/en/) simply rejects all messages detected as spam: False positives don't get lost in a spam folder I never check, instead the sender gets a mail delivery failure notice by their own mail server and at least get a notification that they couldn't reach me.
    • em-bee 7y ago
      but what if email is the only way to reach you? so i got a notification that you didn't get the email. fine. i still have no way to talk to you unless i sign up to some other email service and try it again. depending on the reason to email you, i may not care enough. (maybe i wanted to buy your service) if a customer emails me and i don't respond because i didn't get the email, i have a problem, not the customer. the better solution would be both. respond with a delivery notice, AND deliver the email to my spam folder.
• usr1106 7y ago
  I sent a text format mail containing a couple of innocent words and a youtube link of a completely innocent clip to my wife. Gmail in their infinite wisdom classified it as spam. Obviously users need to be protected from watching youtube clips. I used the smtp server of my ISP. I'm know that it is tightly monitored and not the source of any significant amount of real spam.
• casedup 7y ago
  Check your Gmail message and look in the headers. I'm willing to bet you have some fails and softfails there. That's why you're been labeled as spam.
  • Bnshsysjab 7y ago
    Trust me it’s not, I’ve read theM countless times, google just decided I’m spam, and don’t tell me why. I run a small business and have a business name registered in the same name which cost $500 AUD, I don’t appear to have an option apart from paying AWS or Microsoft to host me.
• Santosh83 7y ago
  Sandstorm should have really caught on. We need to make self hosting drop dead simple so that even non-technical people can do it. The power of these mega-tech companies can only be whittled down if we take collective, well thought out action. And it is not just about tackling power imbalances. Owning your own data is a fundamental aspect of our digital lives which ought to have become simple and natural, given Moore's Law and the phenomenal device capabilities in recent years, yet somehow we are going the other way. Even as our devices become ever more capable (hardware wise), the software is moving to ever more to the Cloud and we're being locked out of the full capacities of our devices except in the narrow realm of media consumption.
  • Gravityloss 7y ago
    Since people specialize, we have organized societies and legal systems so that people can use services with reasonable trust. With new technology, the laws of course lag. You see a wild west, then monopolies etc before it settles.
• em-bee 7y ago
  we can argue all day long about why this happens. more interesting for me would be, what can i do about it. i have noticed the same problem. since a few weeks, i can no longer reach gmail from my mail-server. my mail volume is to small that marking mails non-spam would help. besides i nowadays mainly use email for situations where i don't have an alternative way to communicate, so when i email someone, and it gets rejected, there is no backchannel to let the recipient know about that. reading through that thread, one solution suggests itself: don't host your email server with a provider that tolerates spammers. does anyone have recommendations? where can i host my own mailserver, and not suffer from being stuck in an IP block that is on any blacklists? are there other solutions? can i use a reputable mailserver as a proxy? so that mail gets forwarded to my own server, and mail i send out gets sent through them, but i still do all the filtering, routing, management of email addresses, storage, etc, of emails on my own server? i know this is technically possible but which servers out there support that?
• irjustin 7y ago
  I would argue in this narrow case - I would not point to nefarious undercurrents. Google's ML mail spam models are that way because there's too many bad actors. Email, even in 2019, still extremely valuable. If you can get into people's email inbox, there's still quite high conversion rate - better than clicks/videos on a pure percentage basis. Even the author wants to reach out to people in a cold fashion. As a gmail user, I 100% appreciate keeping my inbox extremely clean. Google's spam filter is a welcome addition. As a business owner, I'm continuously having to do things so I don't end up in spam. Less images, specific wording and the list goes on. I can't have it both ways. I would not be on Gmail if it was like yahoo. My goodness... my parent's inbox, on yahoo, makes me anxious.
  • the_pwner224 7y ago
    > Google's ML mail spam models are that way because there's too many bad actors. Email, even in 2019, still extremely valuable. Google's spam models freaking suck donkey dick. I use Fastmail but my university uses Google for email. A service we use (Piazza, class Q&A) sends notifications via email. Over the years I have gotten probably about 1k email notifications from them, and replied to a few of them too. Google has recently started marking about 5% of their notifications as spam. 95% of the notifications come through; 5% get rejected. There's no discernible logic to this. There are organizations and people within the university which have me on their mailing lists; with them too 90% of the emails get through but 5% get randomly marked as spam. And they're perfectly normal emails that Google just decides to move to spam. Even with people that I have had email conversations with, it just spams random stuff. Every couple of months I check my Fastmail spam folder just for the lolz of seeing what's in there. With Google I have to check spam every day or I'll miss important stuff. There are tons of people who have posted very similar experiences on HN. On this thread I just saw another person comment that Google's own emails go to spam - I've observed this too on my personal Gmail account which I occasionally check. The spam filters have a tough job, but other companies are succeeding at keeping all the spam out without a gigantic false positive rate. Google's filter is hilariously bad.
    • boudin 7y ago
      Yeah, gmail is really not great. I host my own email but use gmail for work. I hate everything in gmail, from the UI to the lack of really simple way to filter thing (like sieve) and to the totally random behaviour like you described. In the end, I don't really read emails on gmail anymore because it's just a huge pain. My own server has a good reputation, but it meant setting up SPF, DKIM, DMARC etc.... Where it was the most painful was with microsoft email (I don't know the name of their service now, still live maybe). By default mails goes to spam, but really quickly they goes in limbo if people don't respond (on the smtp side the email is accepted but the recipient never see it, not even in spam). On new microsoft accounts I was always able to send a few emails in spam before it went into limbo. I ended up creating ~20 different accounts on their system (it was before they enforced giving a phone number) and had random discussions with myself for a while which was enough to build a reputation and not being put in spam anymore. I don't know if this behaviour was intended or not, I try to get in touch with someone from microsoft but couldn't find a way. Since then I do strongly advise not to use their system because that makes it really unreliable.
• vfclists 7y ago
  The legal naivete and indifference of otherwise technological savvy people is mind boggling. It is not the task of mail providers to block or hide email considered to be spam. It is the job of the end users, ie the email providers cusstomers and their software. Consider physical junk mail, ie the type that comes through the letter box. The post office does not decide what is junk mail or not, their job is to deliver it and it is the customer's job to discard it. The proper thing is for the mail provider to tag the emails their systems consider to be junk and deliver it the customers inbox and let the customers decide. Google's customers are the problem, not Google itself.
  • xxs 7y ago
    >Consider physical junk mail... Where I live it takes a sticker 'no spam' glued to the mail box and no more junk happens
    • sambe 7y ago
      I've lived in several places where this practice is common and none where it remotely works - it's totally ignored. Where are you based?
      • xxs 7y ago
        I tend not to leave any specific info about myself online, so the answer would be pretty broad - mainland Europe
      • daliusd 7y ago
        I will just second that this works in my country (Lithuania).
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • Majromax 7y ago
    > Google's customers are the problem, not Google itself. Kind-of? Ultimately, Google's customers are relying on Google's own filtering methodology. That's normally reasonable -- for the vast majority of people the spam filter works (from the recipient's perspective) so often that the spam folder is rarely even checked for false positives. However, Google has a scaling problem as noted by Brad Long later in the linked thread: linear scaling of human effort is too costly for them. That ultimately means that Google's services are offered on a like-it-or-leave-it basis, but leaving is made harder by the integration across the whole "Google ecosystem."
• LeonM 7y ago
  I run an email security/monitoring business [0], and we hear this issue with Gmail a lot, in fact: we have been bitten by it as well during the early days. The problem at hand is that it is really hard to debug situations like this. Google won't tell you why a particular email is blocked, because that information will be immediately exploited by spammers. We build our software suite because we found that mistakes in email configuration are easy to make and really hard to identify. I did a quick scan of rafa.eu.org and found the following: - SPF is setup [1] with a neutral 'all' mechanism, which basically disables SPF for this domain. Hence, DMARC will set SPF as 'pass' even though SPF did nothing here to help the spam algorithm to assess the sender. - A DMARC record exists and has a valid syntax [2], but the proposition (p value) is set to 'none', which basically disables DMARC altogether. It will enable reporting, but nothing more than that. - I don't know you DKIM selector, so I can't assess that, but make sure the DKIM signature address is aligned (using the same domain name). - The TLS configuration of your email server uses a self-signed certificate and is very much outdated (it offers SSLv3 and RC4 ciphers). I used testlssh.sh [3] to check this. So yes, you technically did setup TLS, SPF and DMARC, but in all 3 you have configuration errors. Running a mail server in 2019 requires a bit more work and maintenance than it used to be 10 years ago, but the reason is spammers, not Google. Remember: it is in Google's best interest to have as few false positives, as it ultimately benefits the users. It's just really frustrating that it is hard to figure out why Google is marking your email as spam. [0] https://www.mailhardener.com https://www.mailhardener.com [1] https://www.mailhardener.com/tools/spf-validator?domain=rafa.eu.org https://www.mailhardener.com/tools/spf-validator?domain=rafa... [2] https://www.mailhardener.com/tools/dmarc-validator?domain=rafa.eu.org https://www.mailhardener.com/tools/dmarc-validator?domain=ra... [3] https://testssl.sh/ https://testssl.sh/
  • throwaway2048 7y ago
    Its inaccurate to say that SPF, DMARC and DKIM setup this way is a "misconfiguration", It still allows anybody you are mailing to verify that email is from your mail server, and your domain, which is good enough for anti-spam purposes. Setting SPF to neutral (or softfail) and DMARC to none just ensures stuff like mailing lists forwarding mail from your domain aren't automatically marked as spam. In my experience it does not matter if you have very strict SPF and DMARC policies, with a good reputation IP address, and an old domain, both of which have never sent spam. GMail will absolutely still spambox you.
• guizb 7y ago
  The email landscape is substantially more complex now than it was three decades ago. The poster seems to be frustrated that he is mostly getting technical explanations to his rather emotionally fueled question. He is literally phishing for an argument on the morals of a big company deciding he is a potential spammer without absolute proof. He made it clear that his opinion is that there should be a system in place at Google that he can petition for his reputation, and that emails that look like spam should say 'potentially spam' rather than send it to a spam folder. All this while sending emails from an origin that is very well known for spammers and whose actions depict a typical bot account warming up. (Poster claims to on occasion initiate personal conversations with people who have their emails publicly listed, such as an author from a news site he might disagree with). There is just no reliable system today that allows for someone to host their email servers in a spam haven, not use relays, act like a spammer, and expect not to get your emails sent to spam folders. It's insulting to the folks that are pouring their time replying to what they think is a user in need of technical assistance, only to eventually stop replying when it becomes obvious that he only replies with questions of morality and treats most answers as if they were platitudes specifically attempting to dismiss his efforts to communicate.
  • tomlong 7y ago
    Brandon Long, is as ever, a helpful and respectful voice of reason on the sometimes fractious Mailop list
    • massaman_yams 7y ago
      Sometimes fractious? Ha. There's so many cranks there that 95% of the messages are not worth reading, even if most are well-intentioned.
  • Twisell 7y ago
    I don't think OP stop replying, he seems pretty active on another thread of the same mailing list concerning another big player (MSFT) filtering out some messages for some reasons. https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg09066.html https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg09066.html As a hobbit* , I'm actually pretty happy this whole conversation is starting to gain more traction. My domain is always green on every test I could run (mailtester.com & all) yet some of my mails go to the junk without any warning. At least warn postmaster when you decide to block a domain because of bad neighbour/hosting! * This specific reply of the chain is a must read and is where learned that I'm actually a mail hobbit. https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08958.html https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08958.html
• yoavm 7y ago
  This was the single reason I couldn't operate my own mail server. My mails were just always marked as spam by Google, no matter how much I made sure the whole TLS/DKIM/DMARC/DNSSEC/etc setup was correct. We tend to think about E-mail as something that is still distributed, but Google really killed that.
• Twisell 7y ago
  This finally get me to the point of understanding the "bad neighbor" signal that probably get my personal email (and some of my jobs) rejected from Gmail. Reading the thread was very instructive, but the most irritating point is that this rejection is mostly silent even if you send only 20 mail a week from your email address and all DKIM & all are in place. Lots of pedantic comment in this thread however, it seems that nasty provider are well known by experts, but for the love of internet, please spread your mighty feedback to small-folk so that we can act accordingly. Gonna open a ticket at my provider OVH (now I know).
  • tobias3 7y ago
    Ok, so the way OVH can solve the problem is the same way e.g. Amazon SES solves the problem. 1. They block all outgoing mail (outgoing 25, 465 and 587) and only open it up once you have submitted a ticket where you decribe for what purpose and how often you want to send mail (if you start off wanting to send a million mails per week they won't open outgoing mail at all). Manually review of those tickets is required so that bad actors can't get through. Difficulty of getting through the review needs to be adjusted upwards till it is too much work for bad actors (and they switch to another provider). 2. Monitor bounce-backs and have a spam reporting form for OVH IP ranges. Start blocking outgoing mail pretty soon if a small number of those arrive. Of course this is a cut-throat business ("email marketing"/spam), so competitors may submit false spam reports... 3. Therefore, for (2) you'll have to keep some records of the mail sent, i.e. you'll require mail to be send via relay... The review and the mail relay costs something, so you make it a monthly/per mail cost. Voilà, you have Amazon SES. Currently they probably block individual instances if they get a lot of complaints about one sending a lot of spam. They can't distinguish legitimate mail from spam because it is all SSL encrypted.
    • Twisell 7y ago
      Until now I trusted them so I use their own email servers. They are perfectly aware of my usage since while sending they even implement a trick so that one can't send bulk email from their SMPTP. And that's why I now fear they are utterly incompetent...
    • 7y ago
• OrgNet 7y ago
  The do that to me all the time and also tell me there is suspicious activity on my account when I login and there is no way to turn off these "features"
• thrower123 7y ago
  Gmail always marks the emails from my veterinarian, who has {business_name}@gmail.com, as spam. It's slightly irritating. However, seeing the mails that come in to our sales endpoints, gmail addresses are responsible for a huge percentage of the obvious spam.
• loriverkutya 7y ago
  I just remember the post not long ago ""The “mail is hard” myth" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20851880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20851880
• dylanondrugs 7y ago
  google is trying to become a large monopoly for email services tbh. Not only that but more and more businesses start using gsuite to avoid getting marked as spam for most clients and customers
• beagle3 7y ago
  I had similar problems with Gmail rejecting mail from my perfectly configured domain. I eventually gave up after finding, sometimes months afterwards, that an email was not delivered (and when found within 30 days, it was always in the recipient’s spam folder). I eventually switched to fastmail (from a reputable, but too tiny for google to care about provider), and all the problems were gone. But ... I am almost sure the issue was that I had a catchall address cc:ing a Gmail address; not sure why that would trigger spaminess detection, but that’s the best I could reason with my data.
• good_guy 7y ago
  This is like trying to win an argument over the internet. LOL.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• harel 7y ago
  This issue aside, I wasn't aware of https://talosintelligence.com/ https://talosintelligence.com/ The information there is very interesting.
• jacquesm 7y ago
  This is just Google's way of getting you to switch to their service.
• _wldu 7y ago
  Plain text email with no attachments is almost never marked as spam from what I have seen (unless there are several spammy keywords). I wonder why people don't use plain text email to ensure more reliable delivery of important messages?
• natch 7y ago
  Yep the person in charge of this at Google should be fired. And I say this as someone who has no reliance on or use of outbound email marketing whatsoever. In other words, I’m not an embittered emailer who thinks their email is being unfairly treated as spam. I’m just a user who sometimes looks in the spam folder and is aghast at some of the false positives Google has. And yes some of the false negatives in the inbox as well.
  • mav3rick 7y ago
    You don't understand the scale of this problem. It's such a fad to "fire" someone because you think "it's an easy problem".
    • gm 7y ago
      I think it should suffice to know that after one repeatedly trains the google spam filter with "report not spam" and "mark as spam", it should learn that well enough, no? As an example: Some dumb ass Verizon customer gave them my email address as their own. I got a ton of communications from Verizon that I could not turn off (bill past due, thank you for you promise to pay, and all sorts of really annoying messages). I called Verizon, I was told that neither them nor I could do anything about it because I did not own the Verizon account, and I did not have the account PIN. Their official solution for this problem: Mark all the Verizon emails as spam and don't call them again (I kid you not). The result: I marked about 100 Verizon emails as spam and Gmail learned that really well; now I do not see Verizon emails in my inbox. Why TF can't gmail do this with all the other emails I mark as spam and not spam? I just got in the habit of firing up the hideous gmail app on my phone to go through my spam folder every day and vet out the non-spam out of there. I usually go though about 250 emails per day. I end up looking at all the spam, but it's far faster to fish out the good messages from spam than if I turned spam detection off altogether. No matter how complex the problem to solve is, Google is failing at a level where even I could program it better, which is not a high bar at all.
      • shadowgovt 7y ago
        > Google is failing at a level where even I could program it better You should do so. You can set up filters to hook into keywords, domain names, etc., and route to spam. If the stuff you're getting is that obvious in structure, you should be able to kill it with a handful of such filters.
• vizzah 7y ago
  Google Cloud Platform <CloudPlatform-noreply@google.com> - just found in my Gmail Spam folder! =D
• helpPeople 7y ago
  Ive tried thanking users for supporting my website, but I rarely get a response. I'm not sure if they are "star struck" or are not receiving the email. Any suggestions to confirm?
• faissaloo 7y ago
  I'm someone who uses the Cockli email service and I too often have my emails marked as spam. Makes things a little annoying.
• chisleu 7y ago
  I moved my private server email to gsuite and this problem went away entirely. Running your own mail server is very dangerous. I don't recommend it.
  • neop1x 7y ago
    Thanks, that means you support these practices and you like that only way to prevent your mail to go to the spam folder is to actually pay for their services and send email only through them. Soon we will have to confirm our identity and pay google in order to use the internet as a whole, otherwise all recaptchas will fail. It will soon become survailance like in China just controlled by monopolies (tight to the government anyway). :)
• hsnewman 7y ago
  I'm so sick of technology.
• jayalpha 7y ago
  I like infomaniak. You can buy separate Email hosting. No EU or US jurisdiction. https://www.infomaniak.com/en/hosting/web-and-mail/mail-hosting https://www.infomaniak.com/en/hosting/web-and-mail/mail-host... Gandi offers free email with domain registration.
  • beefhash 7y ago
    > No EU or US jurisdiction. As far as I can tell, they're based in Switzerland. The political pressure if either of them EU cough a bit will probably cause Swiss authorities to fall over immediately. I wouldn't consider myself safe in your position.
    • jayalpha 7y ago
      My email is not valuable enough for the US or the EU to put pressure on them. If you are so worried you have to encrypt your email anyway. A Russian hoster likely would not bend. Be advised that a Russian IP address does not help you to pass Spam filters...
• Benjamin_Dobell 7y ago
  Although the post is about self-hosted mail, I wouldn't be surprised to learn something fairly major changed in Google's spam filter a couple of weeks ago. We use Google Apps (i.e. Gmail) and two weeks ago one of my co-workers noticed that another co-worker's emails were going to spam. Even though we're sending/receiving within the one GApps domain. Upon investigation I discovered that one co-workers emails were indeed going to spam for everyone, myself included unless he sent the email from his Windows machine. In which case it passed Google's spam filter no problem. His mail signature is more complicated on Apple Mail, 2 URL links (to our own domain) and an embedded image (NOT a URL). He's been using that same signature structure for yonks; yet just in the last two weeks it's a no go.
  • mistahenry 7y ago
    It was two weeks ago when I started suddenly having delivery problems (ie consistently delivered to the spam folder) for emails sent from SES from AWS. It’s very obvious to me now when reading these replies that Google changed their spam filtering and it’s affecting many more than just me
• Tepix 7y ago
  If you have an email provider that classifies ham as spam, complain. If complaining doesn't help, consider switching away. Remember at Google you're not the customer. The reason Google want to keep you using their product is so that they can learn more about you and then ask their customers more money to show ads to you.
• chias 7y ago
  I share the sentiment and the frustration. That said, if you read far down enough in the thread, it's pretty clear that the OP has very, very unrealistic expectations about others' obligations to him, and very incorrect notions about how statistics work. The argument eventually turns to "well google has a lot of processing power at its disposal so I don't see why it can't use this in order to turn incomplete data into more complete data" and that's when I checked out :\ Edit: also this Brandon Long has the patience of a saint.
• ping_pong 7y ago
  I'm 100% okay with this aspect of Google controlling mails, etc. The level of spam I have received has dropped precipitously because of it. For that I'm grateful. Whatever they have done has worked, and people don't seem to remember how bad it was 10 years ago. Now my email is relatively clear of spam and that's a great thing for safety and security as well.
• huhtenberg 7y ago
  Might be a good time to mention a new development with Yahoo Mail. They now appear to use a form of shadow ban. They will accept an email, with all outward symptoms being normal, but it will not appear anywhere in the user's mailbox. Not even in the Spam folder. This started few months ago when we were sending out our (rather infrequent) newsletter. 5th or so message to ...@yahoo.com address failed with 421 4.7.0 [TSS04] Messages from xx.xx.xx.xx temporarily deferred due to user complaints - 4.16.55.1; see https://help.yahoo.com/kb/postmaster/SLN3434.html (in reply to MAIL FROM command) That's with just a couple of seconds in. They kept replying with 421 for a while, but later switched to just dropping connections. Then, in the course of the next few days, they would accept 1-2 emails and then go back to denying them again. As I mentioned above, the "best" part is that none of these emails would actually make it into recipient's mailboxes. They disappear. Better yet, all subsequent (non-bulk) emails have the same fate as do _replies_ to emails from Ymail users. This last bit is what makes this look like a shadow ban. All attempts to contact Yahoo went unanswered, including those made through Gmail. Ditto for whitelisting requests through their web form. If anyone has any ideas what the hell's going on, I'd be curious to hear them.
  • driverdan 7y ago
    I don't think this is new. Many email providers will throttle / blackhole you if they decide you're sending too fast or see too many bounces. Slow down your send rate, make sure your server is configured correctly, and prune your lists.
    • huhtenberg 7y ago
      "Many providers" - any concrete examples? For an SPF/DKIM'd server that's been at the same IP for nearly a decade and had not a single spamming incident. PS. The list is immaculately maintained, the server is configured as properly as it gets and very conservatively rate-throttled. There's nothing obvious.
      • baobabKoodaa 7y ago
        Gmail also occasionally blackholes mail.
• ratsmack 7y ago
  This is why I disabled Google spam capture entirely on my account. They were capturing things that I had marked as non-spam many times over, so to me, the feature became worthless.
• penname 7y ago
  OT: Outreach via email and I am not talking about doing some crappy newsletters has the highest sophistication level in our company. And I am not talking about setting up some lame DMARC/SPF, we (must) do 10x more. DB adminstration is easy compared to getting emails through on a large scale.
• pwinnski 7y ago
  "It is always better to let the possible spam go through than to filter out something that is not spam." Spoken like an email sender, not an email receiver. I'm deeply sympathetic with the sender, and not inclined to defend Google here, but I'm also aware that Google is a very large target with a lot of bad actors specifically targeting them, and I just checked my spam folder in gmail: wow! The problem here is spammers, and a communication system that assumes good faith on the part of senders. Gmail is choosing one way of trying to counteract that problem which is causing problems for people in certain IP blocks, and that sucks. But the problem is still spammers, not Google.
• fastaguy88 7y ago
  It's not just gmail. When my university went to office365 mail for faculty, pretty much all of my email from the upper administration (e.g. the president of the university) was marked as junk. I complained, but there were no solutions.
• jedberg 7y ago
  Because of this post I checked my gmail spam folder for the first time in months. Of the 429 messages, 8 were not spam, which honestly is kind of a high false positive rate. Incidentally, two messages from Google themselves were correctly marked as spam, in that they were advertising for services that I didn't care about.
• carloswilson 7y ago
  Prior to GMail, we used to check our "Junk" folder occasionally in whatever email service we used. When GMail arrived with its nice spam classification, it was great. Worked well, better than any competitors out there. This gradually conditioned us to ignore the "Spam" directory completely. Now things have moved to the opposite extreme. It is quite difficult to host independent email servers and send emails from it without GMail classifying it as spam. The high false-positive rate has become the norm. Instead of GMail trying to reduce the false-positive rate, it has now become the responsibility of those hosting email servers to jump through the hoops to ensure that their emails are not classified as spam. Makes one think: If we knew what we know today about spam and abuse of Internet services, would SMTP have been designed the way it is designed today? What fundamental design change could have made it immune to spam? Perhaps a pull-based design instead of push-based? Perhaps something even cleverer?
  • criley2 7y ago
    My conspiracy theory is that google intentionally has degraded the ability of spam to be detected. Why? Google Inbox did it absolutely perfectly. They wrapped up every email, from every major source, into nearly perfect bundles. You could receive hundreds of unsolicited ("sOlIcItEd") marketing emails a.k.a. spam and Inbox would perfectly roll them into one bundle with a 1 swipe gesture to archive. Then they killed Inbox and Gmail has functionally no ability to collate spam into a bundle and hide it. That's intentional. Email marketing is huge, and google has a massive vested interest in ensuring that gmail users can see advertisements.
• fortran77 7y ago
  This is truly a severe problem, and I've given up trying to fix it. I don't run my own mail servers anymore. I have an Outlook business account. Microsoft is big enough that google doesn't mess with their email. I sort of understand why Google does this--probably 95% of email from random mail servers are spam! But that doesn't make it right.
• c3534l 7y ago
  I see most people saying Google errs too much on the side of its spam," but it strikes me as better for everyone that spam never get through so as to incentivize people not to send spam, thereby destroying most spam before it even makes it to your spam box. You can always check your spam box, so its just a mild inconvenience mbst of the time. If you're expecting an email, you can whitelist the sender. If you're sending email to someone who isn't suspecting it, then maybe you need to take a moment out to think about whether you're spamming people's inboxes with emails they don't want.
• S-E-P 7y ago
  Later down the thread it shows that OVH Hosting's reputation is probably the reason why it's marked as spam. https://talosintelligence.com/reputation_center/lookup?search=OVH%20Hosting&org_lookup=1#ip-addresses https://talosintelligence.com/reputation_center/lookup?searc... ^ pretty nifty look at how your neighbors screw you sometimes
  • pera 7y ago
    That's most likely the reason: OVH is well known for their lack of attention on spammers using their VPSs, so most operators will just filter their IP blocks. I run a low volume email server and 100% of the connections from OVH blocks are spam/phishing/vuln-scanning/etc. It's true that Gmail could do more to help low volume operators understand deliverability problems, but in my opinion OVH should be doing something about their spam issue. My advice when looking for a VPS provider for running an email server is to read their AUP and check their blocks on Talos.
• mirimir 7y ago
  One could just use a Gmail account for contacting people with Gmail addresses. If there's extended conversation, then migrate to ones preferred email account.
• pwinnski 7y ago
  This is a pretty fantastic summary of the current state of email: https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08958.html https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08958.html
• secabeen 7y ago
  I run into a similar situation, and I have done every thing you are supposed to. DMARC, SPF, MTA-STS, DKIM, all of it. I have only one IP address that ever sends legitimate email from my domain (I proxy all my personal messages through that IP), on AWS, and it's been that way for years. Despite that, the reputation systems give my system a neutral reputation. Sure, I know that there are lots of people who spam through AWS, but AWS IPs are not allocated in bunches, and anyone can get one. There should be some way to get my reputation up to good, but I haven't yet figured it out.
  • pera 7y ago
    Neutral, in your case, probably means that there is not enough volume coming from your server, and as far as I know the reputation of your /32 does not depend on your block (of course, providers may still decide to filter your block). Did you set up the PTR record and SMTP banner?
• al2o3cr 7y ago
  I repeated this for three different accounts Registering multiple Gmail accounts from the same machine in close succession almost certainly isn't helping you not look like a malicious user.
• mtsx 7y ago
  outlook.com spam rules are much harder.... twitter,edx,coursera, even MS own mails go to the junk folder .
• yellowapple 7y ago
  The domain didn't even have an MX record defined until recently, let alone DKIM and SPIF. I'm surprised Gmail ever delivered emails from that domain to anywhere other than spam.
• eco 7y ago
  Just to add another experience, our company also started getting a lot of legitimate email marked as spam as of about two weeks ago. This included emails coming from the same domain (with all the proper SPF and DKIM setup in place).
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• kazinator 7y ago
  The issue affects only outbound mail, not the ability to operate your mail domain as such. The fix/workaround is to find an SMTP relay which has reputation, and send your SMTP through that. At least temporarily, until the domain you want to be gets better reputation. This is what people do who operate little domains that are physically hooked up via residential subscriber IP addresses. You will never be able to send SMTP anywhere from a subscriber IP. Rather, you typically use your ISP's mail forwarding hosts (usually via an authenticated connection: your SMTP server logs in to theirs to do its business). (Otherwise they would be operating an "open relay".)
• johnklos 7y ago
  Unfortunately, OVH doesn't care about spam from their networks, so people really need to move. Too bad we don't have other ways to properly punish network administrators who ignore complaints.
• user32556 7y ago
  A few weeks ago, we organized a competition and we asked the top 3 participants to send us their solution to our gmail. Two were using their own domains (.io and .su) and one was using Gmail. The two with their own domains just got in the spam folder, and without surprise that Gmail one survived. "If you want to set up your own email domain rather than using Gmail, good luck."
• neop1x 7y ago
  I think the major problem here is IP reputation. Especially if you are hosting on public VPS or worse your home network. The root of the problem is spam abuse. Spammers have no problem to spin up random VPS to send spam. They can set rDNS, SPF, DMARC too. There is enormous amount of spam. Of course it should be handled on message-by-message basis, using proper antispam and ML. But it looks like some providers simply block various IP prefixes. :( It makes their work easier and it is marketing to use their services "which work".