6 ms·

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 expla

by 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
- _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
  Even after reading that, I'm not sure what an email hobbit is. Someone who just wants to live in a cozy hole in the ground with a few nice email amenities?
  - perennate 7y ago
    My impression from that was (almost) everyone is a hobbit. Hobbits being normal people who don't want to send marketing spam.
    - Twisell 7y ago
      But still want own their own domain so that they are not tied to any internet king.
  - tytso 7y ago
    It was an extended metaphor categorizing an ISP's (or a cloud provider) customers into multiple buckets: Kobolds, Lizardmen, Hobbits, and Princesses. Princeses were the customres which sometimes required a lot of customer support, but paid really well because they purchased a lot of services/VM's. Hobbits were customers who basically minded their own business, and didn't guy a lot of stuff, but didn't cause any problems. Lizardmen were customers which had possibly clueless marketing departments that would occasionally send e-mail marketing campaigns which crossed the line, but which also sent plenty of legitimate e-mails, and which were mostly trainable after the ISP/cloud provider smacked them on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper --- and Kobolds were spamvertising companies that did nothing but send spam, and were constantly switching ip addresses / VM's, and knew d*mn well that they were doing something evil, and were not trainable. The problem is that if the ISP / cloud provider has the vast majority of their customers being Kobolds and Lizardmen, it becomes economically hard to just cut off the bad actors, because the vast majority of their customer base are bad actors. If the provider originally had a good mix of all of these customer mixes, but wasn't proactively cutting off the Kobolds and educating the Lizardmen, then their network block would start getting a bad reputation, and all of the major e-mail providers (not just GMail) would start blacklisting the netblock, or at the very least, treating any e-mail sent from that network block as a strong SPAM signal, and this would cause the other customer types to find other providers. So if you happen to be a customer of such a network/cloud provider, you could try complaining to the provider, but they are really in between a rock and a hard place, because if you're the 1 good hobbit and all of the otheer customers for that provider are Kobolds and Lizardmen, what is the provider supposed to do? You're probably better off switching to a better provider. Unfortunately, the better provider may also cost more, but you get what you pay for.
LeonM 7y ago
Rarely have I seen such concise and respectful way of describing the typical rants I see on HN way to often, bravo! I can only wish I had your writing skills. > 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. Yes, I have been bitten by this many times. Every time I see a topic like this one I try to help that person by offering technical advice, basically doing my consulting job for free for everyone to read. And many times the post gets downvoted till its dead. Slowly I learned that people don't want a solution to their problem, they just want to vent their (understandable) frustration about $BIGCORP. But it still hurts to get downvoted when you just try to help.
- pygy_ 7y ago
  That can be annoying... Pro tip: start by briefly acknowledging the frustration, then offer the technical solution/workaround.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    Even technical people are people. This tip can help defuse the frustration, making the recipient more willing to listen to the technical solution. People forget sometimes that the person on the other end of the screen isn’t a computer that is completely unmoved by silly things like emotion and frustration.
- dageshi 7y ago
  This is essentially HN with every single Google related post nowadays. Good or bad, people hate Google, they hate it the way they used to hate Microsoft, they see everything it does as being nefarious. People ignore the email spammers, SEO spammers, automated password crackers and blame google for the solutions they put in place to combat those things. It's impossible to reason with them, honestly I think it's just best to ignore posts like this.
  - 7y ago
megous 7y ago
It doesn't really matter if he or the gmail user initiates the conversation, in my experience. Probably the only reliable way to communicate with gmail users is to send them 5xx response right away when they first contact you, and inform them there about the situation, and that they should check spam and why, tell them to resend, and let the other messages from the same gmail address through (maybe repeat this from time to time so they will not forget to use their e-mail properly and check spam folder). Let them have some of the fucking time waste their provider causes others. Because it's really infuriating if someone writets to you, you put time to help them with something, and their demented (did I say it's infuriating? :D - also what kind of company can't detect something is a response, if you even quote the original email, it's ridiculous) e-mail provider trashes your response.
- cnst 7y ago
  This is actually a great idea. We should implement this two-step approach for anyone trying to email us from Gmail. Sadly, I'd imagine some users don't really have a choice, e.g., an employee whose company is using Gmail from G Suite for its email, so, it'd be an uphill battle for sure.
  - megous 7y ago
    Maybe, one other thing where this would have to have a shortcircuited is when I initiate the contact, so that people responding would not get hit by this, even if their reply is the first e-mail from them sent to my server. So it should be fairly smart.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  You could try that. But I'm not sure so many people would think that corresponding with you is worth the trouble.
  - megous 7y ago
    I can't really care less about those people. Most people I'm talking about are people who're contacting me because I already provided them quite a bit of free service via my free software. So if someone can't be bothered to check so that I'm not wasting time responding to their trash folder, that's a good filter in the first place. Anyway, better thing might be responding by adding a (F)AQ item publicly, and just sending a link.
PhasmaFelis 7y ago
> 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 The common thread among many of the bad-Google stories I've seen in the last 10 years is that Google has made a deliberate decision to not give two shits if they accidentally hurt a small minority of their users. People get messages out of the blue that essentially say "We've just wiped out your email account, we're not telling you why and there's no one you can appeal to." I don't know if this particular guy is on the level or not, but it's not credible that all of these people are secretly spammers and scammers. Occasionally you can get things fixed if you know someone at Google or your complaint goes viral, but that's your only option. I'm sure someone at Google did some math and concluded that the ill will of a few customers costs less than maintaining a support department. That's not an excuse. I don't think we should expect Google to never make mistakes, but we should absolutely expect some avenue to correct those mistakes.
- tracker1 7y ago
  No idea how well it is or isn't correlated, but a note on twitter tagging the appropriate dept at google usually sees the issue fixed within two days, though no actual feedback and likely coincidence.
shadowgovt 7y ago
Basically. His fundamental issue is that Internet services that lack an authority framework organically bred "ghetto" infrastructures, where things work worse because a person lacks access to "the right kind of people" in a system that's supposed to be democratized. He's not wrong, but it's not like someone sat down and decreed some email sources should be untrusted for fun; the system started out very implicitly trusting, we added a pile of humans to the system, and oops! They acted like humans, took advantage of other people, implicit trust broke down, and now there are "good" and "bad" online neighborhoods.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  I'm curious how you define "democracy". Email delivery is very democratic, with each person having the power to choose with whom they associate and who they choose to delegate decisions to. Anyone who doesn't like Google's spam blocker can advertise an alternate address on a mail server that welcomes all submissions (or host a blog, or join a freely open IRC channel,...)
heyoni 7y ago
I’m going through the thread and the answer comes down to reputation...is that really a technical measure of the issue rather than a social one?

by guizb 7y ago

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

_emacsomancer_ 7y ago
Even after reading that, I'm not sure what an email hobbit is. Someone who just wants to live in a cozy hole in the ground with a few nice email amenities?
- perennate 7y ago
  My impression from that was (almost) everyone is a hobbit. Hobbits being normal people who don't want to send marketing spam.
  - Twisell 7y ago
    But still want own their own domain so that they are not tied to any internet king.
- tytso 7y ago
  It was an extended metaphor categorizing an ISP's (or a cloud provider) customers into multiple buckets: Kobolds, Lizardmen, Hobbits, and Princesses. Princeses were the customres which sometimes required a lot of customer support, but paid really well because they purchased a lot of services/VM's. Hobbits were customers who basically minded their own business, and didn't guy a lot of stuff, but didn't cause any problems. Lizardmen were customers which had possibly clueless marketing departments that would occasionally send e-mail marketing campaigns which crossed the line, but which also sent plenty of legitimate e-mails, and which were mostly trainable after the ISP/cloud provider smacked them on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper --- and Kobolds were spamvertising companies that did nothing but send spam, and were constantly switching ip addresses / VM's, and knew d*mn well that they were doing something evil, and were not trainable. The problem is that if the ISP / cloud provider has the vast majority of their customers being Kobolds and Lizardmen, it becomes economically hard to just cut off the bad actors, because the vast majority of their customer base are bad actors. If the provider originally had a good mix of all of these customer mixes, but wasn't proactively cutting off the Kobolds and educating the Lizardmen, then their network block would start getting a bad reputation, and all of the major e-mail providers (not just GMail) would start blacklisting the netblock, or at the very least, treating any e-mail sent from that network block as a strong SPAM signal, and this would cause the other customer types to find other providers. So if you happen to be a customer of such a network/cloud provider, you could try complaining to the provider, but they are really in between a rock and a hard place, because if you're the 1 good hobbit and all of the otheer customers for that provider are Kobolds and Lizardmen, what is the provider supposed to do? You're probably better off switching to a better provider. Unfortunately, the better provider may also cost more, but you get what you pay for.

LeonM 7y ago

Rarely have I seen such concise and respectful way of describing the typical rants I see on HN way to often, bravo! I can only wish I had your writing skills. > 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. Yes, I have been bitten by this many times. Every time I see a topic like this one I try to help that person by offering technical advice, basically doing my consulting job for free for everyone to read. And many times the post gets downvoted till its dead. Slowly I learned that people don't want a solution to their problem, they just want to vent their (understandable) frustration about $BIGCORP. But it still hurts to get downvoted when you just try to help.

pygy_ 7y ago
That can be annoying... Pro tip: start by briefly acknowledging the frustration, then offer the technical solution/workaround.
- falcolas 7y ago
  Even technical people are people. This tip can help defuse the frustration, making the recipient more willing to listen to the technical solution. People forget sometimes that the person on the other end of the screen isn’t a computer that is completely unmoved by silly things like emotion and frustration.
dageshi 7y ago
This is essentially HN with every single Google related post nowadays. Good or bad, people hate Google, they hate it the way they used to hate Microsoft, they see everything it does as being nefarious. People ignore the email spammers, SEO spammers, automated password crackers and blame google for the solutions they put in place to combat those things. It's impossible to reason with them, honestly I think it's just best to ignore posts like this.
- 7y ago

megous 7y ago

It doesn't really matter if he or the gmail user initiates the conversation, in my experience. Probably the only reliable way to communicate with gmail users is to send them 5xx response right away when they first contact you, and inform them there about the situation, and that they should check spam and why, tell them to resend, and let the other messages from the same gmail address through (maybe repeat this from time to time so they will not forget to use their e-mail properly and check spam folder). Let them have some of the fucking time waste their provider causes others. Because it's really infuriating if someone writets to you, you put time to help them with something, and their demented (did I say it's infuriating? :D - also what kind of company can't detect something is a response, if you even quote the original email, it's ridiculous) e-mail provider trashes your response.

cnst 7y ago
This is actually a great idea. We should implement this two-step approach for anyone trying to email us from Gmail. Sadly, I'd imagine some users don't really have a choice, e.g., an employee whose company is using Gmail from G Suite for its email, so, it'd be an uphill battle for sure.
- megous 7y ago
  Maybe, one other thing where this would have to have a shortcircuited is when I initiate the contact, so that people responding would not get hit by this, even if their reply is the first e-mail from them sent to my server. So it should be fairly smart.
lonelappde 7y ago
You could try that. But I'm not sure so many people would think that corresponding with you is worth the trouble.
- megous 7y ago
  I can't really care less about those people. Most people I'm talking about are people who're contacting me because I already provided them quite a bit of free service via my free software. So if someone can't be bothered to check so that I'm not wasting time responding to their trash folder, that's a good filter in the first place. Anyway, better thing might be responding by adding a (F)AQ item publicly, and just sending a link.

PhasmaFelis 7y ago

> 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 The common thread among many of the bad-Google stories I've seen in the last 10 years is that Google has made a deliberate decision to not give two shits if they accidentally hurt a small minority of their users. People get messages out of the blue that essentially say "We've just wiped out your email account, we're not telling you why and there's no one you can appeal to." I don't know if this particular guy is on the level or not, but it's not credible that all of these people are secretly spammers and scammers. Occasionally you can get things fixed if you know someone at Google or your complaint goes viral, but that's your only option. I'm sure someone at Google did some math and concluded that the ill will of a few customers costs less than maintaining a support department. That's not an excuse. I don't think we should expect Google to never make mistakes, but we should absolutely expect some avenue to correct those mistakes.

tracker1 7y ago
No idea how well it is or isn't correlated, but a note on twitter tagging the appropriate dept at google usually sees the issue fixed within two days, though no actual feedback and likely coincidence.

shadowgovt 7y ago

Basically. His fundamental issue is that Internet services that lack an authority framework organically bred "ghetto" infrastructures, where things work worse because a person lacks access to "the right kind of people" in a system that's supposed to be democratized. He's not wrong, but it's not like someone sat down and decreed some email sources should be untrusted for fun; the system started out very implicitly trusting, we added a pile of humans to the system, and oops! They acted like humans, took advantage of other people, implicit trust broke down, and now there are "good" and "bad" online neighborhoods.

lonelappde 7y ago
I'm curious how you define "democracy". Email delivery is very democratic, with each person having the power to choose with whom they associate and who they choose to delegate decisions to. Anyone who doesn't like Google's spam blocker can advertise an alternate address on a mail server that welcomes all submissions (or host a blog, or join a freely open IRC channel,...)

heyoni 7y ago

I’m going through the thread and the answer comes down to reputation...is that really a technical measure of the issue rather than a social one?