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Sadly, this says more about how broken GMail now is than anything else. Real Soon Now(TM), the tech community needs to start a serious campaign to shame and is

Sadly, this says more about how broken GMail now is than anything else. Real Soon Now(TM), the tech community needs to start a serious campaign to shame and isolate email providers that do not reliably deliver legitimate emails, regardless of how high profile they are. It probably needs meaningful government/regulator backing to get anywhere. The odd false positive on spam/malware filtering is understandable, it's not a perfect science, but the reality today is that a lot of these services simply don't work properly and the unreliability is probably causing some degree of damage to huge numbers of people and businesses. Email is far too important for far too many things to let the reliability continue to degrade according to the arbitrary whims of a few large mail services and to permit oligopoly effects to lock new or small-time providers out of the system almost entirely.

sneak 5y ago
“the tech community” doesn’t matter: users chose gmail. Shaming them won’t do anything, because the users are the ones whose choices matter.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  But the users might make different choices if they knew how often mail they probably want to receive isn't reaching them. The problem at the moment is that the failures are largely silent from the user's point of view. To be fair to GMail, although it's obnoxiously aggressive with classifying things as spam, as far as I know it doesn't silently drop incoming mail without notifying either the sender or recipient, which is the worst thing that some major ISPs do. I have had customers contact my business to ask for help with something, and we send them a quick reply answering their question, and then the next day we get a frustrated follow-up asking why we are ignoring them, and this continues for another round or two until they give up on buying something from us or cancel a subscription. I have had friends send me a reply a month after a big party saying they're sorry they didn't make it but they only just found the invitation and the follow-up I sent them in their junk folder. Those sorts of cases are annoying and seem to happen all the time these days, but imagine if a missing email was something really important from your doctor or your kid's school.
  - sneak 5y ago
    Your doctor already pays the whitelisted email deliverability cartel, or their email hosting service does. You're free to try to educate users now, if you like, but most people receive emails only from a small group of hosting companies.
    - Silhouette 5y ago
      And you don't think it's a problem that many people might not receive some legitimate emails at all? Or you just don't think that anything can be done to improve the situation now?
      - sneak 5y ago
        I think that if users thought that their email is broken or not working, they wouldn't use the service that they do. The actual people being negatively affected have chosen an acceptable level of spam false positives.
        Silhouette 5y ago
        But again, the point is that the users often don't know how badly their email is broken. Unless the user is actively expecting to receive an important mail around a certain time and therefore likely to notice its absence, the failures are either quiet (messages dropped in junk automatically that may or may not be noticed by the recipient later) or totally silent (as with ISPs that drop mail they deem inappropriate entirely, without notifying either party). Even if someone is expecting a mail, as the experience with business customers I mentioned demonstrates annoyingly often, the failure to receive that email may be assumed to be the fault of the expected sender, not the recipient's own mail service.
dariusj18 5y ago
It's more about how broken email is, gmail does what it does because they have to deal with the broken ecosystem of spammers and spoofers.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  I don't really buy that excuse any more. This is a business that wants to have heavy, fast-moving objects automatically navigating complex and unpredictable transport networks using its software. For that matter, this is a business whose golden goose is prioritising content people most want to see on the scale of the entire WWW, which has no shortage of junk sites that exist primarily to game the system. I'm reasonably sure that same business can be smarter about spam recognition than defaulting to assuming new mail from a source it hasn't seen before is bad, which seems close to the practical output of its existing system. But as with so many of the current dominant tech businesses, until someone poses a credible threat to its existing business model and revenue streams, it has no reason to invest in fixing problems even if it could obviously do better.

sneak 5y ago

“the tech community” doesn’t matter: users chose gmail. Shaming them won’t do anything, because the users are the ones whose choices matter.

Silhouette 5y ago
But the users might make different choices if they knew how often mail they probably want to receive isn't reaching them. The problem at the moment is that the failures are largely silent from the user's point of view. To be fair to GMail, although it's obnoxiously aggressive with classifying things as spam, as far as I know it doesn't silently drop incoming mail without notifying either the sender or recipient, which is the worst thing that some major ISPs do. I have had customers contact my business to ask for help with something, and we send them a quick reply answering their question, and then the next day we get a frustrated follow-up asking why we are ignoring them, and this continues for another round or two until they give up on buying something from us or cancel a subscription. I have had friends send me a reply a month after a big party saying they're sorry they didn't make it but they only just found the invitation and the follow-up I sent them in their junk folder. Those sorts of cases are annoying and seem to happen all the time these days, but imagine if a missing email was something really important from your doctor or your kid's school.
- sneak 5y ago
  Your doctor already pays the whitelisted email deliverability cartel, or their email hosting service does. You're free to try to educate users now, if you like, but most people receive emails only from a small group of hosting companies.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    And you don't think it's a problem that many people might not receive some legitimate emails at all? Or you just don't think that anything can be done to improve the situation now?
    - sneak 5y ago
      I think that if users thought that their email is broken or not working, they wouldn't use the service that they do. The actual people being negatively affected have chosen an acceptable level of spam false positives.
      - Silhouette 5y ago
        But again, the point is that the users often don't know how badly their email is broken. Unless the user is actively expecting to receive an important mail around a certain time and therefore likely to notice its absence, the failures are either quiet (messages dropped in junk automatically that may or may not be noticed by the recipient later) or totally silent (as with ISPs that drop mail they deem inappropriate entirely, without notifying either party). Even if someone is expecting a mail, as the experience with business customers I mentioned demonstrates annoyingly often, the failure to receive that email may be assumed to be the fault of the expected sender, not the recipient's own mail service.

dariusj18 5y ago

It's more about how broken email is, gmail does what it does because they have to deal with the broken ecosystem of spammers and spoofers.

Silhouette 5y ago
I don't really buy that excuse any more. This is a business that wants to have heavy, fast-moving objects automatically navigating complex and unpredictable transport networks using its software. For that matter, this is a business whose golden goose is prioritising content people most want to see on the scale of the entire WWW, which has no shortage of junk sites that exist primarily to game the system. I'm reasonably sure that same business can be smarter about spam recognition than defaulting to assuming new mail from a source it hasn't seen before is bad, which seems close to the practical output of its existing system. But as with so many of the current dominant tech businesses, until someone poses a credible threat to its existing business model and revenue streams, it has no reason to invest in fixing problems even if it could obviously do better.