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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

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.

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.