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This seems like a major legal liability for Google. It could be shown that Google and other major email hosting providers act like a cartel by unfairly discrimi

• amenod 4y ago
  I hope so! I am tired of explaining people that it's actually Google's fault they didn't receive my mail. I'll be happy when they pay dearly for the disservice they do to e-mail.
  • gnarbarian 4y ago
    Are you using S/MIME certificates?
    • smartbit 4y ago
      Why are you asking? Is there a relation between spam handling and usage of S/MIME?
    • Kadin 4y ago
      Last time I looked into it (I run a mailserver and mailman list for one of my hobby groups), S/MIME wouldn't change your "spamminess" reputation score. DKIM, DMARC, and SPF do, though, and basically are table stakes if you want your mail (especially mailinglist messages) to go through to people at major providers.
    • amenod 4y ago
      No, would that help? I am however using SPF and one of DKIM / DMARC (I forget which). But anyway, I can live with a mail missing here and there. It is just annoying and isn't right.
  • Avamander 4y ago
    It's not really Google's fault to be honest. The need to warm up new IP's has existed for a while and a lot of providers do it. Any postmaster with experience knows how and why it's done.
    • black_puppydog 4y ago
      The root comment literally explains that that's BS. Every post master knows that it is done. But it doesn't have to be that way, although it certainly can feel like it when a company like google decides to not budge on the matter.
      • Avamander 4y ago
        > But it doesn't have to be that way Sure, if you want spam. Don't like it, get people to deploy DKIM, then the domains will be used for reputation purposes. What the root comment says is BS, the industry uses these methods for a very real and practical reasons.
        • BenjiWiebe 4y ago
          No, it can be a different way and still not have spam, by trusting/tracking domains instead of IP addresses.
          • Avamander 4y ago
            I did write how using domains for reputation purposes instead could happen. The second sentence.
            • cmroanirgo 4y ago
              DKIM in no way helps to get past the cartels' "reputation" filters. I send maybe one email every few months to microsoft accounts & it's always received as spam. My server setup & ip have been solid for a decade. It's only ever the globalist providers that block me. Google is 50/50 I get through. Everyone else (eg Protonmail) is no problem.
              • Avamander 4y ago
                It absolutely does. Also that was an "if, then potentially" sentence about reputation tracking in the future. In your case, it's likely that your volume and sending patterns aren't consistent and trustworthy enough to keep track of your domain and IP reputation. You have to understand that they get millions of letters from new domains each day, sent from compromised Wordpress blogs and the alike. If you want to be deliverable, you have to be consistent and not suspicious. Or, more likely, there's some other mistake in your configuration somewhere.
• alar44 4y ago
  Sure, then they relax things, spam explodes, and people are going to complain that they're not doing enough to fight spam or actively enabling it.
  • throw10920 4y ago
    Google has more than adequate capabilities to handle spam, as several comments point out above. Also, Hashcash[1], which is a virtual silver bullet for email spam, especially when combined with existing trust mechanisms (i.e. the less reputation you have, the harder the Hashcash challenge). The problem is not that the level of strictness that Google is applying is necessary to reduce spam; the problem is that Google doesn't care and is in fact incentivized to not accept email from non-Google domains. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
    • Avamander 4y ago
      > Google has more than adequate capabilities to handle spam, as several comments point out above. Yes, and sender reputation is part of it :D that's why they can handle it. > Also, Hashcash[1], which is a virtual silver bullet for email spam, especially when combined with existing trust mechanisms Who do you think has to and can spend more compute or money, well-trusted Google or a small player? Far from a silver bullet. > i.e. the less reputation you have, the harder the Hashcash challenge Who do you think will have better reputation? I won't even start at how different people define spam. Though, I can promise you that on average SpamChimp would get to send a lot of spam for much less "HashCash" than a small player. > is in fact incentivized to not accept email from non-Google domains. Everyone is.
      • BenjiWiebe 4y ago
        The thing with hashcash is that a small player doesn't need much compute power, cause they aren't sending a million emails a minute.
        • Avamander 4y ago
• nonameiguess 4y ago
  They hurt more than competitors. If anyone from gmail is reading and gives a crap about the collateral damage from policies like these, they have set me back at least a few months in my attempts to adopt a child. The agency my wife and I had been getting licensed through dropped us, citing lack of responsiveness in completing paperwork. But I've been e-mailing them for months with questions clarifying how to fill out unclear forms and they've been ignoring me. I presented them with a history of all the sent e-mails they never answered, and even gave my e-mail address in person last time I was there, asking them to add me to an allow-list, but it didn't make any difference. It's particularly disappointing because even just getting the process started was delayed when no one answered our initial inquiries of interest for nearly a month. That was when I first figured out it was because my e-mails were getting routed to the agencies' spam folders. At this point, I'm probably just going to have to give in and get a gmail address for the sole purpose of completing an adoption, and then stop using it and go back to my real address. Who'd have thought this would be the thing preventing me from completely de-googling?
  • superasn 4y ago
    My loss isn't as big as this but I've gotten some Paypal disputes because those users didn't get any of the welcome emails (for a rather costly purchase). My issue has been more with Apple's mail for some reason though. Thankfully all my customers have been super understanding and were kind to take the disputes back once they were able to locate the emails in the Spam folder. Also I finally decided to just use a "reputed" smtp server to fix my problems (feels like extortion but what can you do). I've written this before, but it's so sad that something so important and vital like email is so broken and we are the mercy of corps like Google/Apple/Microsoft and everyone has their own secret policy.
  • dorfsmay 4y ago
    Hiding messages in a spam folder is essentially ghosting. Email servers should reject messages that they consider spam. I've run into countless problems because of my messages being marked as spam. The worse is that now it as become socially acceptable to ghost people, I never know who ghosted me, the mail server or the person! I've run into "I ignore your email, get the hint" a few times when thinking I was marked as spam and tried to contact people through other means.
• jawr 4y ago
  I think everyone always looks at it from the perspective of the hobby mailer, when instead gmail looks at it from the recipients point of view. It’s really really trivial to automate buying a domain, get some IPs and setup DKIM, SPF and DMARC. How can a provider determine intent? Gmails approach is to mostly use user signals, which in my opinion is the best way. At a company I’ve worked for, they sent some mail using sendgrid to a poorly made mailing list and we’re in gmail spam for ages. My personal ran email mostly stays in inbox.
  • Hizonner 4y ago
    From the recipient's point of view, having incoming mail that is not spam dropped is a fucking problem.
    • jawr 4y ago
      It’s only dropped if the relay/server sending it is not behaving nicely, otherwise it’s there in quarantine (spam) awaiting user signals to train it. I think it’s such a typical mindset that people with very limited domain knowledge think that people with a lot more domain knowledge are just being stupid.
• autoexec 4y ago
  I don't care for the idea that any private network should be legally required to accept connections (let alone accepting data) from any other network if they see fit not to. No sender should have the power the force another server on another network to accept whatever they spew out to them. If google is too aggressive about dropping mail and gmail users can't reliably get the email messages they want, those users should move to a platform that doesn't block those messages. Problem solved. I've seen several articles in recent months about Google (and other providers) blocking too much, but they are nearly always about the senders and the burdens blocking and sender reputation places on them. As much as I'd agree that senders have to do a lot to get mail accepted maybe this is working as intended more often than not and the fact that people aren't dropping their gmail accounts in droves seems to suggest that the people whose inboxes are directly impacted by Google's filtering are largely happy with how things are. Most email is spam, and for the few senders who aren't just bitter that they can't force spam on the most popular email providers with impunity, I freely admit that this is an extremely frustrating experience for them and that it does help degrade the utility of email and contributes to the consolidation of useful email providers. The current situation isn't perfect. The idea that we could send mail from any routable IP address, or send bulk email easily to anywhere, or even set up our own personal SMTP servers on a whim and still send email to any other network in the world with no deliverability issues is beautiful, but not practical. Given the decades of scammers and advertisers abusing email, I'd much rather leave it up to the recipients to decide when a service has gone too far in blocking what ends up in their inboxes.