6 ms·

Its 5000/day for marketing, and if you are sending 5000 emails a day, you probably should have unsubscribe links. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#r

by dexwiz 3y ago

Its 5000/day for marketing, and if you are sending 5000 emails a day, you probably should have unsubscribe links. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#requirements-5k https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#requirements-5k You also need a link, not just list-unsubscribe, and it is specifically for marketing emails. In my experience, Google is pretty accurate in figuring out transactional versus marketing. They don't tell their heuristics, but you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? They have reliably been sorting my promotional emails from transaction emails for almost a decade now. But off the top of my head when working on an email marketing platform: sender address, message subject and content, single message or bulk inbound at a given time, open rates, click rates, unsub rates, bounce rates. Part of sender reputation is ESPs building a profile of what kind of email you send from an address.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
> you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? Nope, I don't. So many things get constantly marked as spam in my inbox, even server notifications, from the same domain, same daily emails, marked repeatedly as "not spam", and added to address book. Then there's the second problem of google support... your 2fa passwords, email-authentications, password reset links, etc. will be sent out, gmail will send them to spam, your users won't see/find the email, and there's nothing you can do... noone to call at google that would actually listen and try to do anything, no penalties if they don't do anything, only hope that your service is large enough that it gets some traction on twitter or here and some random googler sees it.
xyst 3y ago
You could have put Google in early ‘00s on this pedestal. But the Google today is not worthy of this. G is like any other Fortune 500 company now. The amount of products in their graveyard grows every year. Maintenance of “legacy” apps is handed off to offshore teams who have objectives to just keep it running until it’s 86’d. Google has also made plenty of mistakes with web: look at PWAs, AMP, and Chrome just to start.
boplicity 3y ago
> you probably should have unsubscribe links They're not requiring just unsubscribe links. They're specifically requiring "one-click" unsubscribe links that can accept a POST request for unsubscribing. This allows their software to have an unsubscribe button that doesn't require the user to leave their software. This is the RFC that has to be complied with: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8058 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8058 Note, that this is not easy for many people using legacy software. It's a major change. I wouldn't be surprised if this requirement gets delayed multiple times.
- eli 3y ago
  Yes, that's the List-Unsubscribe header and it doesn't require a POST request. Email deliverability has always meant staying on top of changing requirements.
  - boplicity 3y ago
    No -- this actually expands on the List-Unsubscribe header, and adds a POST request header for one-click unsubscribe. From the RFC: > This document addresses this part of the problem, with an HTTPS POST action Look at the examples in the RFC for a clear description.
    - eli 3y ago
      Ah, my mistake. The MAILTO: style unsubscribes were a bit of a pain to deal with anyway.
- callalex 3y ago
  >this is not easy for many people using legacy software. It's a major change. That’s fine, I never wanted to receive messages from those people in the first place.
- dexwiz 3y ago
  No, that is for generating the Unsubscribe buttons in the email client itself. They also require a link in the body itself. From the google doc: Marketing messages and subscribed messages must support one-click unsubscribe, and include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message body.
joelcollinsdc 3y ago
“You need a link not list-unsubscribe” is not fully accurate according to my reading. They are asking senders to support the one click unsubscribe rfc, which uses list-unsubscribe.
gsharma 3y ago
> but you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? I’ve seen Gmail put legit update emails coming from Google itself in spam.
- djbusby 3y ago
  And yet obviously fake Drive shares from "Wells Fargo" or "Chase" get delivered to Inbox
jeffparsons 3y ago
> you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? We're talking about Google here. It doesn't matter that they have lots of clever people working there; they still occasionally get/guess things wrong, and if you're the unlucky too-small-to-even-notice outfit that happens to get squished by Google today, there's seldom much you can do about it.
- darylteo 3y ago
  Exactly... Outlook by Microsoft is notorious for being very heavy handed with emails, requiring sites to put warnings to users to whitelist their domains so that they receive invoices or notifications.
  - explaininjs 3y ago
    At this point with outlook it’s pretty much guaranteed that any important “you just paid a ton of money here is the asset you bought” email (show/bus/etc tickets) will go straight to spam. I check spam before I look in the non-“Focused” inbox.
    - amluto 3y ago
      If I send an email to some business, from the Outlook UI, and they reply, Outlook usually classifies the reply as spam. It’s hard to imagine less spammy email than that.
    - latchkey 3y ago
      I'd just rename the spam folder to "Inbox-2" or something. ;-)
jwr 3y ago
> Google is pretty accurate in figuring out transactional versus marketing. They don't tell their heuristics, but you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? Yes, I definitely think that. The engineers can build anything, but where the company focuses matters. I've seen transactional E-mails get sorted into people's spam/junk/newsletter folders too many times.
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  I also get tons of spam to my inbox despite regularly marking it as such, so if they are classifying marketing emails, they're not doing anything with that information. How hard is it to classify a message that literally contains the string "this is an advertisement"?
  - jodrellblank 3y ago
    Your comment literally contains the string "this is an advertisement" but I can't tell what you are advertising?
    - ndriscoll 3y ago
      It's also not an email. I've never seen a legitimate email with that string, and all of the illegitimate ones should be triggering other heuristics, such as the existence of an unsubscribe link, or things like "$x off". In any case the false positive rate on that would likely be incredibly low, so it's a good heuristic considering how bad the false negative rate is right now.
      - Macha 3y ago
        Dear site admin, This is as advertisement that appeared on your site yesterday that is a phishing scam pretending to be a bank. <Screenshot> Please prevent ads like this showing up on your site. Regards, Client XYZ --- Maybe it's just the positions I've been in, but I've often seen variations of the above email, and I've never seen advertisement emails that flat out say "this is an advertisement" In fact, what I have seen are advertisement emails of the form "This is not an advertisement, we'd like to arrange a call to discuss ways to grow your business. Signed, Bob the XYZ product sales manager"
palmfacehn 3y ago
Invoices are in my spam folder regularly. You'd think emails I open consistently month after month, which are followed by receipts would make it through. Search isn't doing that well either.
frereubu 3y ago
Google routinely flags my genuine AWS invoices as possibly dangerous, despite me routinely clicking the "this isn't dangerous, I know what it is" button. So yes, I think it's totally possible that engineers who build web crawlers can't build reliable email classifiers.
- cmg 3y ago
  And somehow I still get regular “H0ME_DEPOT Order CONFRIMATION” junk landing at the top of my Gmail inbox.
  - hedora 3y ago
    That reminds me: totallylegit2022@hotmail.com is holding my USPS package at the warehouse.
- croutonwagon 3y ago
  Google seems to do this from ANY mails coming from some of the major VPS providers. They do the same on my linodes as well, despite me having SPF, DKIM, DMARC and even reverse DNS properly configured...... Luckily for me, its mostly just for my own usage and Im not using Google to send anything, its for things like email alerts to my google workspace account...
- winddude 3y ago
  I dunno, runaway costs on AWS is very dangerous.
- cik 3y ago
  Or potentially a low-key sales tactic to push google cloud...?
  - bombcar 3y ago
    To be fair to Google, they also flag and filter emails from themselves with some regularity.
  - spacecadet 3y ago
KingOfCoders 3y ago
"transactional versus marketing" In my last big job we had big discussions about what is marketing. What can marketing pack into a transactional without it becoming a marketing email? Banner? A tagline in the signature? Testimonials? Also - b/c Germany - big discussions with legal on that topic.
- hiatus 3y ago
  For US companies, the FTC has some guidance on transactional vs marketing, including commingling of the two. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act...
- dboreham 3y ago
  Uh. The answer to this is easy and obvious, unless you are trying to force marketing content into a transaction email.
- callalex 3y ago
  This is like making technical arguments to someone else that actually, legally, you are not sexually harassing them. If there’s even an inkling of a question, your behavior sucks.
JimDabell 3y ago
> you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? Don’t put Google on a pedestal. I’ve seen Google Workspace classify an individual email sent from one colleague to another as spam. Both perfectly legitimate users in the same account / domain. No weird trigger words like Viagra. Just a run-of-the-mill email about work, between two colleagues who had been emailing each other for months. If emails like that aren’t safe from Google’s spam filter, then no emails are safe from Google’s spam filter.
- cj 3y ago
  I don’t disagree with you, but before assuming it’s the fault of gmail classifier I would look at Google Workspace admin configuration. There are a lot of settings that admins can tweak and toggle that can mess with email deliverability. You can even create specific rules that only apply when users within the same workspace are emailing each other. Google Workspace can even be configured to use an external smtp service behind the scenes. Can also be configured to proxy emails through 3rd parties (in which case the email might be leaving the Google ecosystem and then reentering it from a non-Google IP). There’s a lot of silly (seemingly unnecessary) features on the admin side that could trip up a spam filter.
  - JimDabell 3y ago
    In this case it was a super-basic setup. Nothing weird going on, just an internal email within the same Google account, sent from the Gmail web interface and going straight to the spam folder for the recipient, no filtering rules or anything like that.
- CPLX 3y ago
  Yeah that happens all the time, to the point where I had to add specific rules in Google Workspace to never send those to spam. Same with other transactional emails like receipts from some places that I had marked as "not spam" 4 times and Google still couldn't figure out the next one.
- PennRobotics 3y ago
  Yeah, something wrong with the filter. Google marked several Samsung mobile phone order confirmation emails as phishing messages a week or two ago. Nobody sells more Android phones than Samsung, so they should be one of Google's top partners to accommodate correctly 100% of the time.

by dexwiz 3y ago

ajsnigrutin 3y ago

> you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? Nope, I don't. So many things get constantly marked as spam in my inbox, even server notifications, from the same domain, same daily emails, marked repeatedly as "not spam", and added to address book. Then there's the second problem of google support... your 2fa passwords, email-authentications, password reset links, etc. will be sent out, gmail will send them to spam, your users won't see/find the email, and there's nothing you can do... noone to call at google that would actually listen and try to do anything, no penalties if they don't do anything, only hope that your service is large enough that it gets some traction on twitter or here and some random googler sees it.

xyst 3y ago

You could have put Google in early ‘00s on this pedestal. But the Google today is not worthy of this. G is like any other Fortune 500 company now. The amount of products in their graveyard grows every year. Maintenance of “legacy” apps is handed off to offshore teams who have objectives to just keep it running until it’s 86’d. Google has also made plenty of mistakes with web: look at PWAs, AMP, and Chrome just to start.

boplicity 3y ago

> you probably should have unsubscribe links They're not requiring just unsubscribe links. They're specifically requiring "one-click" unsubscribe links that can accept a POST request for unsubscribing. This allows their software to have an unsubscribe button that doesn't require the user to leave their software. This is the RFC that has to be complied with: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8058 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8058 Note, that this is not easy for many people using legacy software. It's a major change. I wouldn't be surprised if this requirement gets delayed multiple times.

eli 3y ago
Yes, that's the List-Unsubscribe header and it doesn't require a POST request. Email deliverability has always meant staying on top of changing requirements.
- boplicity 3y ago
  No -- this actually expands on the List-Unsubscribe header, and adds a POST request header for one-click unsubscribe. From the RFC: > This document addresses this part of the problem, with an HTTPS POST action Look at the examples in the RFC for a clear description.
  - eli 3y ago
    Ah, my mistake. The MAILTO: style unsubscribes were a bit of a pain to deal with anyway.
callalex 3y ago
>this is not easy for many people using legacy software. It's a major change. That’s fine, I never wanted to receive messages from those people in the first place.
dexwiz 3y ago
No, that is for generating the Unsubscribe buttons in the email client itself. They also require a link in the body itself. From the google doc: Marketing messages and subscribed messages must support one-click unsubscribe, and include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message body.

joelcollinsdc 3y ago

“You need a link not list-unsubscribe” is not fully accurate according to my reading. They are asking senders to support the one click unsubscribe rfc, which uses list-unsubscribe.

gsharma 3y ago

> but you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? I’ve seen Gmail put legit update emails coming from Google itself in spam.

djbusby 3y ago
And yet obviously fake Drive shares from "Wells Fargo" or "Chase" get delivered to Inbox

jeffparsons 3y ago

> you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? We're talking about Google here. It doesn't matter that they have lots of clever people working there; they still occasionally get/guess things wrong, and if you're the unlucky too-small-to-even-notice outfit that happens to get squished by Google today, there's seldom much you can do about it.

darylteo 3y ago
Exactly... Outlook by Microsoft is notorious for being very heavy handed with emails, requiring sites to put warnings to users to whitelist their domains so that they receive invoices or notifications.
- explaininjs 3y ago
  At this point with outlook it’s pretty much guaranteed that any important “you just paid a ton of money here is the asset you bought” email (show/bus/etc tickets) will go straight to spam. I check spam before I look in the non-“Focused” inbox.
  - amluto 3y ago
    If I send an email to some business, from the Outlook UI, and they reply, Outlook usually classifies the reply as spam. It’s hard to imagine less spammy email than that.
  - latchkey 3y ago
    I'd just rename the spam folder to "Inbox-2" or something. ;-)

jwr 3y ago

> Google is pretty accurate in figuring out transactional versus marketing. They don't tell their heuristics, but you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? Yes, I definitely think that. The engineers can build anything, but where the company focuses matters. I've seen transactional E-mails get sorted into people's spam/junk/newsletter folders too many times.

ndriscoll 3y ago
I also get tons of spam to my inbox despite regularly marking it as such, so if they are classifying marketing emails, they're not doing anything with that information. How hard is it to classify a message that literally contains the string "this is an advertisement"?
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  Your comment literally contains the string "this is an advertisement" but I can't tell what you are advertising?
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    It's also not an email. I've never seen a legitimate email with that string, and all of the illegitimate ones should be triggering other heuristics, such as the existence of an unsubscribe link, or things like "$x off". In any case the false positive rate on that would likely be incredibly low, so it's a good heuristic considering how bad the false negative rate is right now.
    - Macha 3y ago
      Dear site admin, This is as advertisement that appeared on your site yesterday that is a phishing scam pretending to be a bank. <Screenshot> Please prevent ads like this showing up on your site. Regards, Client XYZ --- Maybe it's just the positions I've been in, but I've often seen variations of the above email, and I've never seen advertisement emails that flat out say "this is an advertisement" In fact, what I have seen are advertisement emails of the form "This is not an advertisement, we'd like to arrange a call to discuss ways to grow your business. Signed, Bob the XYZ product sales manager"

palmfacehn 3y ago

Invoices are in my spam folder regularly. You'd think emails I open consistently month after month, which are followed by receipts would make it through. Search isn't doing that well either.

frereubu 3y ago

Google routinely flags my genuine AWS invoices as possibly dangerous, despite me routinely clicking the "this isn't dangerous, I know what it is" button. So yes, I think it's totally possible that engineers who build web crawlers can't build reliable email classifiers.

cmg 3y ago
And somehow I still get regular “H0ME_DEPOT Order CONFRIMATION” junk landing at the top of my Gmail inbox.
- hedora 3y ago
  That reminds me: totallylegit2022@hotmail.com is holding my USPS package at the warehouse.
croutonwagon 3y ago
Google seems to do this from ANY mails coming from some of the major VPS providers. They do the same on my linodes as well, despite me having SPF, DKIM, DMARC and even reverse DNS properly configured...... Luckily for me, its mostly just for my own usage and Im not using Google to send anything, its for things like email alerts to my google workspace account...
winddude 3y ago
I dunno, runaway costs on AWS is very dangerous.
cik 3y ago
Or potentially a low-key sales tactic to push google cloud...?
- bombcar 3y ago
  To be fair to Google, they also flag and filter emails from themselves with some regularity.
- spacecadet 3y ago

KingOfCoders 3y ago

"transactional versus marketing" In my last big job we had big discussions about what is marketing. What can marketing pack into a transactional without it becoming a marketing email? Banner? A tagline in the signature? Testimonials? Also - b/c Germany - big discussions with legal on that topic.

hiatus 3y ago
For US companies, the FTC has some guidance on transactional vs marketing, including commingling of the two. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act...
dboreham 3y ago
Uh. The answer to this is easy and obvious, unless you are trying to force marketing content into a transaction email.
callalex 3y ago
This is like making technical arguments to someone else that actually, legally, you are not sexually harassing them. If there’s even an inkling of a question, your behavior sucks.

JimDabell 3y ago

> you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? Don’t put Google on a pedestal. I’ve seen Google Workspace classify an individual email sent from one colleague to another as spam. Both perfectly legitimate users in the same account / domain. No weird trigger words like Viagra. Just a run-of-the-mill email about work, between two colleagues who had been emailing each other for months. If emails like that aren’t safe from Google’s spam filter, then no emails are safe from Google’s spam filter.

cj 3y ago
I don’t disagree with you, but before assuming it’s the fault of gmail classifier I would look at Google Workspace admin configuration. There are a lot of settings that admins can tweak and toggle that can mess with email deliverability. You can even create specific rules that only apply when users within the same workspace are emailing each other. Google Workspace can even be configured to use an external smtp service behind the scenes. Can also be configured to proxy emails through 3rd parties (in which case the email might be leaving the Google ecosystem and then reentering it from a non-Google IP). There’s a lot of silly (seemingly unnecessary) features on the admin side that could trip up a spam filter.
- JimDabell 3y ago
  In this case it was a super-basic setup. Nothing weird going on, just an internal email within the same Google account, sent from the Gmail web interface and going straight to the spam folder for the recipient, no filtering rules or anything like that.
CPLX 3y ago
Yeah that happens all the time, to the point where I had to add specific rules in Google Workspace to never send those to spam. Same with other transactional emails like receipts from some places that I had marked as "not spam" 4 times and Google still couldn't figure out the next one.
PennRobotics 3y ago
Yeah, something wrong with the filter. Google marked several Samsung mobile phone order confirmation emails as phishing messages a week or two ago. Nobody sells more Android phones than Samsung, so they should be one of Google's top partners to accommodate correctly 100% of the time.