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Modern email providers, especially ones offered by ISPs often have the same problems that people criticize self-hosted providers for. Even Google has problems.

Modern email providers, especially ones offered by ISPs often have the same problems that people criticize self-hosted providers for. Even Google has problems. For example, I regularly order via companies that use Shopify. Now, all of the shopify emails are going straight to spam in Gmail, despite constantly marking them as not spam. (These even pass dmarc/spf/dkim etc, so who knows what's going on here.) Email delivery and receiving is not hard, but it's inevitably going to be imperfect, no matter the provider you use. There are so many bad actors out there, it's surprising that it works as well as it does.

singpolyma3 1y ago
That behaviour is the whole problem. If you use a self hosted or small time email provider you're much less likely to have email blocked or filtered by aggressive anti-not-gmail filters. Hilarious Gmail addresses send tonnes of spam so filtering by provider doesn't do much there days anyway. But Google insists to continue
dataflow 1y ago
> These even pass dmarc/spf/dkim etc, so who knows what's going on here. Those have nothing to do with being spam, right? Spam is about content, those are about authenticity. Anybody can send authentic trash, or unauthenticated gold.
- mzhaase 1y ago
  Your spam score goes up without DKIM or SPF.
  - dataflow 1y ago
    Sure but that's just because spammers don't tend to authenticate their email. But that obviously doesn't mean they get to send spam if they do.
pembrook 1y ago
Bizarrely, I also find Gmail's spam algo is actually oversensitive to marketing emails from companies these days, which I never thought was something I would complain about. But like you said its super annoying when I actually want the emails. Seems like we had the opposite problem 10ish years ago. But now the pendulum has swung a bit too far in the other direction. Ultimately most of the spam I get these days is actually from individuals doing low volume cold outreach from personal email addresses...not companies sending bulk. The new gmail unsubscribe feature works great for marketing emails but is worthless against cold email spam -- which somehow rarely ever lands in spam.
- fc417fc802 1y ago
  Microsoft Outlook has been flagging their own marketing emails as spam for me lately. I'm not sure if I ought to be impressed or disappointed.
  - seb1204 1y ago
    Maybe because I and others mark them as spam?
lanstin 1y ago
I have self hosted my email for about twenty years; fr about ten or fifteen I just forwarded everything to Gmail but had to revert to local ( started with local mail in emacs, but switched to imapd to solve the airplane ticket in the airport issue) because so much important stuff was marked as spam. Like in the middle of a conversation between me and on other person their reply to my email (which I always bcc:ed ack to myself) would disappear. Self hosted is much better. It took few iteration to get spf etc working.
- jimangel2001 1y ago
  How do you guarantee uptime for yourself?
  - lanstin 1y ago
    Just check email from time to time. Major outages have been my DNS registrar got sold and another time secondary DNS company got sold and I missed the emails. Postfix and Imapd are run by systemd or init.d. I think I filled the root filesystem once. I also pay for backup MX forwarding so brief (few days) outages don’t cause mail loss.
zrm 1y ago
> For example, I regularly order via companies that use Shopify. Now, all of the shopify emails are going straight to spam in Gmail, despite constantly marking them as not spam. (These even pass dmarc/spf/dkim etc, so who knows what's going on here.) There's a pretty good chance this is because Shopify is sending a lot of email users mark as spam, or is using the same mail server as someone who does. Then you marking them as not spam gives them a better score but the sender's reputation is still so bad that it can't break the threshold to stay out of the spam folder.
- seb1204 1y ago
  I mark them as spam. I only want the real notifications and not the free goodies and recap and others are interested in mails.

singpolyma3 1y ago

That behaviour is the whole problem. If you use a self hosted or small time email provider you're much less likely to have email blocked or filtered by aggressive anti-not-gmail filters. Hilarious Gmail addresses send tonnes of spam so filtering by provider doesn't do much there days anyway. But Google insists to continue

dataflow 1y ago

> These even pass dmarc/spf/dkim etc, so who knows what's going on here. Those have nothing to do with being spam, right? Spam is about content, those are about authenticity. Anybody can send authentic trash, or unauthenticated gold.

mzhaase 1y ago
Your spam score goes up without DKIM or SPF.
- dataflow 1y ago
  Sure but that's just because spammers don't tend to authenticate their email. But that obviously doesn't mean they get to send spam if they do.

pembrook 1y ago

Bizarrely, I also find Gmail's spam algo is actually oversensitive to marketing emails from companies these days, which I never thought was something I would complain about. But like you said its super annoying when I actually want the emails. Seems like we had the opposite problem 10ish years ago. But now the pendulum has swung a bit too far in the other direction. Ultimately most of the spam I get these days is actually from individuals doing low volume cold outreach from personal email addresses...not companies sending bulk. The new gmail unsubscribe feature works great for marketing emails but is worthless against cold email spam -- which somehow rarely ever lands in spam.

fc417fc802 1y ago
Microsoft Outlook has been flagging their own marketing emails as spam for me lately. I'm not sure if I ought to be impressed or disappointed.
- seb1204 1y ago
  Maybe because I and others mark them as spam?

lanstin 1y ago

I have self hosted my email for about twenty years; fr about ten or fifteen I just forwarded everything to Gmail but had to revert to local ( started with local mail in emacs, but switched to imapd to solve the airplane ticket in the airport issue) because so much important stuff was marked as spam. Like in the middle of a conversation between me and on other person their reply to my email (which I always bcc:ed ack to myself) would disappear. Self hosted is much better. It took few iteration to get spf etc working.

jimangel2001 1y ago
How do you guarantee uptime for yourself?
- lanstin 1y ago
  Just check email from time to time. Major outages have been my DNS registrar got sold and another time secondary DNS company got sold and I missed the emails. Postfix and Imapd are run by systemd or init.d. I think I filled the root filesystem once. I also pay for backup MX forwarding so brief (few days) outages don’t cause mail loss.

zrm 1y ago

> For example, I regularly order via companies that use Shopify. Now, all of the shopify emails are going straight to spam in Gmail, despite constantly marking them as not spam. (These even pass dmarc/spf/dkim etc, so who knows what's going on here.) There's a pretty good chance this is because Shopify is sending a lot of email users mark as spam, or is using the same mail server as someone who does. Then you marking them as not spam gives them a better score but the sender's reputation is still so bad that it can't break the threshold to stay out of the spam folder.

seb1204 1y ago
I mark them as spam. I only want the real notifications and not the free goodies and recap and others are interested in mails.