10 ms·

Obviously good email (deep in a conversation) being declared "spam" has been a problem with my business for some time also. I figure Google takes all email in

by jmount 12y ago

Obviously good email (deep in a conversation) being declared "spam" has been a problem with my business for some time also. I figure Google takes all email in a 2 step process (either intentional or accidental) 1: get a good fraction of the world on GMail 2: intermittently declare any non GMail mail spam ( greatly lowering the utility of non GMail). This isn't about any mass mailings or even mailing lists. This is about directly replies from me to people I have been emailing for months all of a sudden ending up in their Google Spam folder. Combining that with Google's good reputation and it comes off like "my dog ate my reply" (even though the mail is in their spam folder, the point is it is easier to convince a Yahoo user something is wrong on their side, than to convince GMail user something is wrong on their side). And it isn't that I all of a sudden decide to include a lot of links, attachments or zip files. And for the "I don't like conspiracy theories crowds." From the first this said "either intentional or accidental". It would be enough for this to be a fortuitous bug for the effect to hurt non GMail users disproportionately. Google could even fail a fraction of GMail and the overall image would still be "email is flakey in general, we'd better all switch to the service provider for safety." I known spam filtering is hard- but GMail has some really strong signals that I would think could dominate here (like incoming email contains text unique to a recent outgoing email). Or email is from a sender you clearly have a relation with. (note: "Google takes all email" is a possible outcome, not a plot/conspiracy. A bug like this on a system of this size can have a big impact. Of course that does mean somebody running a system of this size might have an extra responsibility to look out for such things.)

eli 12y ago
I don't think it's malicious. Running mail servers and filtering spam is not easy.
- bhauer 12y ago
  Which ironically is the reason I most often hear from Gmail advocates/apologists for why they advocate Gmail over running your own e-mail server. I don't disagree. E-mail is a mess. Still, on the whole, for any person or organization with modest technical chops, I feel the freedom and decentralization (which is a positive for the entire ecosystem) is reason alone for retaining control by self-hosting.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    It's all about cost/benefit analysis. Maintaining an e-mail server and not getting overwhelmed by spam is hard; making sure you your e-mails will be received is even harder. Most of small businesses or organizations simply don't have resources to do that, if you count in the value lost when business e-mails get flagged as spam. Decentralization is cool and all, but until we have some kind of self-contained, easy to deploy and maintain solution for e-mail servers, it's hard to me to recommend anything other than GMail to people - especially that typical small company or organization has a lifespan that's shorter than Google, so they don't get any important benefit from decentralization.
    - danieldk 12y ago
      it's hard to me to recommend anything other than GMail to people There are other companies that offer e-mail services, without the embrace, expand, and extinguish strategy that Google seems to follow these days.
      - TeMPOraL 12y ago
        I haven't checked the new Outlook recently; maybe it's good. But all others that I know offer subpar service and honestly, look like crap. UX is important. For example, I cringe whenever someone makes me to use Roundcube-based webmail.
        danieldk 12y ago
        Fastmail has a nice UI, is fast, contributes to the open source Cyrus IMAP service (among other projects) and has business accounts.
        larrymcp 12y ago
        Yeah Roundcube's look definitely needs some help. Last year I did choose Roundcube for our webmail, but I spent several days altering its appearance so that it would look semi-professional. I started with their new theme called "Larry" and then corrected the fonts, colors, graphics, and certain element sizing decisions.
- guelo 12y ago
  Google has attempted to kill open protocols like xmpp and RSS in order to lock people into their services. Why is it so crazy to think they could be trying with GMail?
  - eli 12y ago
    Not crazy, just unlikely.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jmount 12y ago
Already downvoted below zero (about 2 seconds). I'll stand by what I said/implied: it is hard to co-exist with Google systems (and apparently also with pro-Google shills/apologists). I know this post violates HN standards, but I didn't think the parent did.
- cssmoo 12y ago
  I think its just that everyone who doesn't run a mail server hasn't had to deal with this shit so finds it hard to believe that their precious email providers are being a pain in the butt. That is until you get a court summons after an invoice was sent several times and never got there because some fuckwit mail policy just blackholed it. This stuff does happen and when it does its costly.
  - fifthesteight 12y ago
    YES. This has been killing me for months- my clients keep crawling in my asshole and all of my efforts have changed exactly none of the problem.
  - Xorlev 12y ago
    It's easy to see how transactional email providers have made money these days. You pay them for 70% of the brain damage, then take on the other 30% for your own.
  - zamalek 12y ago
    I think there needs to be a more substantial karma gate to downvoting (10 000+), I'd be fine with falling out of that category myself. I've only been interacting on HN for the past year or so, but lurked for several years prior: the community has been becoming a lot more "redditish." I nearly always agree or can be convinced by the higher karma users, but the fresh users seem to be defaulting to reddit-level arguments (uneducated, immutable beliefs, hyperbole, taking things personally, no objectivity). I.e. > just that everyone who doesn't run a mail server hasn't had to deal with this shit "Everyone" in that sentence should not have the right to be downvoting in the first place.
cssmoo 12y ago
Having had delivery problems to gmail for years, I couldn't agree more. However Yahoo are an order of magnitude worse when it comes to delivering email. If they decide you aren't their friend, they send back an error code with a URL in it to go and visit and identify yourself via a web form that is reviewed rarely by some humans. Then if you fuck that form up or if they don't like you, blackholed for 6 months and they stick their fingers in their ears. Try telling a yahoo user about this as well and it's "meh". Email is broken unless you have a small provider or DIY and it's fucking frustrating.
- specialp 12y ago
  I had that experience with Yahoo. I sent a single email to my brother whom has an account on Yahoo with SPF, DKIM, and not in any blackhole files. I received their 421 response "All messages from x.x.x.x will be permanently deferred; Retrying will NOT succeed." and my only recourse was to fill in a "bulk email prioritization form" I was not sending bulk email and was thus denied for that program (nobody read my explanation that I am NOT a bulk mailer). It took over a month of contacting various channels to get them to take my mail. I understand spam is a problem but email is perhaps the last communication identity you can own, and have interoperate with others. I have had my own domain and own email for 16 years now, and I am not going to give that up. Free email services come and go, but I own my identity. I think the problem with DIY/small business email is that it is surprisingly difficult to set up a proper mail server. Sendmail book is about 4 inches thick, and my current setup is using 3 projects to achieve a simple mail server with SSL auth/IMAP. (Dovecot, postfix, SASL). I am a software dev, but even very good sysadmins I know do not want to have anything to do with email anymore and will often farm it out to Google.
  - e12e 12y ago
    I really think this used to be a problem. Why anyone in their right mind would even consider using Sendmail these days, is beyond me. I use exim - because I've used at work, and it's default in Debian -- but I'd generally recommend either postfix, or probably openbsd's opensmtpd (it's in Debian unstable). It's not really that hard, AFAIK no sane distros will set up an open relay out of the box anymore, and that's really all there is to it. Assuming you're serving less than a thousand users or so (eg: one user ;-). Might want to set up greylisting, though, to curb incoming spam.
blackhaz 12y ago
Agree. It is time to start boycotting Google ecosystem until it is too late. It is definitely turning into a corporation of evil. I enjoy their search but definitely despise how they spread their proprietary tentacles everywhere. Sad.
jimrandomh 12y ago
For some reason, gmail classifies nearly all of the transactional email I get from Amazon (order acknowledgements, shipping notifications, etc) as spam, and no matter how many I catch and un-mark, it won't stop. Spam classification is a hard problem, but I don't think they've put the false-positive/false-negative tradeoff in the right place, and they really need some safety valves like offering to whitelist an address when you un-mark it as spam.
- kllrnohj 12y ago
  Amazon mail works fine for me. But there is a white list, if you add the sender to your contact list it is white listed.
  - larrys 12y ago
    That doesn't help occasional important people who might send you an email that you might miss because it ends up in spam.
- ibz 12y ago
  I always mark Amazon mail as spam. Could it be that if a lot of people mark a certain kind of email as spam, Google just treats it as spam?
  - taeric 12y ago
    Why not just opt out of the emails? Each one should have a link on it, so that you don't even have to find the page in the site, if I'm not mistaken.
  - rev_bird 12y ago
    If so, it seems like an uncharacteristically clunky way of doing it -- sure, clickthrough rate has a some effect on PageRank, for example, but there's a ton of content-based filtering going on too. I don't really want my spam folder full of false-positives because folks don't want to unsubscribe from things.
  - ccozan 12y ago
rybosome 12y ago
This seems more like a bug than something intentional. What I find more interesting (and am somewhat saddened by) is that a bug such as this causes people to leap to the conclusion that it is part of a malicious, anti-competitive plot.
- ProAm 12y ago
  > This seems more like a bug than something intentional. You can intentionally not fix a bug.
- wpietri 12y ago
  Sadly, it doesn't have to be malicious to be anti-competitive. Back in AT&T's monopoly days they were at their most destructive not when they were scheming, but when their size let them not give a fuck what they were doing to other people as long as it was good for them.
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  Are you asserting that Google has not engaged in anti-competitive behavior or that they should be given the benefit of the doubt despite previously engaging in anti-competitive behavior?
- wampus 12y ago
  It sounds more like a side effect than a bug. Both domains have conflicting policies. He wants any Gmail user to be able to impersonate a sender from his domain, but not in a way Gmail supports.
blfr 12y ago
This is not a general issue with delivering mail to Gmail users. This is not even a mailing list. He is using Gmail as a backend to his own mail setup. His employees want to receive mail sent to @dnalounge.com in their Gmail inboxes. It's a non-standard configuration and brittle. You can't really expect them to support it for free. Google offers a couple of supported ways to do it. Most prominently: pay for Google Apps. But you can also use Gmail like a regular mail client and retrieve mail using POP3.
- protomyth 12y ago
  "He is using Gmail as a backend to his own mail setup" No, he is using a normal forward for those who want to receive their mail at gmail. He is not using gmail as his backend. You should read the original article.
  - blfr 12y ago
    I did read the article and that's exactly what he's doing. He forwards everything to Gmail, and then allows users to send from Gmail via his SMTP server (or maybe doing some spoofing but it wouldn't look so clean). Essentially outsourcing hosting of inboxes (but just inboxes) to Gmail. I run my own mail server, but most of my employees use Gmail. So I have forwarding set up: employee@dnalounge.com simply forwards to employee@gmail.com. When sending mail using their Gmail account, they set their From line to employee@dnalounge.com. (Google lets you do this if you jump through some hoops to verify that you can actually receive mail at that account.)
    - protomyth 12y ago
      And that is the description for a fairly normal "forward all my mail to my personal inbox" scenario. Its not rocket science and it is not using gmail as his backend. We do it with part-time faculty.
    - karlshea 12y ago
      You are misunderstanding what is happening. He is not using Gmail, his employees are.
larrys 12y ago
"This is about directly replies from me to people I have been emailing for months all of a sudden ending up in their Google Spam folder" Yup same exact thing. Just the other day I sent my wife a few links from my business email account @company to her @gmail and it ended up in her spam folder. And I have been mailing her for longer than a few months as well. In other words google does not differentiate it appears on whether you have an ongoing relationship (email wise) with the person that you are sending an email to as if they are just looking at the mail message and nothing else.
wpietri 12y ago
I've run my own mail server since before Google (yes, there was a time...), and I'm having similar problems. Right now I'm in the middle of a job hunt, and email from me (even to people who have already emailed me) is ending up in spam folders. It is infuriating. It is also apparently unfixable. Regular people cannot inquire as to why mail is not getting through. And amazingly, even having friends at Google does me no good here. I'm told that the anti-spam team is so mysterious and opaque that they won't even talk to co-workers about this. It's maddening. I get why Google grew up with absolutely no conception of customer service. (It's hard and expensive, and not necessary for their business model. Chicken farms don't have customer service windows for the chickens to lodge complaints.) But their apparent utter indifference to the problems they are creating for other people is maddening.
- keithnoizu 12y ago
  Do you have the various auth headers setup on for your mx records? I have to go through that ordeal occasionally when setting up outgoing emails for sendgrid or mailchimp campaigns. There are some things you can due to reduce the likely hood of mail being auto flagged as spam although in a lot of ways it is out of your hands.
  - jackweirdy 12y ago
    https://www.mail-tester.com https://www.mail-tester.com is a great tool for testing this.
    - wpietri 12y ago
      Ooh, that is nice. Sadly, I am at 10/10, so I still have no explanation why GMail hates me.
- linkregister 12y ago
  I know this may sound extortionist, but one solution is to use an email-as-a-service, like Mailgun, Sendgrid, or Mandrill. All of these services offer the first few thousand emails free. They perform spam filtering on outgoing mail so they are trusted by Email Service Providers (ESPs). (Full disclosure: I'm an employee of Mailgun)
amelius 12y ago
It looks like gmail is broken, and your employees should just switch service-providers.
myko 12y ago
When I was being recruited by Google I was frustrated by having great phone calls with recruiters, doing well in my phone interview and never hearing a followup. Turned out all the emails from @google.com were going into my Gmail spam. I think they still do (no matter how many I've marked as not spam). Oops.
- Naga 12y ago
  I've been waiting for an email from a company that I'm in the recruitment process with and your comment inspired me to check my spam folder. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have seen an email from a government agency looking to recruit me. So thanks!
  - rev_bird 12y ago
    You'd think .gov, of all TLDs, would have a lower spam score.
    - Kalium 12y ago
      The domain is likely to be legit, but there are no special guarantees about the security of the mailserver.
    - Naga 12y ago
      It was actually .gc.ca, since I'm in Canada, but still.
- vidarh 12y ago
  Follow up call: "So, I notice your spam team needs needs some more engineers".
prawn 12y ago
Most of the spam I get through to my Gmail inbox is from SEO spammers using Gmail. They keep sending the same material with the same username formats and same names, I mark hundreds of them as spam, and they still make it through. Another large portion of my spam is from Chinese product spammers using Picasa albums and send to a friend feature. There are limited ways you can report this and despite marking almost every Picasa email I've received as spam, every single Picasa email still makes it through.

by jmount 12y ago

eli 12y ago

I don't think it's malicious. Running mail servers and filtering spam is not easy.

bhauer 12y ago
Which ironically is the reason I most often hear from Gmail advocates/apologists for why they advocate Gmail over running your own e-mail server. I don't disagree. E-mail is a mess. Still, on the whole, for any person or organization with modest technical chops, I feel the freedom and decentralization (which is a positive for the entire ecosystem) is reason alone for retaining control by self-hosting.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  It's all about cost/benefit analysis. Maintaining an e-mail server and not getting overwhelmed by spam is hard; making sure you your e-mails will be received is even harder. Most of small businesses or organizations simply don't have resources to do that, if you count in the value lost when business e-mails get flagged as spam. Decentralization is cool and all, but until we have some kind of self-contained, easy to deploy and maintain solution for e-mail servers, it's hard to me to recommend anything other than GMail to people - especially that typical small company or organization has a lifespan that's shorter than Google, so they don't get any important benefit from decentralization.
  - danieldk 12y ago
    it's hard to me to recommend anything other than GMail to people There are other companies that offer e-mail services, without the embrace, expand, and extinguish strategy that Google seems to follow these days.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      I haven't checked the new Outlook recently; maybe it's good. But all others that I know offer subpar service and honestly, look like crap. UX is important. For example, I cringe whenever someone makes me to use Roundcube-based webmail.
      - danieldk 12y ago
        Fastmail has a nice UI, is fast, contributes to the open source Cyrus IMAP service (among other projects) and has business accounts.
      - larrymcp 12y ago
        Yeah Roundcube's look definitely needs some help. Last year I did choose Roundcube for our webmail, but I spent several days altering its appearance so that it would look semi-professional. I started with their new theme called "Larry" and then corrected the fonts, colors, graphics, and certain element sizing decisions.
guelo 12y ago
Google has attempted to kill open protocols like xmpp and RSS in order to lock people into their services. Why is it so crazy to think they could be trying with GMail?
- eli 12y ago
  Not crazy, just unlikely.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jmount 12y ago

Already downvoted below zero (about 2 seconds). I'll stand by what I said/implied: it is hard to co-exist with Google systems (and apparently also with pro-Google shills/apologists). I know this post violates HN standards, but I didn't think the parent did.

cssmoo 12y ago
I think its just that everyone who doesn't run a mail server hasn't had to deal with this shit so finds it hard to believe that their precious email providers are being a pain in the butt. That is until you get a court summons after an invoice was sent several times and never got there because some fuckwit mail policy just blackholed it. This stuff does happen and when it does its costly.
- fifthesteight 12y ago
  YES. This has been killing me for months- my clients keep crawling in my asshole and all of my efforts have changed exactly none of the problem.
- Xorlev 12y ago
  It's easy to see how transactional email providers have made money these days. You pay them for 70% of the brain damage, then take on the other 30% for your own.
- zamalek 12y ago
  I think there needs to be a more substantial karma gate to downvoting (10 000+), I'd be fine with falling out of that category myself. I've only been interacting on HN for the past year or so, but lurked for several years prior: the community has been becoming a lot more "redditish." I nearly always agree or can be convinced by the higher karma users, but the fresh users seem to be defaulting to reddit-level arguments (uneducated, immutable beliefs, hyperbole, taking things personally, no objectivity). I.e. > just that everyone who doesn't run a mail server hasn't had to deal with this shit "Everyone" in that sentence should not have the right to be downvoting in the first place.

cssmoo 12y ago

Having had delivery problems to gmail for years, I couldn't agree more. However Yahoo are an order of magnitude worse when it comes to delivering email. If they decide you aren't their friend, they send back an error code with a URL in it to go and visit and identify yourself via a web form that is reviewed rarely by some humans. Then if you fuck that form up or if they don't like you, blackholed for 6 months and they stick their fingers in their ears. Try telling a yahoo user about this as well and it's "meh". Email is broken unless you have a small provider or DIY and it's fucking frustrating.

specialp 12y ago
I had that experience with Yahoo. I sent a single email to my brother whom has an account on Yahoo with SPF, DKIM, and not in any blackhole files. I received their 421 response "All messages from x.x.x.x will be permanently deferred; Retrying will NOT succeed." and my only recourse was to fill in a "bulk email prioritization form" I was not sending bulk email and was thus denied for that program (nobody read my explanation that I am NOT a bulk mailer). It took over a month of contacting various channels to get them to take my mail. I understand spam is a problem but email is perhaps the last communication identity you can own, and have interoperate with others. I have had my own domain and own email for 16 years now, and I am not going to give that up. Free email services come and go, but I own my identity. I think the problem with DIY/small business email is that it is surprisingly difficult to set up a proper mail server. Sendmail book is about 4 inches thick, and my current setup is using 3 projects to achieve a simple mail server with SSL auth/IMAP. (Dovecot, postfix, SASL). I am a software dev, but even very good sysadmins I know do not want to have anything to do with email anymore and will often farm it out to Google.
- e12e 12y ago
  I really think this used to be a problem. Why anyone in their right mind would even consider using Sendmail these days, is beyond me. I use exim - because I've used at work, and it's default in Debian -- but I'd generally recommend either postfix, or probably openbsd's opensmtpd (it's in Debian unstable). It's not really that hard, AFAIK no sane distros will set up an open relay out of the box anymore, and that's really all there is to it. Assuming you're serving less than a thousand users or so (eg: one user ;-). Might want to set up greylisting, though, to curb incoming spam.

blackhaz 12y ago

Agree. It is time to start boycotting Google ecosystem until it is too late. It is definitely turning into a corporation of evil. I enjoy their search but definitely despise how they spread their proprietary tentacles everywhere. Sad.

jimrandomh 12y ago

For some reason, gmail classifies nearly all of the transactional email I get from Amazon (order acknowledgements, shipping notifications, etc) as spam, and no matter how many I catch and un-mark, it won't stop. Spam classification is a hard problem, but I don't think they've put the false-positive/false-negative tradeoff in the right place, and they really need some safety valves like offering to whitelist an address when you un-mark it as spam.

kllrnohj 12y ago
Amazon mail works fine for me. But there is a white list, if you add the sender to your contact list it is white listed.
- larrys 12y ago
  That doesn't help occasional important people who might send you an email that you might miss because it ends up in spam.
ibz 12y ago
I always mark Amazon mail as spam. Could it be that if a lot of people mark a certain kind of email as spam, Google just treats it as spam?
- taeric 12y ago
  Why not just opt out of the emails? Each one should have a link on it, so that you don't even have to find the page in the site, if I'm not mistaken.
- rev_bird 12y ago
  If so, it seems like an uncharacteristically clunky way of doing it -- sure, clickthrough rate has a some effect on PageRank, for example, but there's a ton of content-based filtering going on too. I don't really want my spam folder full of false-positives because folks don't want to unsubscribe from things.
- ccozan 12y ago

rybosome 12y ago

This seems more like a bug than something intentional. What I find more interesting (and am somewhat saddened by) is that a bug such as this causes people to leap to the conclusion that it is part of a malicious, anti-competitive plot.

ProAm 12y ago
> This seems more like a bug than something intentional. You can intentionally not fix a bug.
wpietri 12y ago
Sadly, it doesn't have to be malicious to be anti-competitive. Back in AT&T's monopoly days they were at their most destructive not when they were scheming, but when their size let them not give a fuck what they were doing to other people as long as it was good for them.
crdoconnor 12y ago
Are you asserting that Google has not engaged in anti-competitive behavior or that they should be given the benefit of the doubt despite previously engaging in anti-competitive behavior?
wampus 12y ago
It sounds more like a side effect than a bug. Both domains have conflicting policies. He wants any Gmail user to be able to impersonate a sender from his domain, but not in a way Gmail supports.

blfr 12y ago

This is not a general issue with delivering mail to Gmail users. This is not even a mailing list. He is using Gmail as a backend to his own mail setup. His employees want to receive mail sent to @dnalounge.com in their Gmail inboxes. It's a non-standard configuration and brittle. You can't really expect them to support it for free. Google offers a couple of supported ways to do it. Most prominently: pay for Google Apps. But you can also use Gmail like a regular mail client and retrieve mail using POP3.

protomyth 12y ago
"He is using Gmail as a backend to his own mail setup" No, he is using a normal forward for those who want to receive their mail at gmail. He is not using gmail as his backend. You should read the original article.
- blfr 12y ago
  I did read the article and that's exactly what he's doing. He forwards everything to Gmail, and then allows users to send from Gmail via his SMTP server (or maybe doing some spoofing but it wouldn't look so clean). Essentially outsourcing hosting of inboxes (but just inboxes) to Gmail. I run my own mail server, but most of my employees use Gmail. So I have forwarding set up: employee@dnalounge.com simply forwards to employee@gmail.com. When sending mail using their Gmail account, they set their From line to employee@dnalounge.com. (Google lets you do this if you jump through some hoops to verify that you can actually receive mail at that account.)
  - protomyth 12y ago
    And that is the description for a fairly normal "forward all my mail to my personal inbox" scenario. Its not rocket science and it is not using gmail as his backend. We do it with part-time faculty.
  - karlshea 12y ago
    You are misunderstanding what is happening. He is not using Gmail, his employees are.

larrys 12y ago

"This is about directly replies from me to people I have been emailing for months all of a sudden ending up in their Google Spam folder" Yup same exact thing. Just the other day I sent my wife a few links from my business email account @company to her @gmail and it ended up in her spam folder. And I have been mailing her for longer than a few months as well. In other words google does not differentiate it appears on whether you have an ongoing relationship (email wise) with the person that you are sending an email to as if they are just looking at the mail message and nothing else.

wpietri 12y ago

I've run my own mail server since before Google (yes, there was a time...), and I'm having similar problems. Right now I'm in the middle of a job hunt, and email from me (even to people who have already emailed me) is ending up in spam folders. It is infuriating. It is also apparently unfixable. Regular people cannot inquire as to why mail is not getting through. And amazingly, even having friends at Google does me no good here. I'm told that the anti-spam team is so mysterious and opaque that they won't even talk to co-workers about this. It's maddening. I get why Google grew up with absolutely no conception of customer service. (It's hard and expensive, and not necessary for their business model. Chicken farms don't have customer service windows for the chickens to lodge complaints.) But their apparent utter indifference to the problems they are creating for other people is maddening.

keithnoizu 12y ago
Do you have the various auth headers setup on for your mx records? I have to go through that ordeal occasionally when setting up outgoing emails for sendgrid or mailchimp campaigns. There are some things you can due to reduce the likely hood of mail being auto flagged as spam although in a lot of ways it is out of your hands.
- jackweirdy 12y ago
  https://www.mail-tester.com https://www.mail-tester.com is a great tool for testing this.
  - wpietri 12y ago
    Ooh, that is nice. Sadly, I am at 10/10, so I still have no explanation why GMail hates me.
linkregister 12y ago
I know this may sound extortionist, but one solution is to use an email-as-a-service, like Mailgun, Sendgrid, or Mandrill. All of these services offer the first few thousand emails free. They perform spam filtering on outgoing mail so they are trusted by Email Service Providers (ESPs). (Full disclosure: I'm an employee of Mailgun)

amelius 12y ago

It looks like gmail is broken, and your employees should just switch service-providers.

myko 12y ago

When I was being recruited by Google I was frustrated by having great phone calls with recruiters, doing well in my phone interview and never hearing a followup. Turned out all the emails from @google.com were going into my Gmail spam. I think they still do (no matter how many I've marked as not spam). Oops.

Naga 12y ago
I've been waiting for an email from a company that I'm in the recruitment process with and your comment inspired me to check my spam folder. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have seen an email from a government agency looking to recruit me. So thanks!
- rev_bird 12y ago
  You'd think .gov, of all TLDs, would have a lower spam score.
  - Kalium 12y ago
    The domain is likely to be legit, but there are no special guarantees about the security of the mailserver.
  - Naga 12y ago
    It was actually .gc.ca, since I'm in Canada, but still.
vidarh 12y ago
Follow up call: "So, I notice your spam team needs needs some more engineers".

prawn 12y ago

Most of the spam I get through to my Gmail inbox is from SEO spammers using Gmail. They keep sending the same material with the same username formats and same names, I mark hundreds of them as spam, and they still make it through. Another large portion of my spam is from Chinese product spammers using Picasa albums and send to a friend feature. There are limited ways you can report this and despite marking almost every Picasa email I've received as spam, every single Picasa email still makes it through.