[mcsb4]

> It's simply not true we have no incentive to fix this

I just happen to have set up an email server and encountered the same problems with Google as described in the article. I own the IP since quite some time, it is not on any black list, reverse DNS is set up etc. but Google rejects email as spam.

And this even happens when the gmail account has added the sender in his address book and has send the first email to which I replied - thus there is a message id that should already be known on Gmail's side.

Use your AI to put email into the spam folder. Refusing it outright is a case for the European Commission which hopefully will slap you another few billions of fine onto the wrist until you remember to play nicely with the other kids.

There is no excuse to refuse SPF, DKIM, reverse DNS, proper MX, no blacklist, sender in recipient address book and reply-to msgId email.

[jandrese]

It's not just small fries getting hit by this. Google regularly refuses to deliver mail from backerkit.com to my account, by far the most popular Kickstarter fulfillment support service. I frequently have to contact Kickstarters and ask them to manually send me mail because Google is refusing to accept it, which is annoying and wastes their time.

I wish Google had a way you could tell it "messages from these people/domains are never spam (or I'll deal with it myself)".

[Xamayon]

Google Apps (or whatever it's called now after the last dozen name and service changes since "Postini") does offer a whitelist function, but as far as I can tell it's there only to placate users. Whitelisting domains or individual email addresses globally, or per user seems to have no bearing at all on whether they will show up in your inbox... Postini used to work flawlessly, it's hard to imagine how they could have screwed it up so badly.

[acomjean]

It’s AI above all else. It seems instead of a rule that says all emails from these people are ok, they’re too reliant on ai filtering based on the content. They’re probably trying to prevent spoofing.

I use gmail and they know who is sending. I got an email today with a gmail flag saying “this user sent from a different email address previously”

[sbov]

In gmail, you can create a filter to skip the spam folder. I regularly receive emails where, at the top it says "this would have gone to spam, but you told us not to send it there".

I doubt this affects things when messages are rejected at the protocol level, but if your problem is emails showing up in the spam folder, this might fix it.

[necovek]

One of the problems is the pure mechanics of how SMTP works: anyone can send an email with any "from" address, and filtering on people/domains in the "from" field is basically pointless if you want to catch spam.

What Google is likely doing is checking the domain of the originating IP in the SMTP "envelope", but that also gets tricky with outsourced email services or internal IPs.

I do not use Gmail, so these are just wild guesses, but I do run my own mail server and frequently get my email not showing up for people.

Problem with SMTP bounces is that it may take a week for the final bounce to show up in my inbox (because again, that's how SMTP protocol is designed, to expect nodes to be down and retry a number of times).

[wtfrmyinitials]

> anyone can send an email with any "from" address, and filtering on people/domains in the "from" field is basically pointless if you want to catch spam.

Isn’t this the exact thing that DKIM is designed to fix?

[necovek]

This was a response to a complaint about not receiving emails from some "people/domains" even when whitelisted, and I highlighted how this can be hard for a service to detect reliably.

So yes, DKIM will help a receiving server know for sure, but a receiving server still needs to accept emails from non-DKIM-enabled servers, and perhaps that's why whitelisting didn't work for the parent.

[Neil44]

Bounce handling depends on the error code, 5xx is usually a permanent error so the bounce is immediate. Mailbox doesn't exist etc. Its not going to exist later either. IIRC 4xx is effectively try again later because something is wrong right now that might get fixed. Mail server out of disk space, you're greylisted etc. So try again later. Those can take a few days to give up retrying.

[benou]

> Use your AI to put email into the spam folder. Refusing it outright is a case for the European Commission which hopefully will slap you another few billions of fine onto the wrist until you remember to play nicely with the other kids.

I prefer getting a bounce than ending in the spam folder by far. Lots of relatives on Gmail never look into the spam folder so I never know if they get to see my email or not and I end up having to ping them on eg. WhatsApp. At least with a bounce, I know they did not get my email.

[phinnaeus]

It might obviate the excuse mentioned a few comments above, "I've never had a problem with Gmail, it must be on your end."

If the message is ending up in your spam folder, it's harder to shift that blame off of Gmail's shoulders.

[DuskStar]

But if it ends up in the spam folder there's at least a chance that it'll be trained out of the spam folder by people marking it as "not spam", and it provides a workaround for the people who really need it to work _now_.

[rdl]

I wonder if the correct solution is "send an informative pseudobounced-as-spam message to sender AND put it in the spam folder", for borderline spam (which passes the other checks). Downside is it provides a deliverability oracle for spammers, but since gmail accounts are free, that's not too hard to establish anyway.

[gotenyama]

I believe that the majority of the users are trained to ignore g-mail spam since it's been working good enough for most people. Unless we condition the customer to always view the spam folder it's asking them to do something on top of already checking their e-mail.

My mother would just simply ignore the spam and often times spam catches majority of the phishing e-mails too. So it's a double edge sword educating and conditioning the users to review the spam folder. Why is it the end user's job to determine what is spam and what is legitimate ?

[luckylion]

> Why is it the end user's job to determine what is spam and what is legitimate?

Who else could determine that? I could hire you to send me emails about Viagra sales. They would not be unsolicited, because I specifically asked you to. They wouldn't be commercials, either, so they wouldn't be Spam. An automatic filter can't determine if it's spam or not, it can only take an educated guess.

[southerndrift]

Then they should do both: bounce it and also show it in a folder called 'bounced'.

[Tempest1981]

Great idea. Since many of us rarely check Spam.

[hrez]

That's as a sender (even that reasoning is questionable). As a receiver, would you rather never received an important email from some org instead of finding it in your spam folder?

[luckylion]

But you can mark it as "not spam" (and hope that it does something, I guess) while you (as the recipient) have no options whatsoever with a hard rejection.

[prlambert]

I'm genuinely sorry to hear that. Our analysts are looking into the issue described in the article, hopefully we find something we can fix that will resolve this.

[fmx]

I struggle to see how your analysts could do this without looking into specific instances of the problem. Perhaps you intend to contact the author of the article to ask for this. That might work in this case, but in the general case there is absolutely no way for people to report this problem to Google!

Yes, I'm yet another person with the same problem as the author of the article - running my own mail server for years, only I send mail from it, very low volume, everything set up properly, etc. The difference is that my emails go to spam, rather than being rejected by the SMTP servers, which to me is even worse, since I never know whether an email I sent to GMail has been delivered or not. Since GSuite is so popular now, I never know this for any unfamiliar domain, unless I do an MX lookup.

You say all the right words, but Google's actions on this issue (or lack thereof) speak much louder. It's very difficult to believe that the situation will improve and many comments here reflect this skepticism.

[pfortuny]

Let’s say conforming to usual behaviors? That is simply what the article is asking for.

[joering2]

Since you profile claims you are from Google, you should know by helping here you really doing disservice to everyone else having same problems. Hacker News is not a “gmail customer support hotline center”. You have billions of dollars to setup a system or heck the whole state of the art department to help people with their gmail problem. So you will help two people on HN bitching at gmail.. what about all those that never heard of HN? Sorry friend you doing this only because at some degree google and gmail obviously does not want to look bad to tech society. /rant

[amenod]

Not sure why you are being downvoted, you have a point. There is no excuse for the way Google is operating now - poor customer support, the only recourse twits and HN posts.

I think it also hurts Google themselves. There is a reason they have trouble competing with AWS. Why should developers trust Google that there will be a person on the other side helping them out when things go wrong? And they always do, at worst possible time. Amazon, for all its problems, has excellent customer service.

So your parent's attempt to fix this is a PR stunt at best. If they (/Google) care about this, they should fix the problems in the process:

- define, hardcode and publish rules that will lead to successfull e-mail delivery (SPF, DKIM, history,...)

- establish a gmail technical customer support service

And they should stop with preferential treatment of those who shame them publicly. Or do they want all of us to start doing the same?

[WrtCdEvrydy]

> they should stop with preferential treatment of those who shame them publicly

That's the only way companies care in the 21st century, 3 weeks on an email thread, one tweet and suddenly everyone cares.

[usefulcat]

> Or do they want all of us to start doing the same?

An increase in public shamings probably means that public shamings become less news- or interest-worthy. So an increase in shamings might not have as much effect as you might expect.

[danielparks]

That’s true, but I don’t think we're anywhere near there yet. Especially when it comes to the mainstream — most people outside of tech don’t have any idea this is a problem.

(FWIW, I don’t seem to have this problem in a significant way, but that might be because I have DMARC set up.)

[sumosudo]

hmmmm, so do I and still my emails are unsolicited.

[newsoul2019]

I don't think you can have an open, healthy email ecosystem, when the parties involved (the people running and managing email infrstructure) can't communicate with each other and get help.

[CamperBob2]

Their customer support is just fine. Only trouble is, we're not the customer, we're the product. (And no, I'm not interested in hearing about how that's a hackneyed worn-out cliché, or whatever, given that it's a true statement. Downvote and move on.)

A big part of the problem with Google taking everything over is that only in very limited situations -- the service formerly known as YouTube Red, for instance -- are we given the ability to actually conduct business with them as a paying customer. Conventionally, Google users don't even rise to the status of sharecroppers, since we're the "crops" being sold to advertisers. They expect us to depend on them for the everyday conduct of our personal lives and careers, yet the only way to appeal for help is to start a shitstorm on Twitter or HN and hope somebody notices.

[shawnz]

> I'm not interested in hearing about how that's a hackneyed worn-out cliché

Well, it's a hackneyed worn-out cliché. Without the users there's no viable product. That's what makes them the customers and that's why they need adequate customer support. The fact that you pay for the product with ad impressions rather than dollars doesn't change anything about that dynamic.

[CamperBob2]

Well, it's a hackneyed worn-out cliché. Without the users there's no viable product. That's what makes them the customers

No, that's what makes them "users." The customers are the advertisers who actually pay money to Google. You can rest assured that they don't have to post a cri de coeur on social media to get a response from Google when something goes wrong.

IMO, a company that does its level best to act like vital public infrastructure needs to be held to standards appropriate to vital public infrastructure. If that's a controversial point of view, then so be it.

[slacka]

> - define, hardcode and publish rules that will lead to successfull e-mail delivery (SPF, DKIM, history,...)

This has existed for years:

https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/checkmx/check?domain=tab...

If your site passes and is not on a blacklist, your email gets delivered.

[matrixagent]

This is not doing what you think it does. And it's the second comment where you are spreading your misinformation I've seen in this thread now. :( This tool is for people who want to send their emails via GSuite and their own domain. Not a lot of people in this thread want that, and it certainly has nothing to do at all with what is being discussed in the comment threads where you replied to.

[gaadd33]

That says you must permit google to send email on your behalf in your SPF record. How is that relevant at all for sending email to Google?

[7Z7]

That all depends entirely on whether the "fix" is white-listing the two responders somehow, or flagging the larger issue to the correct team and figuring something more general out.

[tomComb]

In his first post (above) he said that he is from Google but he is not acting in any official capacity here.

It is not Google support, it is just an employee giving some insight on his own time.

What is wrong with that?

[dvfjsdhgfv]

I agree with your message except the motivation part - you can't question that particular person's motives. It may very well be they care just like many other people at Google do, even though the management doesn't.

[feanaro]

> Refusing it outright is a case for the European Commission which hopefully will slap you another few billions of fine onto the wrist until you remember to play nicely with the other kids.

This is a very interesting idea that I completely missed.

[craftinator]

Ah, but you forgot to send it from a Gmail address! That's the big important requirement!