[dingus]

I appreciate the response. From someone who has operated a mail server since 2002, it comes across that Gmail does not care about cooperating with small but legitimate mail servers.

SPF, DKIM, reverse DNS, no blacklists, no open relay, longtime ownership of IPs, etc etc. Using various mail testers returns a 10/10 deliverability score.

And yet, messages sent to Gmail always go into the spam folder, or are never delivered at all. These are everyday regular messages, I have never used mailing lists or sent bulk automated messages.

The issue is, there is no recourse, no fix, no acknowledgement of the problem with false positives. There is no tool available to me to understand or correct the "problem". Hint: this comes across as Gmail not giving a shit.

Gmail has a responsibility to be more accountable, even if these problems are unintentional, because Gmail is such an enormous node in a federated network.

> If we lose an open, healthy ecosystem with many providers, we'll destroy the base we stand on.

Correct. Gmail is contributing to the erosion of email reliability. Please course correct.

[thaumasiotes]

I've had gmail send the following to the spam folder:

- Legitimate class action notices related to Amazon purchases.

- Email coming from addresses to which I had already sent email. (!)

- Email from my landlord.

- Email coming from Google itself.

Based on the contents of my spam folder, which I have to check fairly often because of the extreme overaggressiveness, I would be vastly better off if nothing ever got filtered at all. [1]

>> There are going to be false positives, we will make mistakes, but we certainly care a lot about fixing issues like this when we hear about them.

This doesn't sound honest, or at least not complete. People have been complaining about this for years. I have personally been complaining about this for years. The loss of obviously legitimate email is completely outrageous.

It doesn't look intentional (look at that fourth category!), but it certainly doesn't look like anyone is trying to address the problem.

[1] Yes, if spam filtering was disabled, more spam might get sent.

[ljm]

Before I switched to fastmail, gmail would not believe me when I marked an email as not-spam. They would still get flagged. All I wanted was updates from one band.

That didn’t stop me from repeatedly getting junk from every other record label my email was sold to. It was an endless procession of shit I never subscribed to.

[StudentStuff]

"Inboxing" with Gmail & Outlook is a baroque, hellish process for mailservers.

When either provider decides your small email server is sending spam (eg: sending an email with an attachment, or any kind of form email like a daily report) you won't get through to user inboxes, and instead you'll be routed to spam, or for Outlook.com hosted addresses they will accept mail from your server and send it to /dev/null. Gmail's process is bad, but Microsoft has decided to accept emails and throw them away (which is ridiculous).

[chupa-chups]

At my workplace we have two email addresses, one from google mail (gmail for business) and one from MS Exchange.

I never had a problem with gmail for business regarding spam. I regularly receive mails from smaller businesses (some of them hosting their own mail server) and never had a complaint from anyone yet. Since i can also be contacted via phone i'd know.

On the other hand, MS Exchange constantly delivers obvious spam mails and (quite seldomly, but still) swallows legitimate mail.

Anectodal, i know. And disclaimer: the behavior depicted in the article is as bad as it gets, if everything is as described.

[int_19h]

As far as I know, Gmail also does this sort of black hole spam filtering - the stuff that you see in "Spam" isn't everything.

[mintplant]

> - Email coming from Google itself.

Yep. I missed an invitation to a Google-hosted event at a conference I attended because the email (from an @google.com address, no less) got caught in Gmail's spam filter.

[zwkrt]

This is a problem with ML approaches, right? Instead of water boiling at "100C" it boils at "99.98C +- 0.04C". Normally this is ok, but sometimes it isn't!

[m463]

Denver is just a small minority of the US and we just can't please everyone.

(afaik in denver water boils at 95C)

[grogenaut]

In Denver water boils at 203F

[yeahitslikethat]

If something happens a trillion times a day with .00001 error rate, then 50 MILLION things went wrong, affecting, say 50,000 people.

50 of them blast twitter and it seems the world is collapsing.

The world is resilient.

[badpun]

Sometimes error rates, even nominally low ones, are bad. Would you like to have your IV changed by a nurse with 0.001 error rate?

[Thiez]

I imagine most humans have error rates worse than that. And what does 'error rate' even mean in that context? A small delay or a catastrophic failure ending in death and destruction?

[ficklepickle]

I would think that would be quite a good error rate. Especially when considering people in the hospital are often not in good health, possibly making their veins more difficult to find.

That is assuming by error you mean missing the vein. If error is defined as a fatal complication, then 1/1000 is terrifying.

[SpikeDad]

More importantly would you like to have your IV changed by a nurse that makes up her own standards for health care?

Google does what's best for Google - how could there be any discussion of that fact in 2019.

[jodrellblank]

If there are 50,000 people and 50,000 people experience problems, that's bad.

If there are 5 million people and 50,000 experience problems, that's fine?

Isaac Asimov's comments about world population increase involved something about this; the more people there are, the more each individual is dehumanised and rendered irrelevant (my paraphrasing).

[yeahitslikethat]

No I don't think it's fine at all. I think Google, twatter, Facebook, et al don't care because 50 people and who they represent don't matter to them compared to the money they make.

When all rounded up it isn't even a single penny on the balance sheet. The owners of these businesses literally never even know from the their only view into the companies.

I have no idea why I'm being downvoted on this. Hackers can't do math or what?

[thaumasiotes]

I don't think an average of 1,000 mistakes per person-affected-by-mistakes is realistic here. I'd bet it's closer to 1.

[tomComb]

Yup, I've had the same thing. Just kinda amusing and ironic since I didn't happen to care about that event but it makes one nervous about relying on spam filtering.

On the other hand, once you train it a bit, it is mostly remarkable good. For me, switching from fastmail.fm (which was pretty good itself) to Gmail gave me a big improvement in spam control.

[baudehlo]

Super curious about this response saying on gmail you have more control, because from where I am the “mark as spam” button does nothing but move things to the spam folder. In theory it should learn from that but when someone used my email address to sign up for AT&T no amount of marking things as spam will stop their emails landing in my inbox.

[fencepost]

As in signed up for AT&T service? If so it's because it's not spam - it's misdirected mail, but there are tens of thousands of other Gmail users who think that messages almost identical to those are things they absolutely want to receive.

[RandomBacon]

If there is no business relationship between AT&T and that user, the U.S. Can Spam Act defines it as spam.

Shame on AT&T for not validating their customer's email address.

I too get the same type of spam from AT&T.

[Fogest]

I just cleaned out a little over 100 emails in my Gmail spam filter yesterday. About 80% of what was in there were emails from YouTube giving me notifications of new videos people have uploaded that I am subscribed to. These emails never used to go to spam, but slowly over time more and more of them would end up in spam. It's at the point now where almost all of them from YouTube go to the spam folder.

It doesn't make any sense since they are emails from Google, they are emails I even have a filter applied to so that a label is applied to them. Yes I can adjust the filter and choose "never send to spam" but the messages will still show a warning on them saying "This message was not sent to spam because of a filter you have applied".

Sure false positives makes sense, but I don't get how the majority of what is in my spam folder would be emails sent by Google.

[Faark]

> It's at the point now where almost all of them from YouTube go to the spam folder. It doesn't make any sense since they are emails from Google

It makes a lot of sense... people use the spam button as a lazy man's unsubscribe. Youtube adding the bell button, making mail opt in is probably a response to that.

I actually give Google a lot of cred for not simply white-listing its own domains. Though spammers would probably find ways to abuse it and make them look bad anyway.

[ctack]

> people use the spam button as a lazy man's unsubscribe

This is the small mail server crux right here. If you’re a small mail server and a few of your emails have been spam binned instead of unsubscribed, it would likely lead to your whole server getting shit canned.

[arpa]

You know what's really funny? That even with that overly agressive spam filter, once in a while (once a quarter maybe), it somehow manages to miss obvious BuY@@NiGERiAn@@Vi@gRa-Cia1is type of emails... which, by the way, my morally outdated spamassasin marks as spam.

[AceJohnny2]

"morally outdated" ?

[SXX]

I would make an educated guess that "arpa" is from EX-USSR and their native language is Russian. It's direct translation of idiom "морально устаревший" which literally means something is:

* Available for decades.

* Far from being top notch technology.

* Sometimes of course it's literally mean outdated. Like if you run older CentOS or Debian with decade-old packages.

So it's doesn't mean SpamAssassin is bad, but it's very far from state-of-the-art ML technologies that Google might have.

[blago]

Bulgarian has that too: "Морално остарял"

[cpeterso]

Your comment motivated me to check my Gmail spam folder and 10% (3 out of 30) were false positives, two of which were pretty important. :(

[wingworks]

I've recently started checking quite regularly my spam folder as I've noticed more and more legit emails ending up there. One of them being support emails from TradeMe (one of New Zealand's biggest sites), keep getting put into spam, even after multiple "mark as not spam", along with some other kinda important emails from TradeMe. I've had to put in manual filters to force an email from TM to skip the spam.

[PenguinCoder]

And yet, in my own none Gmail hosted email (fastmail), I currently have 2/55 false positive spam emails. I very rarely ever check it. To note I usually get one actual spam (non newsletter blog spam) to my actual inbox, a month.

[mr_toad]

TradeMe, like eBay and Banks is a popular target of phishing emails.

[baudehlo]

I recently missed an email from the UK government regarding a passport application, it went to Spam. Talk about missing the mark!

[zlynx]

A spam filter can't whitelist government email. My personal SpamAssassin filters out spam from government servers all the time. The latest was from somewhere in Quebec.

You'd think the various governments would put more effort into computer security. They appear not to care, though.

[KajMagnus]

Me too. 2 "spam" emails in Gmail's trash folder, none of which were spam (one was a newsletter from Mastodon (software)).

Edit: Gah. Now I checked my work Gmail spam folder. There was an email from one of my users there. (and nothing else)

Now I'm considering migrating away from Gmail, at least for work related things.

[ModernMech]

Me too. I found an invitation for an on-site job interview I would have 100% missed if they had not called me as well.

[influx]

Likewise I found they filtered an e-mail from my bank about my car loan.

[keithnoizu]

Ditto, Multiple missed emails from factory owner in fuzhou I'm on site doing business with and actively emailing back and forth with daily. Despite the back and forth communication some of the direct messages were in the spam folder. This could have caused me some major issues.

[tlogan]

And all parents with kids in SF public schools should note that all emails from [e-mail] (bulletins, etc.) are marked as spam.

[preinheimer]

> - Email coming from Google itself.

If email coming from google itself got special treatment there would be masses with pitchforks complaining about that.

You've made a lot of good points, but I don't think that's one of them.

[pfranz]

I don't think that has anything to do with Google needing special treatment. It shows that the company who made the rules and has every privilege to follow them isn't able to.

[jrnichols]

Valid point. They've become so large and synonymous with email that many people I encounter are actually unaware that there is other email besides "Gmail."

It feels like Google no longer has any incentive to follow the rules, and they feel that they are going to be the ones to make the new rules. The rest of us end up having to implement workarounds.

[preinheimer]

I think that's a fair interpretation and a good point.

[thaumasiotes]

> You've made a lot of good points, but I don't think that's one of them.

I disagree. I think in the absence of that point, it would have been hard to say this:

> It doesn't look intentional (look at that fourth category!)

But also, I think special treatment for trusted actors is a completely appropriate way to handle email delivery, and I also think it's appropriate for gmail to trust themselves to be sending legitimate mail. Blocking their own email makes them look totally incompetent. They absolutely should whitelist themselves. And they should have a way for you to be whitelisted too, if you want to send email.

[preinheimer]

If they whitelisted the major players in the space, I'd worry that the problem would get _much_ worse for everyone else.

[will4274]

I've also had email from Google recruiters (@google.com email addresses) go to spam. I considered this a high level indicator that Google spam filtering is incompetent, not malicious - if it was malicious, they would at least be able to get their corporate emails through.

[ma2rten]

- Email coming from addresses to which I had already sent email. (!)

That is understandable. It is hard to validate if an email is authentic. SMTP has no authentication built in. Gmail can't just blindly accept all emails from addresses that you have already sent an email to.

EDIT:

Look at this example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol#...

Anyone can connect to relay.example.com and pretend to be [e-mail].

[muppetman]

Not if you use SPF/DKIM/DMARC they can't, that's the whole point of those various additions.

All those "I hacked your email and send you a message from you account" I don't get, because I have a DMARC policy that says if you don't pass SPF/DKIM then you get rejected. So try as the spammer might to connect to my mailserver and pretend to be me, they can't, because my mailserver sees they're not authenticated, and the mailserver they're sending from isn't in my SPF records, isn't signing the message with my DKIM key and therefore it gets rejected at the SMTP level.

[deno]

That’s what SPF[1] is for, and optionally DMARC[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMARC

[bdhess]

Huh? If it's in the Spam folder, they do accept it.

[ma2rten]

I meant accept as not spam.

[eq_sd_]

I've also had email from a Google recruiter go to the spam box...

[m463]

I think the SPAM folder is a separate issue (although important)

The article discusses mail not being accepted by google/gmail in the first place.

[thaumasiotes]

Fair comment. But that issue is pretty simple: there is no good reason for them to fail to deliver email under any circumstances. (This has happened to me too -- someone tried to email my gmail account and gmail completely refused to deliver it. It was pretty embarrassing.)

Messages they think you won't want to receive are what the spam folder is for.

[m463]

"fail to deliver email under any circumstances."

The amount of spam that would be delivered if they didn't discriminate AT ALL is enormous.

They have to read all this feedback and discriminate better.

[winkeltripel]

> there is no good reason for them to fail to deliver email under any circumstances

Yes there is. They don't want to carry traffic from anybody from the major email blacklists. If a mail server is on a real, very transparently-managed blacklist, no large provider should be accepting their smtp traffic.

[acct1771]

Yet all the people here trying to administrate servers from residential and VPS blocks of IPs are telling you they're caught up in this list you're lauding as all-knowing and safe.......

[type0]

About accountability, this gmail thing vaguely reminds me about "The Drop" situation on the mobile phone network https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCOCKS5AJI8

[knorker]

> - Email coming from Google itself.

To be fair, sometimes Google does send spam.

[bryanrasmussen]

>Legitimate class action notices related to Amazon purchases.

You'd think Google had an incentive to get that delivered.

[mathattack]

I had a communication from a Google recruiter go to my Gmail spam folder.

But it still beats no filtering.

[sandworm101]

>> I would be vastly better off if nothing ever got filtered at all.

There are layers of filtering beyond what appears in your spam folder, layers that block obvious spam long before it gets anywhere near your account. If every email ever sent to your address wound up in your spam folder you'd beg for filtering.

[badsectoracula]

Before switching to shared hosting from my VPS (one reason being that i didn't want to bother with email maintenance and didn't want to have a separate service just for email), i had my mail with (badly configured) Spamassassin that wouldn't delete mail, just add a "SPAM" prefix in the topic. My mail isn't exactly commonly known, but still is one i have for years and was made public thanks to me releasing an Android app once (after which, spam increased dramatically).

Even after running it for years, Spamassassin never marked a legitimate mail as spam, so i'm pretty sure that if i wasn't too lazy to configure it to move it to a spam folder, it'd work fine. Stuff did pass through it (at a ratio of one every four or so) but i was fine with deleting those.

What i'm trying to say is that from personal experience, i'd be fine with a spam filter that errs on the side of not marking stuff for spam and me deleting whatever goes through manually. Having to see a bit of spam mail is small cost for losing mail i'm actually interested in.

[vbezhenar]

I'm using my e-mail pretty much everywhere ([e-mail] you have it in clear text, every bot will crawl it now, not for the first time, though). I'm too lazy to setup spamassasin yet, so I'm getting a notification for every spam message I got. The only thing that I'm trying to do is to click "unsubscribe" even from obviously spam mails (may be it'll make more harm than good, not sure). So I'm getting around 20-30 spam e-mails per day. I don't think that it's THAT bad. I'm spending may be a minute every day to delete it. And I'm sure that with absolutely minimal spam filtering I would achieve almost perfect filtering.

[thaumasiotes]

I'm prepared to believe this. But it's not a defense of gmail's policies -- this suggests that in fact nothing would be lost if gmail eliminated the spam folder and delivered everything that would have gone there to your inbox instead. So why are they doing this?

[tankenmate]

Normally I wouldn't +1 a message because it doesn't really seem to add much to the message. But in this case I will (even though it might earn me ire from some). If I could highlight the parent in bold I would. I've run mail servers since the mid 90's and the experience above exactly mirrors my experience. And my takeaway is the same, GMail just doesn't seem to care. I understand that GMail can't give away too much info on why a particular email ghosted (opsec and all that) but GMail doesn't need to do a better job of explaining to postmasters what good actors can do to avoid being ghosted, and more importantly have that reflect actual real life experience.

[creeble]

Me too, since 1997. Same IP for over 12 years.

Thing is, most of my messages get delivered. Then suddenly they don't.

Google "giving a shit" means responding to hostmasters about delivery problems, and they just don't.

Please note this, Gmail PM.

[chillwaves]

After reading this thread I checked my spam and it seems google has gotten way more aggressive in the past ~ 6 months when it comes to spam. They are mass mailers and advertisements but they are moving items that I want -- legitimate subscriptions and people I do business with are ending up in spam. Never experienced such a high failure rate before and I have had gmail for about 15 years.

[russh]

Add me to the "I've run mail servers since the mid 90's and the experience above exactly mirrors my experience." list.

[hpcjoe]

Early 2000's for me, and yes, similar experience. What was really interesting to me is that my home domains had no problem emailing my work and side bit gmail based mail service a few weeks ago. Then, suddenly, this stopped working.

I changed jobs as well, and now work is using a MSFT based hosted mail service, and I am getting delay messages.

Seriously, GOOG, MSFT, and others broke mail. This is not an improvement.

I've not looked into speaking with MSFT mail folks about their breakage yet. With GOOG, you have really no mechanism of reaching out to someone there and getting attention for the problem they are causing.

This is the much bigger problem with GOOG actually, in case any googley people are reading this. They just don't get customer service. At all. It is near impossible to be able to report a real problem across the spectrum of their services. Unless you are one of their bigger customers, you don't have access to even a telephone support number. Their online help is a crapshoot, with you getting useful information less than 50% of the time.

So where I am now is with locked down, long time existing domain mail servers, which send maybe 5-10 outbound messages per month, that suddenly and inexplicably, have a bad reputation. Well, no they don't have a bad reputation, they can send email just fine to other services.

[kreetx]

I think all of you should start some kind of a movement so that this could be heared better at GMail's end.

[dhess]

That's a great idea. I've run my own mail servers since 1999. I'd happily join a union of independent mail operators with the purpose of lobbying Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to treat us as first-class citizens.

[walterbell]

Start a mailing list? Or is there an existing one for this topic?

[kreetx]

I think you should have a web page where you list your issues, show how you've done all the normal things to be considered a well-behaved mail domain. And then perhaps report your experiences with iinteracting with gmail support on the matter.

[rodgerd]

Even if it isn't deliberate, even if gmail give a fuck, as can be seen from the first (and so far only) response from anyone at Google, they're so far in the Google "We're better than everyone else and always get it right because we're geniuses" RDF that it literally doesn't matter. They can't believe that they're the problem.

[lone_haxx0r]

Or even better: so that people stop using Gmail.

[alfiedotwtf]

Me too, but early 2000s.

[redwards510]

> GMail doesn't

what?

[_eht]

I will chime and validate this experience. You will not fully understand or realize the hostility google has towards open email unless you have working experience with email protocols. This is by design.

It is my belief that this is intentional and I would love to be corrected if it’s not.

[jolmg]

Reminds me of this email from Linus Torvalds about a Gmail bug that was affecting git:

https://public-inbox.org/git/CAHk-=whP1stFZNAaJiMi5eZ9rj0MRt...

[hakfoo]

A few years ago, I was dealing with a few small business sites which were self-hosted and always had deliverability problems with the large mail services (mostly, back in the day, AOL and Yahoo).

Large providers tended to have a world view dividing all senders into two categories: 1) Bulk senders who are clearly mailing the same spam to a list of a billion addresses 2) Non-commercial individual hosts which should be sending five messages a day or less in total.

It felt like there was a huge missing third category for transactional emailers nobody wanted to acknowledge. They are probably difficult to score fairly. A hundred "Order details" emails are going to have the same level of randomness/templatedness as the old Viagra spam which had a random block of Project Gutenberg text pasted at the end to trip up filter math. You're not going to have a clear history of "this address bounced twice, let's stop sending newsletters" when most of your messages are to first time customers or once-every-few-years return ones. A lot of the messages will look generic because they use default shopping cart templates.

To the extent they provided sender guidance, it was focused around use case 1) -- sign up for feedback loops and deal with greylisting (because people really love waiting 18 hours for an acknowledgement)

[fpierfed]

This is totally my experience as well. It got so bad that I gave up operating my email server.

Anyway, Gmail is getting some heat in this thread and rightfully so. We should however not forget that Microsoft and Yahoo are just as bad if not worse in this respect.

[GFischer]

I´ve unfortunately searched for some customer-friendly e-mail provider and people want Google.

I had set up some commercial accounts on Zoho (my own e-mail is on Zoho) but they asked me to migrate to Google, even though it was more expensive.

[flurdy]

I also have a 15+ years old set of mail servers and I host mail domains for 10ish friends and family. In fact, I once wrote how to set this up (http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix)

I no longer use Gmail myself but half of my users relay some aliases to their main Gmail account. No problems with that, except my servers continuously get rate limited by Google:

    Our system has detected an unusual rate of 421-4.7.0 unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our 421-4.7.0 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily 421-4.7.0 rate limited. Please visit 421-4.7.0  https://support.google.com/mail/?p=UnsolicitedRateLimitError to 421 4.7.0 review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines.

I have the normal anti-spam features set up (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, Postgrey, Spamassassin, etc) so most spam gets rejected but not all. But several of my users have very common English names as their aliases that are already guessed and added to many spam databases.

This leads to family phoning me all the time to say my server is broken when it is just Google throttling everyone's emails. I frequently have to check Postfix queues and clear some obvious spam or just pointless Facebook update emails which seems to be the majority... (Yes your email admin can read your email...)

The only way to improve is to constantly remind my family to not sign up to all crap, use not so common aliases, and try to keep tightening my anti-spam configurations. But we really are not talking about a lot of emails. Probably less than a hundred per day spread across 5-ish end accounts of which 95% is probably legit. Yet Google is treating me as some totally open relay. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

[flurdy]

I do understand Google's challenge with handling probably the largest amount of email traffic in the world, and then the most spam in the world, and that it is a continuously moving target.

But it does feel like they are treating nearly all minor relays as spam relays. We can not block 100% of spam before we relay onwards to Gmail as that would mean too many false positives emails get blocked, but most try to block as much as possible.

In my case, my servers probably block 99% of spam, but some will get relayed, and most of those ends up being handled by Gmail's even better Bayes scoring and filtered to end users' spam folders.

I don't know what the automatic threshold limit is to be on their naughty list, but it must be very low, as in double digits per day.

[slacka]

First of all, if you check this site:

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

It is not to be set up correctly.

Now in your case, you failed to mention DMARC records. ALL of the big cloud email services have required that for years. Your SMTP server checklist is straight out of 2005.

This entire thread reminds me of the guy who pulled out of a desk drawer an Analog Startac cell phone and blamed AT&T for it not working. Email has moved on. It not Google's fault that people are configuring SMTP servers like it 2005.

[mirimir]

What does this mean?

> error SPF must allow Google servers to send mail on behalf of your domain.

So you must let Google spoof your domain? That seems crazy.

ProtonMail has the same error:

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

[matrixagent]

He's wrong about what this tool provides – namely information for people who want to use GSuite for their email. In that context it makes sense that you have to allow Google "spoofing" your domain, of course. But it has nothing to do with what is being discussed here.

[mirimir]

Ah. Thanks. It makes sense now. I didn't read carefully enough.

[roca]

This tool checks that you have set up your domain correctly for use with Google Apps.

For domains that are not using Google Apps, its results are meaningless.

[zlynx]

It turns out DMARC isn't actually required. Having it might help your acceptance score, but gmail and outlook don't actually require it.

I know because I haven't set up DMARC for my email domain, and my email still gets accepted by everyone.

I believe it helps that I accept on TLS with a valid certificate, and I used Google's postmaster site verification.

[xtiansimon]

Just to be clear, your comments are refering to problems with Gmail's Spam filtering. Isn't that a different issue than what the OP is saying--that his mailserver is being blocked? In other words, emails from his mail server wouldn't even make it to Spam folder.

[fgonzag]

Gmail spam filtering and it's mail server are two sides of the same coin. The mail server itself is blocking believed spam messages as a first layer, then the spam filter acts a second layer that marks messages as spam. I guess they don't want to save messages that they are completely sure are spam, the problem seems to be their false positive rate or simply their approach against small operators.

[emmelaich]

> There is no tool available to me to understand

I _think_ this is because G doesn't want people gaming the system.

> or correct the "problem".

I regularly fish mail from my spam bin. From mailing lists, and other important stuff -- and indeed Google's own mail!

One thing you can do is to get people to add you to their contacts list.

It's a hard problem. There is one "solution" you probably do not want. Have Google (and other companies) give their imprimatur to certain mail senders.

[lossolo]

I have similar experience and of course if you send exactly the same message but from gmail account, then it's not a spam for gmail anymore..

[andrewprock]

Just checked my junk folder.

9 out of 10 threads marked as spam were false negatives.

That's a 90% failure rate.

[wildduck]

Have you looked into WildDuck.email? I find it very nicely made for people who wants to run their own email. Still in Beta. FYI, I'm just a js developer not related to them.

[craz8]

I sent mail from my personal gmail to my company email (different user) for expenses

Since money was involved, I paid attention and followed up

Our finance person found many emails in Spam that were important and should not be there

On the other hand, my personal Spam folder is certainly full of crap I never want to see. But now I don’t trust the system, so I have to scan them anyway

[travbrack]

Datapoint: Ive run a small exchange server with fewer than 500 users for 5 years and have never had an issue delivering to Gmail except a couple times when we had legit issues on our end.

[tty2300]

I have everything set up correct and gmail even accepts 90% of my emails but every now and then it randomly marks one of my emails as spam. A gmail user emailed me first and I replied with a text email no links and that gets marked as spam.