[hakfoo]

Sure there is.

Accept everything by default and allow recipients to choose filtering strategies. Be explicit on reasons and behaviours for blocking.

Yes, 90 percent of users might pick some easy default that blocks you, but that moves the control back a notch from a web of opaque and deliberately hostile systems.

I was never particularly annoyed by spam. But I was deeply annoyed to find that important, time-sensitive work-related mail is merrily flagged by work-provided GSuite, and the best I can do is to try to Rube Goldberg some rules to force it back into the inbox. Who knows if there's other important stuff that rejected before even reaching "route to spam"?

[jeffbee]

> Accept everything by default and allow recipients to choose filtering strategies.

Yeah, I mean, that's never going to happen. You can only suggest this because you haven't seen email from the inside. That stuff in your Spam folder is the cream of the crop, the 1% of spam directed at your account that the classifier wasn't really 100% sure was spam. The rest of it was blocked at SMTP time without you ever seeing it. Letting all of that stuff get delivered would 1) cost a fortune, and 2) overwhelm the user who is in no way prepared to choose how to classify the resulting deluge.

GSuite users who find their own internal traffic in Spam folder are often using external systems to route and process mail, and those external systems often have jacked up DNS records or poor IP reputation, and they screw up the message by reformatting it or adding dumb footers and signatures. Consequently the mangled messages look sorta spammy.

GSuite also allows corporate IT jerks to blacklist words and phrases and reroute "objectionable content" to the spam folder. This is a very common problem and the solution is to fire the IT guy and delete the content policy.

If either of these are happening to you, talk to your GSuite admin.

[hakfoo]

Well, it wasn't internal traffic, it was communication with a third-party service provider we integrate with, which seems to be maintained by bargain-basement outsourced workers. I'd be unsurprised if their mail server had deliverability problems. Hell, their API test environment has been broken for weeks at a time.

But fundamentally, "deliverability problems" feels like we lost something about the promise of email. I don't have to talk to my postman and tell him "BTW, I'm expecting a box from Mouser next week, make sure you don't yeet it straight into the dumpster."

I suspect filtering is a S-curve thing: you set up a handful of fairly simple rules and get up to 80 or 90% rejections, and then you can spend the rest of your life taming the rest.

But part of the point is to restore some transparency. If you know what filters you have, you can refine them in a better way to get the outcomes you want. Maybe that default block for "Canadian Pharmacy" isn't so useful if you're a medical student looking into job opportunities in Quebec. Being able to manually isolate, understand, and manage the rules is much better than doing rituals to appease the Almighty Algorithm.