You probably tried this, no idea if it ever works, but in case someone reads your comment and is in the same boat: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;accounts&#x2F;contact&#x2F;forum_ar_escalations?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;accounts&#x2F;contact&#x2F;forum_ar_escalat...</a>

Right. If there was someone you could call about this, there&#x27;d be someone a social engineer could call about it.

They specifically provide 10 one use codes for this type of situation that should be saved somewhere. Also, email should be backed up locally if it’s important, just like anything else.I’m not sure what else people want from a secure email service you don’t have to pay for. Also, any work around the 2FA by a human simply means less security for everyone.

You can also have more than one device set up for TOTP - phone, previous phone or tablet, desktop using WinAuth or similar. Authy and the password managers will also track those seed values, though it&#x27;s best to store them separately from your actual password storage.Another thing that will not migrate phone to phone is Signal conversations if you&#x27;re inclined to keep those.

Print the QR codes, put them inside a plastic bottle and bury them 6 feet down in your parents backyard under the cover of darkness.-- the more elaborate, the more cool you feel doing it :)

When a family member had a phone stolen not long ago, the only major functionality on it that they couldn&#x27;t quickly and securely disable was the Google stuff.The procedures for doing so seemed to be unnecessarily complicated and difficult to find when starting, ironically, from a Google search on another device.Worse, the security policies seemed to be fundamentally flawed, because they kept insisting on some form of authentication based on a trusted device when the purpose of the transaction was to notify them that the trusted device had been stolen.There has been an unhealthy trend recently of assuming that everyone has a mobile phone and that communications to that phone&#x2F;number are a good method of authentication, without adequate thought to what happens if the physical device and&#x2F;or the associated phone number are compromised, or to whether protocols like SMS are really suitable for this sort of application. And some of the really important things, like banks and government services and email providers (which are in practice a gateway to everything else you do online) are often among the worst offenders. I don&#x27;t know what to do about this, but certainly raising awareness of this kind of problem would be a good start.

I had a fright last time I changed phones. After restoring my backup onto the new phone, I was about to wipe the old one; I did a final pass through my apps just in case... and saw that Google Authenticator configuration did not carry over to the new phone (which makes sens from a security perspective but is a PITA to manage). I had to re-enroll my device with all the services on which I use MFA.After this episode I made damn sure I had recovery codes stored in a safe place.

I updated my phone recently and google authenticated directly from my phone number.

For the future, if you use yubikeys, yubico authenticator is a drop in replacement for google-authenticator and you can save your google-auth setup on multiple yubikeys. So, even if you lose one, you still have it on another. Then it is independent of the phone. Also the yubikeys themselves can be used as 2FA for google accounts. However, sadly, you can&#x27;t set them up on firefox the last time I tried.

Happened to me too. The thing that triggered lockout was attempt to login from different country (I&#x27;ve changed my VPN provider). I didn&#x27;t give Google my phone number so the only option left for recovery was tricky questions like &quot;what city you&#x27;ve been logging in from&quot; which I failed to answer.

Add another perspective to this.  Once I updated my phone, and google would not accept new google Authenticator codes after set up.  Locked out of 15 years of email.

To be honest I don&#x27;t like this confidentiality notes and from what I&#x27;ve read (not a lawyer) they don&#x27;t have any practical effect either.

&gt; we use Office365 and don&#x27;t have this issueI&#x27;m not surprised Microsoft&#x27;s IP range is known by google. Sending from sendgrid, mailchimp, and a few others that send a lot of mail also works. It&#x27;s when a new player wants to get in the market (or god forbid, an individual with their own nerdy server) where the trouble arises.

&gt;Even after all that, there&#x27;s some chance that an email from my server will be marked as insecure&#x2F;spamDon&#x27;t I know it. This happened to us but not with Google. We use Exchange Online (Office365) and have DKIM, SPF headers configured. At some point our emails stopped being received by bell and cox emails addresses ... sporadically but sometimes for days at a time. It turned out that the spam filter provider (used by bell and maybe cox) correlated one innocuous phrase in our confidentiality notice (which is appended to all outgoing email signatures) with spam and therefore marked the entire email as spam as well.

Asking whether anyone resents using https is just being snarky. You know the answer and the obviousness of it makes it condescending. We all agree that https is good, so comparing that to spf and dkim is like saying GP is stupid for not having enjoyed it.Even ignoring spf and the other anti-spam tech that doesn&#x27;t do anything remotely like https, dkim only signs messages. Https is more like pgp or s&#x2F;mime, not dkim. It&#x27;s like posting the hash when you share a binary online: the recipient can verify the integrity and sender (namely, whoever put up the hash), but I don&#x27;t think anyone considers a signed binary to be private like bank transactions done with https.

I do actually resent the way google imposed HTTPS everywhere, but my issues were with the rollout as opposed to the tech. Rant for another day :)But with the security&#x2F;encryption&#x2F;signing for email... yeah, if it was just an &quot;on&quot; switch somewhere, I&#x27;d be all for it. Unfortunately, setting up SPF for something like exim isn&#x27;t very straightforward at all. It&#x27;s flipping LOTS of &quot;on&quot; switches in lots of different places, generating and copying keys around, setting permissions on all the files properly, testing etc. It turns into a legitimate project fairly quickly, and it&#x27;s hard to prove that this is a better method than just really well-trained spam filters. So, basically, it ends up being by Google fiat that I had to do that project.

Do you resent HTTPS too?I&#x27;d rather turn on encryption&#x2F;signing&#x2F;security for my mail than contribute to a system like the telephone network where bank accounts get emptied by transoceanic criminal networks on the regular.

&gt; but still a major site that presumably generates a lot of revenueThat&#x27;s very possible! It&#x27;s definitely an amazing site and it&#x27;s absolutely clear that it could drive revenue.With that said, perhaps it might be like Google News, where it not only doesn&#x27;t generate profits, but doesn&#x27;t generate any revenue at all? Is it possible that being a major site and generating revenue might be entirely distinct?

It&#x27;s not just email, it seems like any service is at risk of being ignored through malice or just being too tiny it gets neglected if it doesn&#x27;t help the walled garden somehow.At one point I heard a rumor that no human had worked on Google Finance in over a year, simply because nobody was interested. Not their biggest service of course, but still a major site that presumably generates a lot of revenue. If they think that global finance is &quot;too boring&quot; for their amazing engineers then support for everything is liable to be canceled at any moment.

Perhaps he was indirectly referring to MTA-STS[1] that Google sponsored, co-authored, and recently released in beta?[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;gmail-making-email-more-secure-with-mta-sts.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;gmail-making-em...</a>

Uh, SPF was being developed long before Gmail was a thing and was pushed for by at least 1 other (Yahoo) mass mail provider, as was reverse DNS verification. If you&#x27;re going to be salty at someone, it should be the spammers.

As someone who runs their own personal mail server, this annoys me to no end.I set up DKIM, SPF, and reverse-DNS records and resented every moment of it. Even after all that, there&#x27;s some chance that an email from my server will be marked as insecure&#x2F;spam or otherwise just not be delivered because Google has come up with some new brilliant mail security&#x2F;auth&#x2F;permission scheme that the world has to adopt tomorrow or be cut off from all Gmail users.

I think you are still being sold even if you pay. Nothing really stops that. Even if they give away or even pay the bigger providers they are ultimately selling a white list. Since if they just accepted whoever gave them money with zero policing of abuse, even a warning and take down system for spam then nobody would accept their whitelist as it eventually becomes a blacklist of &quot;the one spammers use&quot; and their business model essentially becomes a scam.

There&#x27;s a good middlespace here, where you pay someone for email service who isn&#x27;t an adtech company. Sure, you don&#x27;t host it yourself, but someone who&#x27;s not selling you is and you&#x27;re their actual customer. (I pay FastMail, personally.)

That&#x27;s the cost of not pushing the cost on those responsible: the spammers

There&#x27;s some setup cost, for sure. But there need not be that much of an ongoing maintenance (for me, it&#x27;s just pacman -Syu + restart of some services, perhaps 10mins a month). You can also gain some interesting features and insight as a result.

A while back I&#x27;d explored trying to own my data, especially with email, and found that the efforts involved in hosting your own email server were tantamount to a full-time job.The amount of fighting you have to do to stay on everyone&#x27;s whitelists is absurd.

I feel like as they leave more and more up to the algorithms, we suffer. I&#x27;ve been having this ever increasing in frequency issue where Gmail Search just doesn&#x27;t working. Not that it doesn&#x27;t return search results but rather that it returns what I know to be incorrect results.I have an email with some account information that I access a couple times a year at most but will consistently need at least once a year. Just infrequently enough that I can&#x27;t remember the exact contents.I know exactly what the subject line of the email is and it&#x27;s a suggested search query in Gmail but about 2 years ago Gmail just stopped being able to find it. I can navigate to the email via label or star just fine but I can no longer search for it.Is it because it&#x27;s an 8 year old email? idk what the reasoning is but Gmail as deemed it irrelevant and stopped returning it as a search result. This isn&#x27;t a platform issue either, it happens in App, or browser on multiple devices.

They don&#x27;t even have to be doing it deliberately; as you say, the lack of incentives to fix such issues will cause a gradual evolution in that direction.

Email deliverability has been a hassle for a long time. 15 years ago, AOL was the juggernaut that made sysadmin&#x27;s lives difficult.I do agree that Google&#x27;s outsize influence in so many markets is concerning.

Break up Google&#x2F;Alphabet. Way past time.

Google Ads support is incredible. I’ve been shocked. You can tell where their real business is. You call and you get a competent human in less than a few minutes.Also, Google email deliverability is good, inbound and outbound. I’ve been running an email service and have had no problems with them, unlike Hotmail&#x2F;Outlook.

I wholly agree with your statement. I would add that, sadly, its like this with most things Google: 1) vague descriptions of the problem, 2) impossible to get support or talk to anyone, 3) severe consequences (because of the ubiquity of Google’s platforms i.e. search, Gmail, Android, Chrome). Anyone who’s had a safe browsing problem, an App Store issue, or, heaven forbid, an AdSense issue will attest.As far as it relates to email, this is why platforms like Sendgrid got so popular, they manage the relationship with Google and others for you.

I used to be &#x27;with it&#x27;. Now what I&#x27;m &#x27;with&#x27; isn&#x27;t &#x27;it&#x27; and what&#x27;s &#x27;it&#x27; is strange and foreign to me. It&#x27;ll happen to you!

Those people wouldn&#x27;t have learned how the internet works regardless. It&#x27;s simply not something most people care to understand.

Define &#x27;people&#x27;.  We&#x27;re already there IMO.  The kids today don&#x27;t have any particular understanding of what the internet is and how it works.  They view it through walled gardens via the app store.

Google has a long history of &quot;oopsies&quot; where they deliberately cripple the competition and blame it on unintended consequences [1].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computerworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;3389882&#x2F;former-mozilla-exec-alleges-google-torpedoed-firefox-with-oops-excuses.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computerworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;3389882&#x2F;former-mozilla...</a>

Any examples?  (DDG fan here; curious to know if it is filter bubbling, or something else.)

&gt;I’m now regularly seeing search results bury political pages which seem to run counter bay area political views.This has been a well known occurrence. I’m think about all those pictures of “Hillary Clinton is” [0] typed into each search engine and Google was polar opposite of all others.I think one needs to be pretty obtuse to not see Google is “curating” results to fit an ideology.Everyone should be mad at that even if they believe in the same things.EDIT: Well... apparently some people don&#x27;t believe me, so I just re-tested. &quot;Hillary Clinton i&quot; in four engines.I couldn&#x27;t use &quot;Hillary Clinton is&quot; because &quot;for some reason&quot; Google guessing completely stops working when you type &quot;is&quot; after her name - can someone find me another phrase besides &quot;Hillary Clinton&quot; that &quot;breaks&quot; the search fill when &quot;is&quot; gets added? No? Well.. That sure seems like Google is &quot;curating&quot; then.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.postimg.cc&#x2F;MTkdFb14&#x2F;Hillary-Clinton-I.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.postimg.cc&#x2F;MTkdFb14&#x2F;Hillary-Clinton-I.png</a>

I&#x27;m now regularly seeing search results bury political pages which seem to run counter bay area political views. I&#x27;ll search the terms on Bing and DuckDuckGo and the page I&#x27;m expecting will be the first hit, but on Google it&#x27;ll be on page 3 or 4.Clearly they keep the hit in the search results for plausible deniability, but they&#x27;re trying to influence people by suppressing speech. Given that Google is becoming synonymous with the internet, like AOL, this is a very concerning trend.

This may be a fair sentiment for an educational institution (you&#x27;re not directly making money from email sending &#x2F; hopefully admissions marketing doesn&#x27;t have this problem), but as a candidate I&#x27;d be extremely concerned if a company I was going to work with A) couldn&#x27;t deliver to gmail and B) held the view that it was everyone else&#x27;s problem.  As it is you&#x27;re statistically leaving half the candidate pool at the door, which is recoverable.  A biz that can&#x27;t deliver to gmail is a terrible smell though.

Indeed, the spur for me to finally sign up for Fastmail was that I was applying for a job and I can&#x27;t trust Google with crucial email.  You get what you pay for.

I&#x27;d suggest that regardless of your email provider, you should obsessively check your spam folder if you&#x27;re expecting a job&#x2F;internship&#x2F;etc. offer. Every spam filter has false positives, and those sorts of messages can trip a lot of the heuristics tuned for actual spam.

I think you’ve got to meet people halfway here.While’s gmail’s filtering is obviously neither your responsibility nor under your control, you also can’t really fault people for using one of the most popular email services on the planet.I would hope that your department follows up some other way (you surely have a phone number!). Searches are crazy time consuming and expensive, and grad student recruitment isn’t exactly free either.

&quot;Our outbound email is misconfigured, but this is everyone else&#x27;s problem&quot;?

When I try to be sure that I will get a answer, I always try to write to the company email instead of filling a web form. When Gmail sees that I wrote to a company, it won&#x27;t put its emails in the spam folder.

Seems like if you don&#x27;t change something you are potentially losing out on a lot of great students. Maybe you do not need to change your e-mail service, but I would hope you are at least warning applicants about this issue somewhere in the application process.

Rule #1 if you&#x27;re applying for jobs or graduate school - Don&#x27;t use gmail for your email address.Source: Led a hiring committee this year. Interview invitations and job offers went straight to the junk mail folder. Also serve as Director of Graduate Studies. Admissions and funding offers, as well as general inquiries about availability, all went straight to the junk mail folder. We&#x27;re not going to change our email service.

It is a bad idea to host your own SMTP, but only because you need to keep on top of maintaining it. Most of that effort is the same if you have one user or a million, so it is more efficient to outsource that maintenance. However if you are willing to pay the price in time there is no reason you shouldn&#x27;t be able to maintain your own server.I use fastmail. They have humans that respond quickly when I have a problem (twice in 10 years)

Difficult to host smtp?!  That&#x27;s absolutely not true and has never been true.  It&#x27;s difficult to configure and set up in the first place but after that it&#x27;s just updating.  Source: personal experience for decades.

&gt; It has become very difficult &#x2F; unwise to host your own SMTP server, thoughThat&#x27;s not been my experience at all.

Surely someone has to run their own SMTP servers, or there won&#x27;t be any SMTP servers. So how is it decided who can run SMTP servers and who can not, and is this a good method?

You don&#x27;t have to switch to gmail, you can pretty reliably switch to a myriad of service providers. You could even solely switch your SMTP server to something hosted and retain message storage on your end if you wanted.It has become very difficult &#x2F; unwise to host your own SMTP server, though, but that&#x27;s been true for ages now. Gmail&#x27;s marketshare is going to make that veeeery obvious, but it really has been a bad idea for the better part of a decade, at least.

I think it should, or some sort of oversight should be in place. Their filters are extremely aggressive. I have a specific GMail rule in place to ensure that all mail gets through and nothing gets sent to spam, but even with that the occasional message gets sent to spam. It&#x27;s generally advertising, but never actually spam.There&#x27;s definitely for GMail to become the new &quot;Windows&quot;, with everyone else fighting to stay connected.

The evil part about this is that it needs no one at any step to say it out loud. It just “happens” as a result of Google being big.Whatever lead to Microsoft being sued for pushing Internet Explorer in Europe and whatnot? Shouldn’t that kick in already for at least some of the recent Google bullshit?

&gt; I write &quot;Perhaps&quot; because my report was a lot more specific.How did you even get your report to be read by an engineer at Google? This seems impossible unless you have some kind of business connection.

I too self-host and have done for decades. When I had a problem that may perhaps have been like this, Google disabled the relevant part of them spam filter and made an issue in some internal tracker. I write &quot;Perhaps&quot; because my report was a lot more specific.Google sells mail+spam filtering+more as a product, with a seven-digit number of paying customers, each of which pay per month and user. What more incentive could they have?

&gt; It&#x27;s like we&#x27;re heading back to the days when people didn&#x27;t know the difference between AOL and &quot;the internet.&quot;Why is this no longer true?IMO, other competitors came along offering a better service&#x2F;experience and AOL just couldn&#x27;t compete. At the time, you could not know what this better product looked like. I believe the same will happen with the internet giants of today.

Can you suggest free email provider with similar level of service which allows to use your own domain?

I recently switched (mostly) from gmail and realized what insidious lock-in mechanisms the &quot;unlimited inbox&quot; and &quot;inbox categories&quot; really are. I hadn&#x27;t been giving it much thought, but I&#x27;ve gone well over a decade just casually archiving everything, on the presumption that I can always find anything important I might need to reference by searching for it down the line. And I&#x27;d just been ignoring those junkier &quot;category&quot; tabs for months on end, presuming I can always go sort through them later to find those handful of actually-important messages that end up in there.Maybe this is just my personal organizational problem, but it was like a waking nightmare when I really started to look with fresh eyes at how unstructured my email management strategy had become with the tools gmail gives you. It took me weeks of nights and weekends to sort this all out (finding messages I actually want to save, identifying senders I actually want manually sorted to other folders, unsubscribing from lists I&#x27;ve been ignoring for years because they were conveniently out of site in &quot;promotions&quot;) to a point where I felt ready to migrate to a more traditional mailbox setup. I can easily imagine many people seeing how daunting this task is and just deciding to stick with gmail.

The right response to this problem - for gmail users - would be to switch to a different email provider. After all, if you are not receiving important mails because Google decides to block them for inexplicable reasons, you are getting an inferior, faulty service.(For me gmail is inferior regardless as my privacy is violated)

These days many people don&#x27;t know the difference between Facebook and &quot;the Internet&quot;. We&#x27;ve handed the reigns to our communication and culture into the greedy palms of about five mega-corporations that put profit above all else. Much better to use community software and platforms - things that people run for people, not companies running for profit.

In an attempt to avoid google, I kept a non-gmail address that I don’t administer, and instead forwarded it elsewhere.The administrators of the account decided to outsource the smtp relay to google. It is ridiculously unreliable, and regularly sends “no such address” responses to my synology NAS (which emails me periodically).Similarly, when I used gmail’s IMAP gateway for work, it was regularly down.I’m pretty sure Google will succeed at killing email. I hope gmail also goes down in flames if they succeed.

Totally.  I think that we need to start conceiving of email as the first widely used social network, in terms of the tendencies of large companies to try and balkanize the internet, and what a decentralized social network can look like.

Secondly, we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our users.This is so deeply disingenuous and at odds with so many peoples experience it’s absurd. Or satire?

&gt; Gmail does not, inherently, have any network effectsThis is wrong. The current situation is &quot;if you want to reliably contact gmail users you need a gmail address&quot;. This is no different than Facebook or messengers.
And that may actually be the incentive for Gmail being such a bad player compared to everybody else.

&gt; It&#x27;s simply not true we have no incentive to fix thisI 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&#x27;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.

Are there metrics regarding this ecosystem that Gmail is optimizing for and which Google engineers can get rewarded for improving?

&gt; I&#x27;m one of the PMs for Gmail and hang around HN quite a bit.Can you bring back the old web UI?I experience obnoxious interaction and interface bugs in the new one on an hourly basis, it has horrendous interaction latency for many operations that used to be snappy, it looks worse, and has basically nothing new I want.Actually, can you bring back the Gmail of like 10 years ago? Basically every change since then has been negative for me.

Google the giant will only bend when lawsuit happens. Assuming Google&#x27;s AI put an urgent email to spam by mistake and made a huge loss to some party, Google should be immediately sued, probably by class action, only then it will respect small and well-behaved players like the original post here. Whenever I read post like this, I recall its once popular(now withdrawn) slogan &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot;.

As a &quot;small fry&quot; myself, the hoops I&#x27;ve had to jump through in order for Gmail to accept legitimate mail from my mail server are rather large. Like the op, legit email appears in the trash of some recipients for goodness knows why. Like OP I&#x27;ve spf, dkim, &amp; have never been on rbl. I (&amp; services on my machine) are the only senders, and the recipients of those machine messages want them (about 10ppl in total &amp; email have no marketing content). I communicate on port 25 using tls where possible.It&#x27;s only ever Gmail that sends mail to spam. Every test I run on that email marks it as clean (generally spam assassin)Gmail is certainly NOT a part of the open email system you mention, but is a constant thorn in open communication.Ironically, I use Gapps for one domain and because of my spf settings with &quot;include:_ghs.google.com&quot; I get every cat and his dog trying to send as users from my domain, which thankfully end up in that domain&#x27;s gapps spam. (hint: let us use geo located includes, like _ghs-us.google.com or _ghs-au.google.com, so that there&#x27;s a smaller include list!)

If we lose an open, healthy ecosystem with many providers, we&#x27;ll destroy the base we stand on.Or you&#x27;ve grown large enough that the base no longer matters.we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our usersit definitely makes me sad to see articles like thisThere are going to be false positives, we will make mistakeswe could do much better there.Most of this reads like it was written by Facebook&#x27;s PR department after yet another scandal.

&gt; 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.Oh really? Then what is the mechanism by which an affected user can report an issue like this and receive individual, accountable response? Because that is what a company that cares about fixing issues does.As far as I can tell, the only redress available for any issue like this with Google is 1) be a big enough name like Jamie Zawinksi (he has been posting about struggles with this exact issue for several months) that your blog post gets attention, or 2) hope your blog post makes the front page on a site like HN.

&gt; Gmail&#x27;s success is entirely predicated on the health of the global email ecosystemThat depends on what you define as &quot;health&quot;.&gt; Email itself, of course has a huge network effect, and that is because you can email anyone in the world, regardless of what email system they useIf that&#x27;s the case, then why does Gmail system explicitly thwart this objective, as described by this very article?&gt; If we lose an open, healthy ecosystem with many providers, we&#x27;ll destroy the base we stand onAnd that&#x27;s exactly what Gmail is doing when it does what is described in the article.&gt; we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our usersYou personally might, but your company does not. What your company cares about is advertising revenue. If your company really cared about users, it would figure out a way to let them pay directly for your company&#x27;s services (not just Gmail but search, maps, etc.) so you could see directly from users how valuable those services were, instead of having any benefit to users be a side effect of trying to capture their eyeballs for advertisers.

I&#x27;d love to have a discussion about gmail but offline, feel free to mail me. I&#x27;ve just transitioned a small company over to gmail and the experience so far has been nothing short of terrible, this can&#x27;t be how it is meant to be. If you&#x27;re up for it my email is in my profile.

Wow since you&#x27;re so concerned and helpful, here&#x27;s a tidbit: Everyone who has tried to run a personal mail server in past five years can&#x27;t because of gmail.

So will you fix OP&#x27;s problem then, prlambert?

Gmail stopped being a good email provider years ago:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dominictarr&#x2F;your-web-app-is-bloated" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dominictarr&#x2F;your-web-app-is-bloated</a>Gmail used to be a small, light, fast and simple email service. Frankly, you should be ashamed of what Gmail has become.

Glad you&#x27;re here and listening. I&#x27;m another poor schmuck who runs his own email server for family members (you can look it up from my HN profile -&gt; mx record) and Gmail deliverability has been a problem for me for over a decade. I do DKIM, SPF, reverse DNS, had the same IP for many years, etc etc., and it&#x27;s a total crapshoot whether Gmailers get my message in their inbox or spam folder.
Postmaster tools have been useless for me because apparently my volumes aren&#x27;t high enough.I&#x27;m inclined to think Gmail&#x27;s approach to this problem is fundamentally flawed, because Gmail has been by far the worst at binning my server&#x27;s emails. I don&#x27;t have this problem with Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, etc., etc. Now, feel free to argue that their approaches are too lenient, but if I have to choose between false negatives and false positives in my spam filter, I absolutely know which one I&#x27;d choose.

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&#x2F;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 &quot;problem&quot;. 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.&gt; If we lose an open, healthy ecosystem with many providers, we&#x27;ll destroy the base we stand on.Correct. Gmail is contributing to the erosion of email reliability. Please course correct.

&gt; Firstly, Gmail&#x27;s success is entirely predicated on the health of the global email ecosystem. Gmail does not, inherently, have any network effects (unlike FB, messengers, any other comms tool of Gmail&#x27;s scale)Google initially federated with XMPP, until you had critical mass and shut out the rest of the Jabber&#x2F;XMPP ecosystem.Of course now you seem intent on killing your _own_ messaging product so it&#x27;s hard to divine any self-consistent intent here.

You are a PM, you may “theoretically” care when you see something in HN or some other social media, but the number of people having problems with your product are magnitudes larger than that. Everything is completely filtered out by customer support, even for companies that have good customer support unlike Google, and never reaches your ears.I am not taking a stab at you personally. I truly believe that you care when you read the story here. But if you really cared enough there would be no story to be reported here.

&gt; we certainly care a lot about fixing issues like this when we hear about them.And there&#x27;s the problem. The only effective way for OP to contact someone who likely has the ability to fix it was to write an article, post it on HN, get upvotes, and hope you happen upon it.That&#x27;s not a viable solution for everyone who runs a mail server Gmail falsely identifies as a source of spam. You don&#x27;t have a good way to hear about issues like this.

If this is your personal take, then who is that &quot;we&quot; you keep saying?

I use email hosting from my domain name provider (email in my profile). I regularly find out that personal emails from me end up in people&#x27;s spam folders on gmail. As far as I can guess from digging into email headers, gmail is upset because my domain name provider&#x27;s email server doesn&#x27;t use whatever the latest mail-server signing mechanism gmail expects is. There&#x27;s absolutely nothing I can do about that, and no obvious way I can get gmail to stop treating my mail as questionable and throwing it in people&#x27;s spam folders. And it&#x27;s not at all obvious how to debug this.I get why gmail isn&#x27;t transparent about all their spam-filtering mechanisms. But when personal email to gmail users is being regularly classified as spam, that produces a serious usability problem for non-gmail users.

&gt;&gt; but we certainly care a lot about fixing issues like this when we hear about themIt&#x27;s sheer chance that you happened upon this HN post. Google needs to have an open, healthy customer service infrastructure in place to hear about, track, resolve, and follow up on reported issues. This is antithetical to &quot;The Google Way&quot;. That is how you get posts like this.

Actions speak louder than words. When I see generic PR phrases like &quot;we care deeply&quot;, my bullshit detector immediately goes off the wire.

Inventing a reason to reject mail does not sound very much like “caring deeply”. More like “let them deal with it”.

I have never used Postmaster-tools. Is there any particular reason why it requires a Google-Account?

I&#x27;ve had emails sent to gmail users from our paid MS Exchange accounts blackholed. And not just randomly once or twice. My wife was a contractor for someone and despite having years of previous conversations with them, one day they just stopped getting her emails altogether. She had to create a gmail account just to keep working with them.

Why can&#x27;t I even upload a simple text file to hangouts

Have you guys considered an automatic system with collateral. I&#x27;ll gladly sign a contract stating that I will be under X% bounce rate for the next month and put some collateral (depending on the email volume requested). At the end of the month you get your collateral back.It&#x27;s a purely economic and automated solution that should work well enough for small operators (collateral for a small email volume should be small since spammers really need high volume)

Small anecdote: The acceptance email to my universities study abroad program landed in my Gmail spam folder. An email that I had 5 days to react to or someone else gets the spot.I thought it&#x27;s great that I have so rarely stuff in my Gmail spam folder that I don&#x27;t even have to check it regularly until I nearly missed a very important email. Apparently I was lucky that ot didn&#x27;t get outright rejected.I rather have to deal with some spam than to miss important, or even regular, emails.

This is your personal opinion. And there is the experience of those people out there. I believe you that you personally stand for these but I seriously doubt your employer cares. There are many examples of the same issue, like that one with Firefox.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;former-mozilla-exec-google-has...</a>It is kind of funny to me that other email vendors could implement SMTP and co properly and Gmail _more recently_ started to have issues. Just because of this I started to look for alternatives because I will not stand and watch how an ad-tech company destroys the open internet, even if this will be very inconvenient personally.

Keep trying to make yourself feel better. The company you work for is ruining the internet which means you are complicit in just that. Perhaps you could find something more constructive to do with your life.

Google does not have incentive to fix this, because they can simply not fix it, and get along just fine.That&#x27;s the point.It doesn&#x27;t have to be conscious dereliction, it can just be &#x27;big, dumb bureaucracy&#x27;. Interestingly, operational ineffectiveness can happen within well run organizations, particularly if there&#x27;s no poignant reasons to change.These kinds of things tend to happen when one part of the organization is mining Oil or Gold and throwing vast surpluses around the rest of the camp.You have $100 Billion dollars to fix the problem - a hoard of the best and most highly paid talent on planet earth.So fix it.

So apart from the hang-wringing going on here. What can the original poster do?They have literally shown what they have tried to do and it is not enough.If this poor guy is a &quot;false positive&quot; then what is his path to resolution? It looks like he doesn&#x27;t have one and saying &quot;Yeah, that sucks&quot; or &quot;Because you made it on hacker news we will investigate&quot; isn&#x27;t helping all the other &quot;small fry&quot; out there.

Thank you for the reply. Wouldn&#x27;t it, somehow, be possible for Google to provide a place where one can go when such problems occur? Maybe paid (in order to scale). As is one feels completely powerless and negative emotions will be caused.

Thanks for sticking your neck out. When these kinds of articles happen, it often feels like a witch hunt.How extensively does the Gmail team test interoperability with other mail systems? From my personal experience, one sin committed by many teams who in say they play nice with the ecosystem is to neglect to test integration against other players in the ecosystem. It&#x27;s annoying to test and slows down development pace, so frequently no developer wants to do it. This leads to a situation where it may be unintentional, but there is definitely a &quot;favored client.&quot;

&gt; Firstly, Gmail&#x27;s success is entirely predicated on the health of the global email ecosystem.That simply is not relevant anymore if 99% of email is on Gmail.I want to echo the exact same issues as the original author. Running my own email servers since the 90s I recently just “gave up” - no single indication about spam issues. All green on several tests. But Google rejects mail. Zero help or tools from google to get off their filter or whatever it is that makes these kind of decisions.Friends and family all have Gmail accounts for those important emails that Must go through. Enough said.I’ve moved my email to another provider and stopped self hosting.

&gt;Firstly, Gmail&#x27;s success is entirely predicated on the health of the global email ecosystem. Gmail does not, inherently, have any network effects [...]That&#x27;s ... unconvincing to the point where it sounds like PR spin. How does Gmail not benefit from crappy email service outside of gmail? How do more gmail users not accentuate this?&gt;Secondly, we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our users.Frankly, talk is cheap.I don&#x27;t mean to be rude, but your response is either (a) completely missing the point or (b) disingenuous. Assuming the former, can you substantiate your claims?

&gt; but we certainly care a lot about fixing issues like this when we hear about them.What then should we make of the fact that Google practically ensures that they won&#x27;t hear about such issues by making it next to impossible to report them?

I&#x27;m someone in exactly the same situation as the author of this blog post. I appreciate your well-meaning response, but the bottom line is that Google will have to offer a way for a real two-way communication channel for email administrators or be considered as acting in bad faith.There needs to be a way to inspect what caused mail delivery so we are able to fix it. There needs to be a way to provide feedback to Google about mail that was wrongly rejected. If you can push this forward internally, please do it.This is a far too regular occurrence to just ignore: it is a rule that delivering email to gmail from outside is unreliable, not an exception.

How can you seriously argue you have no network effects when Gmail has repeatedly added (to be fair, somewhat useful) features that basically only work on Gmail, like AMP emails or expiring&#x2F;deletable emails? Sure, other vendors could go out of their way to reimplement AMP and shove it into email but really?

I&#x27;m glad you have your heart in the right place.However, as one of the PMs in charge of one of the most important messaging applications on the planet, you cannot claim the following without stating your reasons:&gt; Gmail does not, inherently, have any network effectsYes, compared to facebook, and within the context of messaging apps, gmail&#x27;s network effect is weaker. But the fact that the very existence of the gmail monolith can kill off small mail servers (not implicitly, but by failure to deliver messages), is a real problem.I understand it&#x27;s a difficult problem. It&#x27;s not a gmail scale problem, but the effects, times the number of small mail servers is important, because those small mail servers will be what is left if any of the big players in this ecosystem collapse.

&gt; Gmail does not, inherently, have any network effects (unlike FB, messengers, any other comms tool of Gmail&#x27;s scale)That&#x27;s not true at all. I&#x27;ve noticed when sending from Gmail to Gmail it always gets delivered and quickly. I&#x27;ve noticed with other email service people, even ones using big providers like Yahoo, it&#x27;s really hit or miss if they can receive from me, send to me, and it takes a long time to show up in my email. So there&#x27;s a really strong network effect to use Gmail because Gmail doesn&#x27;t work well outside Gmail. So much so that I keep a bunch of address (personal&#x2F;Gmail, work, school, my personal web site and email server) and try to pick the one that works best based on who I&#x27;m sending to.

it&#x27;s cool that you hang around HN, but this kind of response just exacerbates the big problem with Google these days: unless you can get to the top of HN, or picked up by TechCrunch, you have no hope of getting any resolution for any of the bad things that Google does.  Whether you have incentive to fix it or not, the reality is that you refuse to acknowledge these &quot;false positives&quot; or give people any recourse to fix them.

It really got worse. In the past years (always the same IP, good reputation, DKIM), I had a few mails land in the spam folder of gmail users, but it did not happen very often.This week I encountered the following situation the first time:
1. I received an email from a Google apps (or whatever it is called) user. My response to that email landed in the spam folder.
2. I exchanged one or two mails more with another person in the same organisation without problems.
3. Suddenly my response got rejected. I tried sending via various means such as via Thunderbird, via mobile on 4G, via mobile on Wi-Fi, changing the content slightly... No chance. My email got rejected. In the I ended up calling the person from number 1 on his mobile to get the second person&#x27;s mobile number...
Needless to say, I have been less than pleased.Person 1 was very surprised about their spam filter misbehaving, but at least I can now offer an excuse by pointing to this blog post...

My properly configured DKIM&#x2F;SPF&#x2F;etc mailserver, with a 10-year old IP, still gets email redirected to gmails spam folder more often than not. Even replies to emails from gmail addresses, with reply-to-id&#x27;s.That&#x27;s the box I use for my personal email. Out of principle. I believe in a distributed&#x2F;federated net. It just means that I can&#x27;t expect that emails I send actually get delivered. Sigh.My experience for business has been that you simply have to bite the bullet and be on outlook.com or gmail.com. Or you can&#x27;t expect that regular email always arrives. What everyone in the corporate world expects of course.I&#x27;ve heard this story from everyone I know that operates their own mailserver. No hyperbole. I would be tremendously happy if Google would spend some serious (and visible) effort on this. Thanks Paul.

&gt; Gmail does not, inherently, have any network effectsIn an ideal world, yes. Unless Gmail makes it harder for anyone using a different provider to communicate with Gmail users. In which case you&#x27;ve effectively &quot;encouraged&quot;&#x2F;forced everyone else to use Gmail to take advantage of the Gmail network. This seems to be exactly what&#x27;s happened to the author. This is very similar to the complaint voiced recently by the Mozilla leader as well.I don&#x27;t doubt that you as an individual have very good intentions. But individual intentions do not translate well to organizational priorities. The best way to prevent Gmail-lock-in in the long term is to have more diversity and competition in this marketplace.

Secondly, we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our usersHoly shit, GMail&#x27;s going away? This is the kind of thing we&#x27;re told just before a Google product is killed.

&gt; Gmail does not, inherently, have any network effectsIf you reject most non-Gmail messages it does!

Every single person inside of an institution can care deeply about something, but that doesn&#x27;t mean the institution as a whole will act as if it cares. Think of Google as a huge animal made up of individual people. The people can perceive and act on their immediate surroundings, but only by forming larger structures (like teams or orgs) are they able to act on the world at Google&#x27;s scale.Really, it&#x27;s not about incentives; it&#x27;s about perception. Just like you can&#x27;t act at Google&#x27;s scale on your own, you can&#x27;t perceive the effects of Google&#x27;s actions on your own. You care about fixing issues when you hear about them, but how do you hear about them? What can the Google-animal see, and what is it blind to?

If you deeply care what is the proper way of letting you know about it? I&#x27;m sorry but calling these relationships caring is rubbish. If Linus himself said that no one in the mail team listens, then what do the devs that are not the most popular name in the open source world have to do?!

I&#x27;ve written a similar article to this a few years back, so this isn&#x27;t a new problem and obviously little has been done to fix it:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;penguindreams.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-google-and-microsoft-made-email-unreliable&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;penguindreams.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-google-and-microsoft-made...</a>I have SPF, DKIM, reverse DNS, DMARC .. all the things, and yet I still get e-mail dropped.Will you guys fix Postmaster tools for small servers? What can I do to send e-mail to my friends?

a) thanks for the response 
b) do you have any clues why this failure is so sporadic? That is to say, why does an email from domain&#x2F;server x get blocked on one day but get through a few days later (repeatedly)?

Hey, thanks for replying. Just sticking your head over the parapet is pretty brave.I have a contra story. One of no delivery issues to Gmail or Hotmail, none, zero, nada. I&#x27;ve run a private email server (friends&#x2F;family&#x2F;small business&#x2F;private mailing lists) for two decades. It&#x27;s kept pace with every possible factor for reliable delivery - SPF&#x2F;DKIM&#x2F;DMARC&#x2F;ARC, valid client SSL, IPv6, correct PTRs, DNSSEC etc and have no sketchy affiliates. In that time the IPv4 address changed exactly once and has never been RBL&#x27;d. Our mail gets delivered AOK.And yet, even though I think my compliance level is good, I still feel like the blind man groping an elephant. I&#x27;m hoping I&#x27;m perceiving things correctly; I have no idea if I&#x27;m missing something. It helps that I&#x27;m an old-school ISP engineering inmate and contributor to well-known MTAs and MDAs, but few folks are lucky enough to have exposure to so SMTP radiation.My take on the Postmaster Tools is that they&#x27;ve been created entirely to serve Google&#x27;s purposes, and thereby serve no-one well because (as you point out) it&#x27;s ecosystem engagement that makes a difference. If you sincerely have an incentive to improve, there is an awful lot of work to do there. It&#x27;s okay to push the burden of compliance back to the sender, but the Postmaster tools offer only the most rudimentary levers to pull and provide almost no useful information, particularly for smaller&#x2F;indy senders.The message that comes through is that Google only really gives a shit about other large scale entities and struggles to see other points of view. This stands in quite stark contrast to Google&#x27;s effort level over HTTP certificates and webmaster tools.

Google could fix this rather simply. Have an opt-in system whereby anyone sending you email is charged a penny. (Of course, this will initially mean the sender will need to get a google account, but as this catches on more email providers will provide this service.) Split the revenue between the recipient and Google.I don&#x27;t mind spending a penny to send an email, I don&#x27;t send enough to make any difference. But to spammers, it makes abusing the email system unprofitable. And if I receive half the revenue from people sending me email, it&#x27;ll likely work out to costing me about nothing.

Thanks for wading in.&quot;Gmail does not, inherently, have any network effects&quot; - you do and you can&#x27;t help it.I&#x27;ve been doing email for quite a while (20 odd years) and I don&#x27;t find Gmail refusing my customer&#x27;s email for silly reasons too often.I have had some odd rejections from Gmail (int al) and no-one to talk to. You opine that Postmaster tools are under-invested in but actually miss the real point:You (G) seem to under-invest in people and put too much faith in magic (AI&#x2F;ML&#x2F;nonsense). I really am not a Luddite (I&#x27;m giving the tyres on my smart new Node-RED home IoT thingie a good talking to via Javascript right now) but please don&#x27;t forget ... &quot;memento homo&quot;)

I very much want to believe that Google cares about small email providers and self-hosters. I believe that you care personally, but have a look at the documentation. All the help articles target bulk-hosters, the documentation doesn&#x27;t even mention humans! The case that a human wants to send an email to another human, which is the very reason email was created in the first place, is not even covered or planned, so I&#x27;m pretty sure Google doesn&#x27;t care about collateral like us, who have fun caring about their own email servers, playing by the rules and doing everything to not be on blacklists.Why not count the amount of emails coming from those domains and give them a &quot;softer&quot; filtering algo if it&#x27;s below a certain threshold? Or open a whitelisting program where you can go full Google on people who violate the terms? I think there are (automatable) ways to solve this problems, but only if Google understands that emails are for human interaction, not to receive ads.(Edited for typos)

&gt;Firstly, Gmail&#x27;s success is entirely predicated on the health of the global email ecosystem.It absolutely does not. It is so large now that what the parent poster said is the real case. It has such dominance that people are pressured to switch to Gmail or Google apps to get stuff reliably delivered to the massive percentage of email users.This is exactly like an IE6 PM coming on extolling the virtues of open standards and how they are critical to the success of internet explorer.Seriously think about it (assuming you are even posting in good faith). If Gmail&#x27;s success was &quot;entirely predicated on the health&quot;, do you really think Postmaster tools and other interoperability efforts would have so little investment?

Thanks for the thoughtful response.But the problem with all Google services is that there&#x27;s apparently nobody listening. Unless you&#x27;re a paying customer, and even then, I gather that it&#x27;s iffy. It&#x27;s all automated, in extremely unhelpful ways.I do appreciate, however, that it&#x27;s largely a scale issue. Google is just so big, and operates on such small margins, that it&#x27;s arguably not economically feasible to provide individualized support.Unless you make it to the HN front page, or whatever.As a practical matter, if you want to send email to Gmail accounts, you&#x27;d better be using Gmail. And apparently, even that doesn&#x27;t always work.

If Google really cared about the health of the global email ecosystem maybe you guys should consider putting a GPL on Gmail. Maybe if we could study the code and come up with a solution that benefits everyone maybe we could make email better. Instead you guys at Google just want to maintain your near monopoly on a vital part of our online existence.

NB:  Google absolutely has network effects, and those are to an nth approximation its entire value.

Just signed up for two newsletters today, both “Please confirm your subscription” messages went to spam. Corrected it then hit the confirm links. One “subscription confirmed” email went to inbox after that, the other still went to spam.Guess I’ll find out whether correcting it a second time applies to the actual newsletter messages.

I call bullshit. Google has flaunted their complete disregard for RFCs time and time again. Try to send an abuse complaint to abuse@ any domain that&#x27;s hosted by Google. You can&#x27;t. Try to correspond with a human. You can&#x27;t.Content filters should never be applied to abuse addresses, yet Google happily ignores this and never even replies to abuse complaints sent to @gmail.com or @google.com.

Also, a lot of big companies don&#x27;t even allow their employees to use Gmail, but I suspect they are allowed to send email to people on Gmail.

<pre><code> we will make mistakes
</code></pre>
Completely understandable.What I don&#x27;t understand: why aren&#x27;t these false positives sent to the recipient&#x27;s Spam folder? Why else does that folder exist?

What about amp for email as network effect?

But then, how can a simple heuristic like &quot;hey, this guy has sent and received messages from this non-google address before, we should most definitely not drop incoming mail from there&quot; not be in place? I gmail is pretty much the only google service I still use. In pretty much all regards, google has repeatedly disappointed me over the last couple years. A couple months ago, gmail suddenly started dropping incoming mails from a mailing list I&#x27;ve been subscribed to for 8(!!!) years, three times so far. Exactly like in the linked blog post here.To sum it up: sorry, but what you&#x27;re saying here doesn&#x27;t sound like it&#x27;s true, and if it is let me tell you that you&#x27;re failing at it, miserably. The only reason I didn&#x27;t move away from gmail is that it&#x27;s just a lot of work. But the time will come, eventually.

&quot;It&#x27;s because email is open. If we lose an open, healthy ecosystem with many providers&quot;Don&#x27;t you see? This post on HN means you have created the CLOSED unhealthy ecosystem. You built what you just spoke against when you shut out email from small providers. Shame on you for speaking idealically and not confronting the reality of the situation.

GMail is placing email from other users in the same google suites domain into spam which makes 0 sense since google knows they all belong to the same gsuite account.

&gt;Secondly, we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our usersI bet you also take the security of your system seriously. What other Internet platitudes can you spout?

I appreciate the response and the evident care at the personal level that you apply to this.It is also an excellent goal to use AI to scale as many processes as practical to provide ever-broader services.Yet, it is obvious that, at the corporate level and despite being one of the most massively well-funded companies worldwide, Google is famous for abysmal customer service and most particularly, providing NO way whatsoever for a person who has been damaged by a &quot;false positive&quot; to every correct a real person at Google to get a resolution.Yes, providing an avenue to real people who could resolve the issue would be expensive. I seriously doubt that it would be so expensive as to make any serious dent in Aplhabet&#x27;s profitability or stock price (unless, of course, the problems are far more massive than anyone knows).Moreover, providing the ability for people who have been &quot;false positive&quot; damaged by some spam, account violation, etc. to reach a person for resolution to a problem would also provide large amounts of the fine-grained detailed data that would allow Google to fix its issues at the algorithm level, thereby reducing the need for the support service as well as the frustration.Why is this not done? Is it that the problems are actually massive but hidden? Is it that management does not care the way you do? Is it that mgt actually wants to drive off all small services in order to dominate? Obviously all speculation, including bad speculation. But leaving zero ways to contact, as well as zero information about the issues, leave the field ripe for all the speculation. This is the sort of reputational problem that can fester for years, seen only as a minor issue -- until it grows so massive and passes a tipping point, where the reputation and market position is unrecoverable. I hope Google does not go that route.

I&#x27;m one of the PMs for Gmail and hang around HN quite a bit. This is my personal take, not an official reply.It&#x27;s simply not true we have no incentive to fix this. Here are a few:Firstly, Gmail&#x27;s success is entirely predicated on the health of the global email ecosystem. Gmail does not, inherently, have any network effects (unlike FB, messengers, any other comms tool of Gmail&#x27;s scale). Email itself, of course has a huge network effect, and that is because you can email anyone in the world, regardless of what email system they use. It&#x27;s because email is open. If we lose an open, healthy ecosystem with many providers, we&#x27;ll destroy the base we stand on.Secondly, we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our users. I can tell you it definitely makes me sad to see articles like this. 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.I agree Postmaster tools has been underinvested in and we could do much better there.

&gt; Google has no incentive to fix these kinds of problems.You mean not to try to actively sabotage the internet that we once knew?

You&#x27;re over-thinking it. GMail&#x27;s market pretense is large. The number of edge cases like this in the entire world combined is a rounding error to them. It would likely be easier to fix problems to minimize bug reports and keep community good standing than increase GMail&#x27;s user base by 0.001%.

we&#x27;re definitely there in the K-12 market. The only email kids know is Gmail. The only browser they know is Chrome. The only OS a lot of them now know is ChromeOS, on the Chromebook their school was basically given &quot;for free.&quot; their editors are Google Docs, Google Sheets, they use Google Hangounts to chat. Their phones are Android with all of the Google services. They know YouTube, Google Play, Google Music, etc. YouTube again for music.
Some have iPhones
.. and their Apple ID is a @gmail.com address.It terrifies me just how deeply Google has entrenched itself in the K-12 education market. At least when Apple was everywhere, we still had Microsoft Office vs Appleworks&#x2F;etc.Google is now more &quot;the internet&quot; than AOL could have dreamed of.

&gt; It&#x27;s like we&#x27;re heading back to the days when people didn&#x27;t know the difference between AOL and &quot;the internet.&quot;I hate to say it, I really do, because I used to respect Google and liked their products, but if you imagine combining the perception of &quot;AOL is the internet&quot; with the way Microsoft acted up to the mid-2000&#x27;s and I think you have Google.

&gt;It&#x27;s like we&#x27;re heading back to the days when people didn&#x27;t know the difference between AOL and &quot;the internet.&quot;You’re right.And it’s a small thing, but I’ve really been trying to correct myself when I use google as a verb. I’ve been trying to say “search it” instead.

Exactly. 
Like Google&#x27;s services compatibility with non-Chrome browsers.

It&#x27;s not broken. It&#x27;s just hyped well beyond its constraints.

Funny you mention AOL. There used to be a magic formula for how many concurrent SMTP connections, how many emails&#x2F;minute, etc, you could pump at them before you silently went into spam.I worked on a team with a large (real double opt in, not spam) email list. We had to pay for a bunch of AOL accounts to figure out the trigger points, so that we could get our email updates out overnight without tripping AOL&#x27;s spammer logic.And there was a time when they had dominant email share like Google has now.

&gt; Google has no incentive to fix these kinds of problems.Even worse, they have incentive to create these problems.Gsuite is extremely profitable for them, I am sure. Charging $5&#x2F;user&#x2F;month for hosted email must make them a pretty penny.I would guess that no gsuite sent emails are ever blocked with this suspicious message 550 error.

This is precisely why we should block gmail (and microsoft) in retaliation - because gmail users will start having problems with their accounts.

Google has no incentive to fix these kinds of problems.It&#x27;s big enough that when someone complains that a message sent wasn&#x27;t received, the intended recipient will say, &quot;I never have problems with my Gmail account. It must be you.&quot; And the sender has to switch to Gmail to reliably communicate with the outside world.I wish this was just paranoia, but we&#x27;ve seen multiple discussions on HN about Google programs and policies that alter the internet in ways that only benefit Big G. It&#x27;s like we&#x27;re heading back to the days when people didn&#x27;t know the difference between AOL and &quot;the internet.&quot;

Personally I see this as just more Google incompetence. Gmail has just become bad. If you want to get all your mail you have to use something else.It&#x27;s like we&#x27;re going back to the days when each e-mail service only trusted messages from its own users, and if you wanted messages to go to another network, you had to use an e-mail gateway.Can I get my ...!killer!jolnet bang path back?

&gt; Indifference that does not cause a business problem remains indifference.More generally, indifference to small &quot;trivial&quot; problems eventually normalizes the deviant behavior[1]. Evil behavior doesn&#x27;t happen in one step, it&#x27;s end result of regularly being indifferent to &quot;minor&quot; problems[2].For a very good explanation of why this happens, I recommend Richard Cook&#x27;s excellent talk, &quot;Resilience In Complex Adaptive Systems&quot;[3].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikibooks.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Professionalism&#x2F;Diane_Vaughan_and_the_normalization_of_deviance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikibooks.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Professionalism&#x2F;Diane_Vaughan_...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.aopa.org&#x2F;aopa&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;07&#x2F;the-normalization-of-deviance&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.aopa.org&#x2F;aopa&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;07&#x2F;the-normalization-of-d...</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60</a>

Indifference that causes a business problem turns into not-indifference. Indifference that does not cause a business problem remains indifference. No one ever calls a meeting.There is a lot of evil done in the world that comes from this simple and straightforward principle. You don&#x27;t have to have an evil plan to end up doing evil.Personally I see this as just more Google incompetence. Gmail has just become bad. If you want to get all your mail you have to use something else.

You’re saying that the system’s apparent behavior is by design, but wasn’t that design put forth by employees of the company in question? These aren’t natural phenomena we’re discussing. When a puma tears apart a rabbit, it does so without any influence from the agency of man. Gmail’s “spam filtering” is no such thing: it was deliberately designed to work this way by paid professionals who knew what they were doing.

this is basically equivalent to pretending that as long as no one says &quot;this is my evil plan&quot; before doing something, it&#x27;s not evil. which even google doesn&#x27;t bother to try to do anymore.

Organizations are often best modeled by an optimizing AI system. Often there is no intent behind behavior, simple that behaviors that result in propagation of the meme are preferred by the system. Never ascribe to intent what emergent behavior and individual&#x27;s apathy can explain.

I have been thinking a bit about the anti-competitive effects of Google&#x27;s behavior in the email space. It is something I&#x27;d like to research further. One interesting part of the research would be looking at email provider market share over time (or even just a current snapshot).Does anyone have suggestions on how to go about this? My first thought was to use a password breach like Collection #1 to get a distribution of domains used, then query each domain to see which provider they are using or if they are self hosted. But I would certainly appreciate other suggestions!

Up until recently it was used for ad targeting.

Email in Gmail isn&#x27;t used for ad targeting, so this line of thinking  doesn&#x27;t follow well.

Actually, I interpreted it as exactly &quot;I have a positive reason to believe there is no malicious intent.&quot; and I presume the positive reasons are, e.g. most people not being malicious. &quot;I don&#x27;t presume there is malicious intent&quot; is significantly weaker than the original.

&gt;&gt; I&#x27;m sure there is no malicious intent behind this&gt; How can anyone be sure of this?I know this would sound crazy to an alien learning English but the phrase, &quot;I&#x27;m sure there is no malicious intent&quot; in this context actually means &quot;I don&#x27;t presume there is malicious intent&quot;.It does not mean, &quot;I have a positive reason to believe there is no malicious intent.&quot;

I find it mind-blowing that Gmail&#x27;s algorithm doesn&#x27;t lean more on users to train the spam filters...instead of top-down arbitrary keyword filters &amp; rules that constantly result in false positives.Apparently human users are trustworthy enough to train 4,000 lb self-driving cars to not kill humans via CAPTCHA. Why the hell can&#x27;t we rely more on humans to train the spam filter?It could solve literally every issue with email deliverability today. It&#x27;s clear the current algorithms are simply not sophisticated enough to do this job properly. Hell, gmail can&#x27;t even properly discern the difference between an &quot;Update&quot; and a &quot;Promotion.&quot; Every dev-related newsletter I&#x27;m subscribed to (all of which I want to receive) randomly alternates between those two tabs each week.To be honest, I highly doubt Google is using any sophisticated Machine Learning algorithms inside Gmail. It doesn&#x27;t seem like a big priority for them. The space is ripe for a competitor to come in.I would LOVE to have an email address where I was 100% confident in the spam filter, didn&#x27;t hide a large portion of my emails behind disappearing tabs, and had more control over what categories my messages go to. Any alternatives out there I should be using?

&gt;Gmail’s spam filtering is just a pretext for passing all email through a machine learning systemIt can&#x27;t be just that. Spam filtering makes email in general much more usable, and Google of course wants Gmail to be an attractive product.

&gt; I&#x27;m sure there is no malicious intent behind thisHow can anyone be sure of this? This is only one of Google’s practices that seems to follow a pervasive pattern of eroding open internet standards while presenting Google’s own proprietary implementation as somehow superior. Eventually, the open standard loses all meaning because the most popular implementation does not actually adhere to it. Meanwhile, Google reaps enormous benefits in the form of additional signals for its advertising business. How can this not be grounded in malicious intent?&gt; and that there are some very smart people working on spam prevention at Google.There are some very smart people working on advertising at Google. The rush to forget the primary nature of Google - it’s an adtech firm - is why they’ve been allowed to skate for so long. Gmail’s spam filtering is just a pretext for passing all email through a machine learning system. Sure, one possible signal emitted by that system is whether a message is spam or not. Perhaps this determination is conflated with wether the message is useful for ad targeting: after all, when viewed from Google’s own perspective certain e-mail messages contain no information which can be used for ad targeting, so they must be spam. The user’s interests are clearly secondary to this.So, back to the “smart people” working on this: at what point do we begin judging engineers for working at Google? There’s a lot of highly vitriolic criticism that emanates from Google’s workforce on a variety of subjects, but how many of them would actually pull the pin and leave their employer? I don’t have any statistics to offer, but it seems to me that we still have a ways to go before Google has become completely drained of engineering mindshare.

So Google--or any other big corporation--can take it over as well? I don&#x27;t think coming up with yet another open protocol is the solution.

I fear this will lead to the same problem: If it’s interesting enough for Google, they will offer a free service, gobble up a large number of users, at which point they can hold the new protocol hostage, add their own extensions, and everyone else must follow.

There&#x27;s nothing wrong with the basic principle of email (other than its lack of built-in security, arguably).The problem is that certain large organisations now claim to offer an email service, but don&#x27;t actually make it work properly. It might have been better for the rest of the community to block those services until they did work properly to force everyone to play by the same rules, but unfortunately we have reached a point where some of them are too big for that to be a practical solution.The obsession with fighting spam and malware means some mail services are now far too ready to accept false positives where they block legitimate mail, in order to reduce the risk of false negatives where they let illegitimate messages through. This seems strange, because often the false positive will be more damaging. In the cases where it is not, such as messages being sent with known malware attached, the receiving mail service could still deliver a short replacement message to the intended recipient instead, notifying them that something was blocked because of malware and providing essential details like the sender and subject line, so the recipient could take further action rather than miss something important.

That message protocol will not be federated due to how greed and a lust for control works on the internet in this time.

I have run a private mailserver for over 20 years, and I have the same problem.  There&#x27;s no telling what Google will let through.  I have a second account at a medium-sized email provider, basically paying them for access to the email deliverability cartel.

I have a similar problem and it sounds like some here do as well.What can we do about Google&#x27;s email monopoly?

&gt;I&#x27;ve been running a small SMTP and IMAP mail server for [...] around 15 years [...] I have SPF records and DKIM message signing setup on the domains I use. The server is hosted on commercial static IP space (with the very same IP it first went on-line) and I&#x27;ve made sure with the ISP that correct reverse DNS records are in place. [...] Being a good administrator and a well-behaved player on the network is no longer enough [...] Now every time I write a mail I wonder whether Google&#x27;s AI will let it through or not. [...] So far Google has blocked personal messages to friends and family in multiple languages, as well as business mail. I stopped guessing what text their algorithms deem suspicious.Yep, I know the author&#x27;s frustration very well. I made a previous comment[0] trying to warn others of personal email servers&#x27; outgoing email being spam-holed -- and yet some of the replies still argued I was overstating the difficulties.Everybody&#x27;s risk tolerance is different. Personally, I just don&#x27;t have the bandwidth to administer my own private email server and constantly worry if recipients are receiving my emails.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15526089" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15526089</a>

&gt; If enough expected messages don’t show up, users are going to start thinking gmail is broken.I doubt that. They will rather consider that the people (or their IT) that send them emails made a mistake. It&#x27;s Google after all.

&gt; The problem for Google is that they are not the only trusted brand consumers interact with.The solution to this is to start tarnishing this trust by word of mouth when talking to non-technical users. I take every opportunity to put Google in a bad light until they change their behaviour.

If enough expected messages don’t show up, users are going to start thinking gmail is broken. The problem for Google is that they are not the only trusted brand consumers interact with. I’ve seen a lot of stuff start ending up in spam that shouldn’t be there. If enough password resets, customer service responses, and order confirmations aren’t delivered, it looks like Google has a problem. If it doesn’t even make it to the spam box it makes Google look really bad.Google has definitely been changing things, everyone presumes it’s some rogue ML system. My company had solid Gmail delivery for almost 10 years, and at a fairly large volume. Now we can’t get it delivered any more. Very close to showing users a message not to use Gmail.

unrelated:
i was going through a pile of CDs in my archive this last week, and i noticed an earthlink email address on one of my indie electronic CDs, and i still lament that i can&#x27;t identify some of my old CDs because there&#x27;s no discernible artist&#x2F;album names on the CDs themselves, and neither I.. nor anyone I know locally.. own a CD drive.

Here&#x27;s the problem with inline filtering of SMTP transactions.1) The RFCs mandate a server to accept multiple recipients--100 minimum per RFC 5321 (inherited from RFC 2821 and RFC 821).2) A server can only accept or reject a message for all recipients.Theoretically a global rule shared across all recipients could be implemented in a way that rejects at the transaction level. But because you also have to implementing lazy, per-user filtering (or more importantly, per-user whitelisting), in practice the architectural and engineering focus is on filtering after accepting the message and closing the transaction.Without the ability to provide immediate and accurate failure responses upstream, filtering issues are left to metastasize and fester. (Because of spamming and spoofing mitigations bounces are next to worthless in terms of proper integration into the end-to-end software stack.)One of two things needs to happen with SMTP.1) RFCs drop the requirement for multiple recipients per transaction.2) An extension mechanism is added that permits per-recipient transaction responses.I think the only practical option is #1. Both cases require some amount of infrastructure patching, but for #1 it&#x27;s extremely minimal and in most cases none at all. #2 is infeasible, at least without #1 preceding it (i.e. once you can no longer rely on batch sending as part of the basic SMTP command set, you&#x27;ll have to support the extension.)Once that&#x27;s accomplished vendors who don&#x27;t implement inline filtering can be rightly criticized and shamed. As inline rejections become more prevalent, mail being effectively black-holed will become a thing of the past and we&#x27;ll finally begin to see proper back-pressure (literal and figurative) return to the e-mail network. There&#x27;ll be more pressure on large vendors like GMail to improve their systems and policies once the fog of complexity and plausible deniability lifts.

The last time a company screwed with e-mail at scale was Earthlink.Remember for a couple of years, every time you&#x27;d send a message to someone at Earthlink, you&#x27;d get an automated rely demanding that you verify yourself before the message would go through?Now I can&#x27;t remember the last time I saw an @earthlink.* e-mail address.Google has apparently learned from that and put the &quot;error&quot; in the 550 messages, where they can&#x27;t be seen by the end user, and lead to non-helpful resolutions for sysadmins.The result is that the blame for missing messages goes to the sender, not to the recipient&#x27;s email service.If Gmail at least notified the sender that there was a problem, then a pattern of responsibility could be established. But this is just another dark pattern.

There may be a workaround here: configure your own mailserver to relay outgoing messages through a service with a known good reputation. For example relaying via sparkpost or mandrill should be trivial to do. You might be able to do that under a free developer account if you don&#x27;t send a lot of email.

Same here. I love email for a variety of reasons, one of them for being an open standard and protocol.So, naturally, as many of you, I went the mail&#x2F;postfix, DKIM, SPF, etc way. And all is fine until you start receiving random hard bounces with no real debugable answer for Google.It got me deeply sad and questioning my decisions: since you can’t really ignore Gmail, email isn’t in practice “open” anymore. So I might as well sign up for Facebook, WhatsApp and the likes. It’s been years and I haven’t yet, but it’s getting harder and harder.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;0x46.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;0x46.net&#x2F;</a>

Lest anyone think Gmail is less susceptible to problems because of the sheer volume of mail they handle (so any problem gets a lot of &#x27;eyes&#x27; on it), they had an amusing and long-standing bug that meant any email containing a link to any domain name starting with &quot;0x&quot; automatically went to spam.You could literally have two long standing, legitimately used accounts send an email to each other containing a link to a URL like <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;0xANYTHINGHERE.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;0xANYTHINGHERE.com&#x2F;</a> and it would be insta-spammed. I suspect it was a hard coded rule to avoid people using &quot;long IP&quot; URLs to circumvent other filters.. except there are lots of legitimate 0x domains that aren&#x27;t long IPs.It was fixed sometime in the past year but I got a lot of use out of it in talks I&#x27;ve given about email deliverability over the years.

This is the reason I sadly don&#x27;t recommend to customers that they run their own email servers, and instead outsource it to GSuite or O365. Being on the hook when emails aren&#x27;t delivered for one or more of a dozen reasons that you can&#x27;t control is no fun at all.

yes, they are, and they&#x27;ve been really really good. haven&#x27;t seen any of the behavior you refer to. ever. now SORBS on the other hand... doesn&#x27;t really exist anymore (fortunately) but spamhaus has been great.especially when used as a filter in Postscreen.

Reminds me of Spamhaus.  Are they still around?  When I worked for an ISP we had to deal with them regularly.  They&#x27;d happily hold you hostage over a single e-mail.

Google probably stores the selectors for a domain when it processes email from that domain.

There&#x27;s no standard DKIM selector though, right? You may have used a different DKIM selector in your query to the one they have set up

Not set up to send email through google. Unless they are using gmail as an smtp relay (which they aren&#x27;t), that shouldn&#x27;t be a problem - otherwise he would be giving google authorisation to send emails on his behalf.

You may also want to add a DMARC policy. A dmarc record generator can be found at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mxtoolbox.com&#x2F;DMARCRecordGenerator.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mxtoolbox.com&#x2F;DMARCRecordGenerator.aspx</a>

Thanks for the link. I think the tool you linked specifically checks whether DKIM is set to allow Google&#x27;s servers to send mail on the behalf of your domain.These checkers for example don&#x27;t find any errors with the DNS record:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dmarcian.com&#x2F;dkim-inspector&#x2F;?domain=tablix.org&amp;selector=alpha" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dmarcian.com&#x2F;dkim-inspector&#x2F;?domain=tablix.org&amp;selec...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mxtoolbox.com&#x2F;SuperTool.aspx?action=dkim%3atablix.org%3aalpha&amp;run=toolpage" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mxtoolbox.com&#x2F;SuperTool.aspx?action=dkim%3atablix.or...</a>One thing that this second one does find is the lack of a version number in the record. I see that the RFC [1] got updated since the last time I checked and having that is now recommended instead of optional. I&#x27;ll add that. Thanks!EDIT: after adding version record, Google&#x27;s tool now shows green checkmark for DKIM as well.In any case, it&#x27;s impossible to test a DKIM setup just by looking at the DNS records. The true test is to verify the actual signature in the message. Last time I checked, the mail on the receiving end (Gmail), did have &quot;dkim=pass&quot; in the Authentication-Results headers.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;rfc6376#section-3.6.1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;rfc6376#section-3.6.1</a>

Google seems to not agree DKIM is setup properly?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;toolbox.googleapps.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;checkmx&#x2F;check?domain=tablix.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;toolbox.googleapps.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;checkmx&#x2F;check?domain=tab...</a>

Hrm, an automated appeal to automated spam-listing probably looks a lot like spam to the algorithms used to detect spammers.

Form has captcha: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;supportrequestform&#x2F;8ad563e3-288e-2a61-8122-3ba03d6b8d75" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;supportrequestform&#x2F;8ad56...</a>

At &gt;10 times I&#x27;d automate that process.

I&#x27;m trying out purelymail (basically one dude&#x27;s AWS hosting of email for $10&#x2F;yr) and I&#x27;m having the same problem with my custom domain: google stopped having issues after the first few emails I sent got marked as &quot;not spam&quot;, but microsoft, despite the purelymail guy filling out all the requisite forms, still eats all of my email, not even sending it to the spam folder of the addresses I&#x27;m sending to.

I host my own email stuff too (private stuff and for a couple of friends) and sending to microsoft domains (hotmail, outlook.com) consistently gives me the most problems. Right now it seems to be ok again but I always make sure that people using my domains are fully aware of all these problems.Edit: not long ago I used a gmail account to contact microsoft support to get them to remove me from their blacklist again (couldn&#x27;t use my normal email for obvious reasons). Ironically enough their reply got marked as spam by gmail (something in my included message parts might very well have triggered that but I had to laugh out loud at the situation).

Don&#x27;t worry, you can fix all of this by joining the ReturnPath Protection Racket™^W^W &quot;Sender Certification Program&quot; that will let you pay to guarantee your mail ends up in the Inbox at all the major players.

I&#x27;ve never gotten spam nor have my ProtonMail emails marked as spam. Lucky me

Ever tried <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;protonmail.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;protonmail.com&#x2F;</a> ? I wonder if they face the same kind of challenged?

I&#x27;m also one of those oldfarts that insists on hosting my private emails for me and a few friends. I&#x27;ve owned the ip since early 2000&#x27;s and have had zero &quot;spam&quot;&#x2F;blacklist incidents. One trend I&#x27;ve been noticing is that Microsoft&#x2F;Outlook have regularly started to block me. I have to contact their abuse which takes a day or so to get unblocked. To date, I&#x27;ve done so &gt;10 times:<pre><code> hotmail-com.olc.protection.outlook.com[104.47.1.33] said: 550 5.7.1
 Unfortunately, messages from [&lt;redacted&gt;] weren&#x27;t sent. Please contact
 your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block
 list (S3150). You can also refer your provider to
 http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mail.live.com&#x2F;mail&#x2F;troubleshooting.aspx#errors.
 [VE1EUR01FT028.eop-EUR01.prod.protection.outlook.com] (in reply to MAIL
 FROM command)
 Reporting-MTA: dns; &lt;redacted&gt;
 X-Postfix-Queue-ID: 14A41FEB66
 X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; &lt;redacted&gt;
 Arrival-Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2019 14:07:42 +0200 (CEST)</code></pre>

That’s not the issue, though. The issue is that Gmail are too zealous in blocking and wind up blocking legitimate email with no way for the sender to debug what happened. From your perspective, nothing happened because how do you prove you never got an email you never knew was sent to you?The people having problems here are non-Gmail senders sending email to Gmail recipients.

Every time I look in my spam folder, there&#x27;s dozens of legitimate emails in there, and I get this dreadful feeling that over the years, thousands of legitimate mails went over the 30-days-in-spam threshold, down the memory hole forever.

Am I the only one here experiencing that GMail does reasonably good job in filtering out the spam, while I have to visit the Spam folder approximately once a week, just to randomly correct a mail or 2 a month? (not a Google employee)

It&#x27;s just smtp relay really, nothing fancy.
I still run my own mail server but I relay outbound over to mailgun

Can you tell us a little more about your setup? I have a home email server, incoming only because of ISP restrictions, and I would love to make it into a real email server for my family and business.

I had exactly the same kind of problems when I tried to set up a new mail server.In the end I just gave up and started using mailgun as a relay.

Google Is Eating Our Mail