Email deliverability has been a hassle for a long time. 15 years ago, AOL was the juggernaut that made sysadmin's lives difficult.

I do agree that Google's outsize influence in so many markets is concerning.

It's interesting that you bring up AOL, because I remember dealing with this kind of crap with them. It was annoying, but didn't feel like it was as big of a deal.

I guess the only real difference is that with AOL it was less insidious... You knew it was only for aol.com emails and that you weren't dealing with business info. Not that emails to personal addresses aren't important, but at least it wasn't suddenly SomeRandomFortune500Customer.com that sales is trying to email a proposal to right before the deadline that "is make or break for the entire company!"...

AOL had a highly competent mail administration outfit, at least compared to other big shops at the time. It could be annoying to deal with them at times, but they had fair, mostly sane processes and I could always get in touch with a technical person with authority there. (They may still be this good, I just haven't had reason to deal with them for quite a while.)

Google - well, I haven't had to, but can get in touch with a competent person there, but not officially. Which is not the case with ATT, with whom I have had a mail issue for over a decade. At this point I'm thinking either their postmaster died in his closet office back in about 2006 and nobody noticed, or they simply don't give a damn.

Didn’t AT&T outsource all their email to Yahoo! a decade or so ago?

Not sure I agree about being able to reach a tech person at Google, even informally. Bitching on Twitter can get some results, but that’s hardly the way to operate a business...

Didn't mean to imply that Google's stance is a good thing.

It absolutely should not be the case that you need a pal in the right department to get something done, but that seems to be where we are - our Politburos are just privatized.

Edit - My mail issue specifically is with WorldNet. I believe that's run by an ATT spinoff call "Maillennium", but maybe that changed. I don't especially care from a practical perspective; there is exactly one person whom this affects and we worked around it forever ago. I just see it as a barometer of ATT's interest in being a competent network operator.

> It's interesting that you bring up AOL, because I remember dealing with this kind of crap with them. It was annoying, but didn't feel like it was as big of a deal.

I do too, because there was an actual useful URL that had contact info in the bounces and SMTP errors. IIRC, I actually managed to get a human being on the phone and got this sorted right quick!

You might have grounds for a lawsuit if it broke your company.

>It was annoying, but didn't feel like it was as big of a deal.

Perhaps because email itself wasn't as big of deal back then? Phone calls and snail mail were used with a lot more regularity back then.

Heh. I’ll be honest, that sounds a lot like a millennial projecting onto all the old people in this thread.

Sure there’s an element of truth to it, but email was insanely popular before the iPhone too...

He he, this. E-mail rised in the 90s and was hugely popular very soon, because it brought real benefits. I was under impression that in today's world the number of emails is going down (on account of social networks and whatnot).

>like a millennial projecting

Well, I am almost 40, so not really a millennial at all, but a gen x'er. And I remember being in college and going days, maybe weeks without checking email. I also remember my university giving me an a .edu address, which I was technically supposed to use (supposedly there was important information sent to it from professors), but never logged into once.

Break up Google/Alphabet. Way past time.

Would be a much more important case if the EU commission that cared about actual freedom instead of competitors.

The bigger problem is how to define what Google is and split it. Many of their platforms post losses like youtube, because they can afford to spend their ad money to prop it up. If you split away youtube, youtube would likely fold. Similar thing with android, Google props up android so they have an ecosystem they can get data from to use for ads. If android was split off, it would have no income stream and likely fold.

> If you split away youtube, youtube would likely fold.

I see no problem with this.

If you had to pay anything to distribute your video, the quality would soar relative to what we have now.

So we'd lose a neo-Nazi enrichment factory? Not seeing the problem.

How would this fix delivery for gmail? Gmail will be the same monolith it is today.

It wouldn't necessarily, but Google doesn't really provide help to customers who pay for services with their attention and data, largely because they have a substantial enough market position that they don't have to worry about losing their customer base.

Breaking them up would be a remedy to the general attitude that big, concentrated companies often develop toward the average consumer.

My comment didn't deserve net +19 upvotes.

It didn't deserver +24 either.

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/Outlook.

Are you spending money on Adwords or receiving money from AdSense? I have heard many horror stories from Adsense but nothing from Adwords.

Sorry, didn't meant to be confusing. Specifically "Google Ads" which is how they they've rebranded AdWords, I believe. And so yes, spending money.

I would disagree, the 'AdWords Expert' I had a pleasure of speaking with sounded like someone who started there a week ago

Interesting. I've called 3 times, to give you a sense of my sample. They seem to have an interesting program going there. It's been at least fun to play with and run experiments.

I've had mixed-to-excellent Google support on their Cloud and Fi products, as well as my various GSuite accounts.

IMO what "you can tell" is that they have good support where you're actually a paying customer, and no support for their free products.

> IMO what "you can tell" is that they have good support where you're actually a paying customer, and no support for their free products.

I've heard a few examples here of people having trouble getting support with both GSuite and GCloud.

Sometimes I've got support from GCloud. Even once got two blokes onsite because they'd messed up something badly, but at that time I was working on a project that was seemed to be big time bragging rights for anyone involved on both our side and their side.

Other times our requests would be handled by someone who was more or less clueless && who clearly didn't care at all IMO (this was also the same project.)

For smaller customers it seems to be hopeless from what I read here: - Someone getting their account (GSuite or GCloud) closed for no good reason and with no way to get it back seems to be a thing that happens from time to time.