Gmail having issues

Re:Gmail having issues by petercooper on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @07:07PM (#25437230)

Yes, most likely! That is a common approach for 'soft bounces' in most list management systems (e.g. MailChimp).

The problem here is Gmail has been throwing out "NoSuchUser" errors which are an instant unsub in most systems because Gmail takes repeated delivery to non-existing addresses into account for deliverability purposes.

I'm extremely paranoid about email hygiene, tiny bounce rates and high delivery rates, so we aggressively unsubscribe troublesome addresses (often to the point of getting reader complaints about it) for many reasons beyond that, however.

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Re:Gmail having issues by octoberfranklin on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @08:38PM (#25437981)

> Gmail takes repeated delivery to non-existing addresses into account for deliverability purposes.

I think you mean "reputation purposes"?

If so, wow, that sucks. Their opaque rules have conditioned their counterparties to punish Google as hard as possible for a screwup.

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Re:Gmail having issues by MagnumPIG on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @12:47AM (#25439509)

> Their opaque rules have conditioned their counterparties to punish Google as hard as possible for a screwup.

Good for karma, bad for everyone though.

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Re:Gmail having issues by petercooper on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @07:39AM (#25441838)

I think you mean "reputation purposes"?

That better describes what I was trying to say, yes. Reputation then affecting deliverability.

Over 80% of our subscribers use Gmail so to say I'm paranoid about maintaining a good record with them is an understatement ;-) Gmail is a huge weak link for us.

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Re:Gmail having issues by Jap2-0 on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @07:17PM (#25437319)

Ah, thanks for the explanation.

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Re:Gmail having issues by mehrdadn on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @06:42PM (#25436985)

Logically you'd expect unsubscribe to only act after lots of bounces of this format when the address has been receiving mail fine before. It also seems reasonable not to trust such bounces for the entire domain for a while when this happens to lots of other addresses that have worked fine before. Not that I expect software currently works this way, but it does seem like a common sense thing to code in.

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Re:Gmail having issues by petercooper on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @07:10PM (#25437247)

I mean, it's possible, but you'd need to queue up a day's worth of bounces, do the analysis, and then handle the bounces asynchronously later on to do that.

Most systems operate more immediately in isolation on individual addresses than that right now, because such analysis is generally not needed (until today, of course ;-)).

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Re:Gmail having issues by mehrdadn on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @07:13PM (#25437281)

Mail agents already queue emails that bounce though; it's a matter of changing the conditions for when you retry and/or unsubscribe. I imagine you can do the analysis in real time too... just look at the bounce and see if it pertains to an email you sent to in the past, and if so, increment some rolling counter for that domain.

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Re:Gmail having issues by octoberfranklin on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @08:37PM (#25437975)

Their SMTP server being unreachable is a 4xx temporary error. The sender MUST keep trying for at least 24 hours, and 72 hours is recommended.

"Gmail going down" would not have caused this problem. Even if all their SMTP servers went offline.

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Re:Gmail having issues by organsnyder on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @09:49PM (#25438468)

Yeah, they would have been better off pulling the (metaphorical) plug—maybe block incoming traffic to port 25 or something—until they had this fixed.

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