It is also apparently unfixable. Regular people cannot inquire as to why mail is not getting through. And amazingly, even having friends at Google does me no good here. I'm told that the anti-spam team is so mysterious and opaque that they won't even talk to co-workers about this.

It's maddening. I get why Google grew up with absolutely no conception of customer service. (It's hard and expensive, and not necessary for their business model. Chicken farms don't have customer service windows for the chickens to lodge complaints.) But their apparent utter indifference to the problems they are creating for other people is maddening.

(Full disclosure: I'm an employee of Mailgun)

It is possible to send email from your own server; you need to follow onerous industry-standard practices, like using a dedicated, known IP that has a certain amount of increasing email volume, known as "IP warming". After a few months of constant interaction with an ESP, your sender score improves. Unless you're sending massive amounts of email, the cost-benefit ratio isn't in your favor to use this method.

However Yahoo are an order of magnitude worse when it comes to delivering email. If they decide you aren't their friend, they send back an error code with a URL in it to go and visit and identify yourself via a web form that is reviewed rarely by some humans. Then if you fuck that form up or if they don't like you, blackholed for 6 months and they stick their fingers in their ears. Try telling a yahoo user about this as well and it's "meh".

Email is broken unless you have a small provider or DIY and it's fucking frustrating.

I understand spam is a problem but email is perhaps the last communication identity you can own, and have interoperate with others. I have had my own domain and own email for 16 years now, and I am not going to give that up. Free email services come and go, but I own my identity.

I think the problem with DIY/small business email is that it is surprisingly difficult to set up a proper mail server. Sendmail book is about 4 inches thick, and my current setup is using 3 projects to achieve a simple mail server with SSL auth/IMAP. (Dovecot, postfix, SASL). I am a software dev, but even very good sysadmins I know do not want to have anything to do with email anymore and will often farm it out to Google.

Might want to set up greylisting, though, to curb incoming spam.

What succeeded for one client was my posting pflogsumm stats showing delivery rates and times for Yahoo vs. numerous other large mail providers, along with proof of SPF and DKIM support, to all the Yahoo C-level (and several lower) execs, indicating that they had a problem, and I'd been attempting for months to resolve it.

Apparently there's a Yahoo "concierge", and we managed to get onto the company's approved senders list shortly after.

That said: email's a pain in the ass, and I do know for a fact that that particular client was failing to scrub known dead recipients (as in: the domains no longer existed). Some fights you just concede....

Turned out all the emails from @google.com were going into my Gmail spam. I think they still do (no matter how many I've marked as not spam).

Oops.

Yup same exact thing. Just the other day I sent my wife a few links from my business email account @company to her @gmail and it ended up in her spam folder. And I have been mailing her for longer than a few months as well.

In other words google does not differentiate it appears on whether you have an ongoing relationship (email wise) with the person that you are sending an email to as if they are just looking at the mail message and nothing else.

Spam classification is a hard problem, but I don't think they've put the false-positive/false-negative tradeoff in the right place, and they really need some safety valves like offering to whitelist an address when you un-mark it as spam.

Apparently forwarding can sometimes invalidate the SPF or DKIM [1] depending on the settings involved.

[1] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/175365?hl=en

But there is a white list, if you add the sender to your contact list it is white listed.

It's horribly convoluted but it /is/ possible to do so:

http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/69442/how-to-disa...

I've been running it this way for about 18 months now after having a few important emails get gobbled up by their spam filter.

Never because my grocery store isn't a website.

Amazon can't give you a printed receipt because you are not there, physically. So they send you an email instead.

This is not that hard to understand.

(And keep this discussion in mind next time you read a HN story teaching people how cool e-mail marketing is for your startup - what it's cool at is often pissing off your users.)

Also Google took a good approach to that issue - when an e-mail has an unsubscribe link and you try to mark it as spam, you get asked if you'd like to unsubscribe instead. And yes, I sometimes do exactly that.

1) Unsubscribe should be one click, no confirmation. In the case of accidentally unsubscribing, if it's really that valuable, the person will re-subscribe, and I guarantee it's easy to subscribe because that's already optimized, for obvious reasons.

2) GMail shouldn't give you the option to choose; if you mark something as spam, it should silently attempt to unsubscribe in the background, then keep track of which services don't actually support unsubscribe, and mark those as spam. Far too many people are vindictive and lazy and will intentionally mark things as spam either because they don't want to go through the process of unsubscribing, or they forgot they subscribed, or think they've been "wronged" by getting an email they opted in to.

For the record, I too despise the oblivious email marketing stories on HN, eg the "cold emailing" C level execs whose addresses aren't publicly available. Dirty, dirty, dirty.

so... sorry? :)

If you signed up, then you opted in. Don't be lazy and mark things you signed up for as spam. I'm not understanding how people get email from Amazon that aren't customers, and how customers can't turn off everything but confirmations, which I know is possible, because I have.

I'm a customer, I consider that opt out. You don't? I signed up for amazon, not their bullshit emails. That you consider the situation opt in shows they have you trained well.

That said, this is no excuse for Google to mark their transactional emails as spam for people that clearly want to receive them. Google is just being lazy and doing a bad job. Even Yahoo gets that right, Google can do it too.

of the 64 emails I have from them 50 are spam of this nature.

http://paste.click/fOAtyL

just because i signed up for amazon.com, doesn't mean they get to spam me crap because they've buried a 2pt font unsubscribe feature that may or may not work over the course of a few weeks.

You can intentionally not fix a bug.

I don't disagree. E-mail is a mess. Still, on the whole, for any person or organization with modest technical chops, I feel the freedom and decentralization (which is a positive for the entire ecosystem) is reason alone for retaining control by self-hosting.

Decentralization is cool and all, but until we have some kind of self-contained, easy to deploy and maintain solution for e-mail servers, it's hard to me to recommend anything other than GMail to people - especially that typical small company or organization has a lifespan that's shorter than Google, so they don't get any important benefit from decentralization.

There are other companies that offer e-mail services, without the embrace, expand, and extinguish strategy that Google seems to follow these days.

I started with their new theme called "Larry" and then corrected the fonts, colors, graphics, and certain element sizing decisions.

Another large portion of my spam is from Chinese product spammers using Picasa albums and send to a friend feature. There are limited ways you can report this and despite marking almost every Picasa email I've received as spam, every single Picasa email still makes it through.

That is until you get a court summons after an invoice was sent several times and never got there because some fuckwit mail policy just blackholed it. This stuff does happen and when it does its costly.

I nearly always agree or can be convinced by the higher karma users, but the fresh users seem to be defaulting to reddit-level arguments (uneducated, immutable beliefs, hyperbole, taking things personally, no objectivity). I.e.

> just that everyone who doesn't run a mail server hasn't had to deal with this shit

"Everyone" in that sentence should not have the right to be downvoting in the first place.

Also, Reddit is cool, and there's ton of quality discussions - usually under particular subreddits. For example, I love /r/KerbalSpaceProgram for a perfect combination of being large, friendly, fun, and full of people willing to teach each other some more advanced science.

To address your point: I think current downvote gate is fine and adjusting it up won't really help much. What would help (though I don't know how to achieve that) is people realizing that when saying anything controversial, you might end up getting a bunch of downvotes immediately, but the score usually settles to a reasonable value within an hour or two. It takes time, but one just has to get used to it.

TL;DR: karma comes and goes; look at it through a low-pass filter, to filter small variations.

Huh. Maybe we should take that metaphor literally and implement it!

I find hn a really to be a really good combination of intelligent, grown up discussion with little name-calling etc.

That said, I think on hn one must be prepared to be corrected, -that's just part of being scientifically minded. As the old saying goes: "Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another."

Who cares about my stupid comments, sure, I'm an idiot- I'll agree to that. Unfortunately, I see it happen all the time. The parent of this, for example, was downvoted immediately.

Everyone in this community is prepared to be corrected- the problem is when there's no correction offered. It's a community of suppression, and it's not hard to see.

I don't think it is a big problem though only that it has been slightly increasing.

(one comment you'd see back in the days when comment scores where displayed was: "sorry for the downvote, -reading hn from a mobile device ". You don't see this comment anymore but I'm not sure if that is because it was easier to detect accidental downvotes back then or because people where more polite.)

Perhaps HN users need to be reminded to upvote things that have been unfairly downvoted? (Although I've seen plenty of examples of corrective upvotes supplied pretty quickly).

Another issue I have with your argument - I don't believe Gmail has the market share to make such a fiendish strategy viable.

And try doing business with small businesses and then tell me what market share you perceive GMail as having.

I think, right or wrong, you'd probably get a better result if the rage in your text was clearly directed at the consequences rather than the motives - if nothing else because, as you say, the motives don't actually change the consequences and it's the consequences you, I, and everybody else who likes having their own email setup has to suffer.

(to be clear, I'm not commenting on whether or not you should have been downvoted, only on my best guess as to how to get across the same information without it happening)

Another educational moment for you would be to look up the word "conspiracy" to learn what it means. I understand that you were hoping to use it as a dismissive term, but you would have been better off using a universally dismissive term like "crazy", as there are a lot of rational people that understand the factual meaning of "conspiracy" and don't interpret it in the same way you do.

It doesn't matter. The conversation at HN is toxic. I've bitched enough. I was just reaching out for commiseration.

His employees want to receive mail sent to @dnalounge.com in their Gmail inboxes. It's a non-standard configuration and brittle. You can't really expect them to support it for free.

Google offers a couple of supported ways to do it. Most prominently: pay for Google Apps. But you can also use Gmail like a regular mail client and retrieve mail using POP3.

No, he is using a normal forward for those who want to receive their mail at gmail. He is not using gmail as his backend. You should read the original article.

I run my own mail server, but most of my employees use Gmail. So I have forwarding set up: [email protected] simply forwards to [email protected]. When sending mail using their Gmail account, they set their From line to [email protected]. (Google lets you do this if you jump through some hoops to verify that you can actually receive mail at that account.)