
Gmail marking email from me as spam - cnst
https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08806.html
======
guizb
The email landscape is substantially more complex now than it was three
decades ago. The poster seems to be frustrated that he is mostly getting
technical explanations to his rather emotionally fueled question. He is
literally phishing for an argument on the morals of a big company deciding he
is a potential spammer without absolute proof. He made it clear that his
opinion is that there should be a system in place at Google that he can
petition for his reputation, and that emails that look like spam should say
'potentially spam' rather than send it to a spam folder. All this while
sending emails from an origin that is very well known for spammers and whose
actions depict a typical bot account warming up. (Poster claims to on occasion
initiate personal conversations with people who have their emails publicly
listed, such as an author from a news site he might disagree with). There is
just no reliable system today that allows for someone to host their email
servers in a spam haven, not use relays, act like a spammer, and expect not to
get your emails sent to spam folders.

It's insulting to the folks that are pouring their time replying to what they
think is a user in need of technical assistance, only to eventually stop
replying when it becomes obvious that he only replies with questions of
morality and treats most answers as if they were platitudes specifically
attempting to dismiss his efforts to communicate.

~~~
Twisell
I don't think OP stop replying, he seems pretty active on another thread of
the same mailing list concerning another big player (MSFT) filtering out some
messages for some reasons. [https://www.mail-
archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg09066.html](https://www.mail-
archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg09066.html)

As a hobbit* , I'm actually pretty happy this whole conversation is starting
to gain more traction.

My domain is always green on every test I could run (mailtester.com & all) yet
some of my mails go to the junk without any warning. At least warn postmaster
when you decide to block a domain because of bad neighbour/hosting!

* This specific reply of the chain is a must read and is where learned that I'm actually a mail hobbit. [https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08958.html](https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08958.html)

~~~
_emacsomancer_
Even after reading that, I'm not sure what an email hobbit is. Someone who
just wants to live in a cozy hole in the ground with a few nice email
amenities?

~~~
tytso
It was an extended metaphor categorizing an ISP's (or a cloud provider)
customers into multiple buckets: Kobolds, Lizardmen, Hobbits, and Princesses.

Princeses were the customres which sometimes required a lot of customer
support, but paid really well because they purchased a lot of services/VM's.
Hobbits were customers who basically minded their own business, and didn't guy
a lot of stuff, but didn't cause any problems.

Lizardmen were customers which had possibly clueless marketing departments
that would occasionally send e-mail marketing campaigns which crossed the
line, but which also sent plenty of legitimate e-mails, and which were mostly
trainable after the ISP/cloud provider smacked them on the nose with a rolled-
up newspaper --- and Kobolds were spamvertising companies that did nothing but
send spam, and were constantly switching ip addresses / VM's, and knew d*mn
well that they were doing something evil, and were not trainable.

The problem is that if the ISP / cloud provider has the vast majority of their
customers being Kobolds and Lizardmen, it becomes economically hard to just
cut off the bad actors, because the vast majority of their customer base are
bad actors. If the provider originally had a good mix of all of these customer
mixes, but wasn't proactively cutting off the Kobolds and educating the
Lizardmen, then their network block would start getting a bad reputation, and
all of the major e-mail providers (not just GMail) would start blacklisting
the netblock, or at the very least, treating any e-mail sent from that network
block as a strong SPAM signal, and this would cause the other customer types
to find other providers.

So if you happen to be a customer of such a network/cloud provider, you could
try complaining to the provider, but they are really in between a rock and a
hard place, because if you're the 1 good hobbit and all of the otheer
customers for that provider are Kobolds and Lizardmen, what is the provider
supposed to do? You're probably better off switching to a better provider.
Unfortunately, the better provider may also cost more, but you get what you
pay for.

------
irjustin
I would argue in this narrow case - I would not point to nefarious
undercurrents.

Google's ML mail spam models are that way because there's too many bad actors.
Email, even in 2019, still extremely valuable.

If you can get into people's email inbox, there's still quite high conversion
rate - better than clicks/videos on a pure percentage basis. Even the author
wants to reach out to people in a cold fashion.

As a gmail user, I 100% appreciate keeping my inbox extremely clean. Google's
spam filter is a welcome addition.

As a business owner, I'm continuously having to do things so I don't end up in
spam. Less images, specific wording and the list goes on.

I can't have it both ways. I would not be on Gmail if it was like yahoo. My
goodness... my parent's inbox, on yahoo, makes me anxious.

~~~
the_pwner224
> Google's ML mail spam models are that way because there's too many bad
> actors. Email, even in 2019, still extremely valuable.

Google's spam models freaking suck donkey dick. I use Fastmail but my
university uses Google for email. A service we use (Piazza, class Q&A) sends
notifications via email. Over the years I have gotten probably about 1k email
notifications from them, and replied to a few of them too. Google has recently
started marking about 5% of their notifications as spam. 95% of the
notifications come through; 5% get rejected. There's no discernible logic to
this.

There are organizations and people within the university which have me on
their mailing lists; with them too 90% of the emails get through but 5% get
randomly marked as spam. And they're perfectly normal emails that Google just
decides to move to spam. Even with people that I have had email conversations
with, it just spams random stuff.

Every couple of months I check my Fastmail spam folder just for the lolz of
seeing what's in there. With Google I _have_ to check spam every day or I'll
miss important stuff.

There are tons of people who have posted very similar experiences on HN. On
this thread I just saw another person comment that Google's own emails go to
spam - I've observed this too on my personal Gmail account which I
occasionally check.

The spam filters have a tough job, but other companies are succeeding at
keeping all the spam out without a gigantic false positive rate. Google's
filter is hilariously bad.

~~~
rapind
I'm not defending gmail, but I will say that some users simply suck
(unintentionally). I bet some of your peers are just hitting the spam button
instead of simply deleting the email, generating a bad reputation for the
sender.

I've seen this with my SaaS. We ONLY send transactional emails like purchase
receipts and login links (using postmark). We're very intentional about not
sending anything remotely resembling marketing or spam, and sending as little
as possible. Yet I still get the occasional user who will flag their purchase
receipt as spam when all they really mean to do is delete it. They don't get
the difference and don't realize that it matters which button they click.

I've noticed that in the past year or so gmail has made hitting the spam
button more explicit and now have a confirmation message. Obviously they did
this because some people were simply mashing that spam button instead of the
delete or archive button.

I don't even blame the users. Most don't know the impact it has. But bad
actors sending tons of spam have trained them to be cynical of any generic
form email.

~~~
vbezhenar
May be you should not send purchase receipt by default? I don't know why
everyone does that as I don't care about it at all. If it's not required by
law, add button to your UI which will mail receipt (or better just let user
download it) and that's about it. While I'm not marking those receipts as
spam, I'm sure that some users would do that as it's unwanted mail for them.

~~~
rapind
We actually have users contact our help desk asking for the receipt not
realizing it's already in their inbox or spam folder.

I've considered adding an opt-out checkbox during checkout but I honestly
doubt it would ever be unchecked and if it was opt-in we'd have users
contacting support asking for it because they didn't realize they had to check
the box. Either way it's one more toggle on the UI which I'm not a fan of
unless absolutely necessary.

I'm curious if you've run a business and experimented with not sending
receipts, and if so how it played out?

------
LeonM
I run an email security/monitoring business [0], and we hear this issue with
Gmail a lot, in fact: we have been bitten by it as well during the early days.

The problem at hand is that it is really hard to debug situations like this.
Google won't tell you why a particular email is blocked, because that
information will be immediately exploited by spammers.

We build our software suite because we found that mistakes in email
configuration are easy to make and really hard to identify.

I did a quick scan of rafa.eu.org and found the following:

\- SPF is setup [1] with a neutral 'all' mechanism, which basically disables
SPF for this domain. Hence, DMARC will set SPF as 'pass' even though SPF did
nothing here to help the spam algorithm to assess the sender.

\- A DMARC record exists and has a valid syntax [2], but the proposition (p
value) is set to 'none', which basically disables DMARC altogether. It will
enable reporting, but nothing more than that.

\- I don't know you DKIM selector, so I can't assess that, but make sure the
DKIM signature address is aligned (using the same domain name).

\- The TLS configuration of your email server uses a self-signed certificate
and is very much outdated (it offers SSLv3 and RC4 ciphers). I used
testlssh.sh [3] to check this.

So yes, you technically did setup TLS, SPF and DMARC, but in all 3 you have
configuration errors. Running a mail server in 2019 requires a bit more work
and maintenance than it used to be 10 years ago, but the reason is spammers,
not Google. Remember: it is in Google's best interest to have as few false
positives, as it ultimately benefits the users. It's just really frustrating
that it is hard to figure out why Google is marking your email as spam.

[0] [https://www.mailhardener.com](https://www.mailhardener.com)

[1] [https://www.mailhardener.com/tools/spf-
validator?domain=rafa...](https://www.mailhardener.com/tools/spf-
validator?domain=rafa.eu.org)

[2] [https://www.mailhardener.com/tools/dmarc-
validator?domain=ra...](https://www.mailhardener.com/tools/dmarc-
validator?domain=rafa.eu.org)

[3] [https://testssl.sh/](https://testssl.sh/)

~~~
baobabKoodaa
No, it's incorrect to say that running an email server requires just "a bit
more work". Google basically no longer allows low volume servers to send mail.

I wrote more about this here:

[https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-
ser...](https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-server/)

~~~
Avamander
My low volume server can send mail very nicely. You can't however do your job
half-assed, lack of strong SPF/TLS/DKIM isn't okay from both Google's and
anti-spam perspective.

~~~
baobabKoodaa
If you would have actually read the link in the post you're replying to, you
would know that Gmail is not accepting mail from me despite that I've spent a
huge amount of time in verifying that everything is configured correctly.

Also: please stop spreading unsubstantiated claims about your magical server
magically sending mail past Gmail's spam filters. There's virtually no chance
of that being true, and if it somehow was true, extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence.

~~~
ViViDboarder
I run a personal mail server for just myself and I’ve been getting full
delivery to Gmail so far as well. Same with Outlook.

I’m waiting for the day they try to shut me down.

~~~
baobabKoodaa
Can you show any evidence for these claims?

------
sdan
Google's making us play by their rules:

1\. Our ML models see that your emails spam? You're spam.

2\. You're using Tor or a VPN? Here's 10 reCaptcha's.

3\. Don't use Google Webmaster or use AMPs? Good luck finding your page on the
1st page.

4\. Youtube video includes education hacking tutorials? Demonetized.

Obviously some alternatives are moving to Fastmail and using Duck Duck Go, but
we need Google to stop this "my way or you don't exist" attitude before they
become a huge conglomerate which controls major aspects of many people's lives
(which they arguably already do) and leaves everyone (like small companies
that don't use Google or just regular people who don't want a Google account)
separated from the world they're forming.

~~~
LeoPanthera
"Moving to Fastmail" is such a popular alternative that if they ever get to
any kind of reasonable size we'll be in the same position all over again.

That should not be the suggestion. Many smaller providers encourages the
competition necessary for an open network, not a small number of huge
providers.

~~~
rosybox
I've been using Fastmail for about 5 or 6 years now. My only problem is the
1GB mailbox size limit I have. Maybe I should upgrade. Otherwise I love it.
Their webmail client is phenomenal and works with mobile and desktop. I don't
like their Android app but I haven't tried it in a year. Their web client is
so good I don't need an app for them.

I do see mail going to spam though. It's never bugged me that much.

~~~
dewey
You can also just use the native imap client provided by your operating
system. The beauty of using a provider and service that adheres to open email
standards.

------
cnst
I'm actually having a similar problem recently, although my messages are
declined at the SMTP stage, "due to the very low reputation of the sending
domain", which I attribute to the output of certain cron jobs being sent
towards my own Gmail account — it seems like my whole primary domain name has
subsequently been blacklisted a few weeks ago:

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21340460](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21340460)

* [https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-October/10381...](https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-October/103817.html)

It also seems that more and more of the mailing list posts end up in the Spam
folder, too. For example, I'm subscribed to the nginx list, and recently found
that all the mails from one of the core developers are now in the Spam folder
in Gmail.

Gmail is becoming less and less useful as days go by. If it cannot be used for
the mailing lists anymore, and inbound forwarding into the account is so
unreliable as well, leaves fewer and fewer reasons to continue using it,
especially as it's no longer free as they've stopped their infinite storage
growth, so, I now need to pay 1,99 USD/mo because I bought into their infinite
storage claims back in the day, and subscribed to way too many mailing lists
to fit in 15GB of space.

~~~
osamagirl69
I have a hotmail throwaway account (it has since been migrated to outlook with
the microsoft buyout) and its spam filter is completely backward. There is
currently 373 e-mails in my inbox (100% spam, expected since it is a
throwaway...) and 4 e-mails in my spam folder--100% of them the account
registration/confirmation e-mails that I was wanted.

I have migrated to fastmail for all of my personal e-mail, which I have been
pretty happy with. So far I haven't caught any legit email which has been
categorized as spam and negligible spam that has made it through into my inbox
(mailing lists notwithstanding--I sort them using automation rules). My one
complaint is that there is no way to turn off their "thou shall not receive
executable attachments" filter so I still need people to play the "set windows
to show the file extension, change it to .txt, and then attach it" game when
people want to send compiled code via e-mail.

In any case, it is certainly a much better situation than the gmail spam
filter I used while in school, which had about a 10% chance of marking outside
messages as spam--in fact it even started marking e-mails sent by my professor
(via the university gmail) as spam...

~~~
LeoPanthera
> it has since been migrated to outlook with the microsoft buyout

Aside: Microsoft bought Hotmail in 1997! How old is that account?!

~~~
osamagirl69
Honestly not sure, but certainly sometime in the 20th century. It was my main
e-mail back then, I migrated to Yahoo! shortly after the Microsoft buyout and
kept the HoTMaiL as a throwaway. When Google announced Gmail and the 1GB (with
projection to infinite) storage I switched to them as soon as I got an invite,
but when they changed their slogan from "Don't be evil" to "Do the right
thing" with the Alphabet restructure I ditched it and moved to my own domain
with Fastmail. If Fastmail starts to show signs of evil it will be as easy as
updating my domain records to point toward
OurMailIsActuallyGoodIPromiseThisTime.com and click through the certificate
warnings on my mail clients.

------
djsumdog
I thought this had been getting better. At least more e-mail from my personal
server has been getting through to its destinations. I've written about this
too a few years back:

[https://battlepenguin.com/tech/how-google-and-microsoft-
made...](https://battlepenguin.com/tech/how-google-and-microsoft-made-email-
unreliable/)

..and I reference the Hostile E-mail Landscape blog post by Ribton (really
good btw).. which is gone now and redirects to some bullshit software site
(there are archives of it).

I've got DKIM, SPF, DMARC, reverse DNS for IPv4 and v6 and I still don't have
the volume to show up in the postmaster tools Google has.

My own e-mail server occasionally has spam come through. I really don't care.
I sometimes mark it to be learned, but honestly I'd rather have some SPAM get
through than get HAM marked and placed in the big fucking SPAM bucket I never
check.

But for big providers and dangers like ransomware, this isn't an option. So we
have shitty unreliable e-mail (even on gmail back in 2012; I had delivery
issues to other people on gmail).

Where does the blame go? The 1% of people who give scammers money, get
ransomware infections and click on everything? Over aggressive spam filters?
The lack of real e-mail server diversity? Who the fuck knows anymore.

~~~
skrause
> _but honestly I 'd rather have some SPAM get through than get HAM marked and
> placed in the big fucking SPAM bucket I never check._

This is why I like that my email provider
([https://mailbox.org/en/](https://mailbox.org/en/)) simply rejects all
messages detected as spam: False positives don't get lost in a spam folder I
never check, instead the sender gets a mail delivery failure notice by their
own mail server and at least get a notification that they couldn't reach me.

~~~
em-bee
but what if email is the only way to reach you?

so i got a notification that you didn't get the email. fine. i still have no
way to talk to you unless i sign up to some other email service and try it
again.

depending on the reason to email you, i may not care enough. (maybe i wanted
to buy your service)

if a customer emails me and i don't respond because i didn't get the email, i
have a problem, not the customer.

the better solution would be both. respond with a delivery notice, AND deliver
the email to my spam folder.

~~~
luckylion
> but what if email is the only way to reach you?

I have no idea if it actually is, but it _might_ be a legal issue too in some
jurisdictions. German law for example requires commercial sites to have an
option for quick and electronic communication - Email is generally a valid
choice. If your mail server rejects incoming mail (be it because it's overly
sensitive, offline, or you never bothered setting it up etc), that could very
well be considered as non-compliant.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
Wouldn’t a simple contact form on a website meet the definition of quick and
electronic communication?

~~~
luckylion
Yes, but that has it's own challenges with spam protection, privacy laws,
users not spelling their email correctly etc, and you still need an email
address to receive those messages (or check for new form entries regularly),
so an email address is often used as a shortcut.

------
chias
I share the sentiment and the frustration.

That said, if you read far down enough in the thread, it's pretty clear that
the OP has very, very unrealistic expectations about others' obligations to
him, and very incorrect notions about how statistics work. The argument
eventually turns to "well google has a lot of processing power at its disposal
so I don't see why it can't use this in order to turn incomplete data into
more complete data" and that's when I checked out :\

Edit: also this Brandon Long has the patience of a saint.

------
LeoPanthera
The attitude of the replies he gets lower down in the thread is shocking. I
hope whatever mailing list that is doesn't have any kind of good reputation,
because it seems like the consensus opinion there is shockingly anti-
cooperative, anti-internet, "me before the network", even going as far to say
"if Google thinks you're a spammer then you probably are".

How things have changed.

~~~
viraptor
That's a meeting of technical and moral view. I'd love for corps to have no
impact on people, for distributed knowledge and resources, for everyone being
in control of their data, and general socialist direction.

But the technical answer to "why is my email landing in spam" is still "follow
best practices, build up reputation, and you'll be fine... unless Google
decides otherwise, which they can". Posting about how unfair that is is not
going to change anything.

~~~
kruczek
> Posting about how unfair that is is not going to change anything.

It won't change anything, unless enough people complain. And even just
recognizing that things are not right is the first step required to make a
change. Of course, I won't hold my breath waiting for Google to change their
ways, but I think it is in fact important to make a clear note their is not
the right way. As the guy writes:

"Maybe it is just so, that big companies ignore small external senders who are
sending mail to them, simply because they can, and we can't do anything about
this (however, it's always worth trying to check whether we really can't - and
that's what I'm doing by posting my issue on this list). But even if we can't
do anything about this, we should not pretend that everything is OK, they are
correct, and it's the sender's fault. No, on the contrary: we should state it
explicitly and clearly that this behaviour is not OK. Maybe we have to live
with it; but it doesn't make it less bad."

------
huhtenberg
Might be a good time to mention a new development with Yahoo Mail. They now
appear to use a form of shadow ban.

They will accept an email, with all outward symptoms being normal, but it will
not appear _anywhere_ in the user's mailbox. Not even in the Spam folder.

This started few months ago when we were sending out our (rather infrequent)
newsletter. 5th or so message to ...@yahoo.com address failed with

    
    
        421 4.7.0 [TSS04] Messages from xx.xx.xx.xx temporarily
              deferred due to user complaints - 4.16.55.1; see
              https://help.yahoo.com/kb/postmaster/SLN3434.html 
              (in reply to MAIL FROM command)
    

That's with just a couple of seconds in. They kept replying with 421 for a
while, but later switched to just dropping connections. Then, in the course of
the next few days, they would accept 1-2 emails and then go back to denying
them again.

As I mentioned above, the "best" part is that none of these emails would
actually make it into recipient's mailboxes. They disappear.

Better yet, all subsequent (non-bulk) emails have the same fate as do
_replies_ to emails from Ymail users. This last bit is what makes this look
like a shadow ban.

All attempts to contact Yahoo went unanswered, including those made through
Gmail. Ditto for whitelisting requests through their web form.

If anyone has any ideas what the hell's going on, I'd be curious to hear them.

~~~
driverdan
I don't think this is new. Many email providers will throttle / blackhole you
if they decide you're sending too fast or see too many bounces.

Slow down your send rate, make sure your server is configured correctly, and
prune your lists.

~~~
huhtenberg
"Many providers" \- any concrete examples? For an SPF/DKIM'd server that's
been at the same IP for nearly a decade and had not a single spamming
incident.

PS. The list is immaculately maintained, the server is configured as properly
as it gets and very conservatively rate-throttled. There's nothing obvious.

~~~
baobabKoodaa
Gmail also occasionally blackholes mail.

------
com2kid
Gmail's ML models categorize plenty of Google's own emails as spam.

I honestly don't think they are nefarious, just overly insistent.

I remember email before Gmail's spam filters. Everyday was a task of deleting
spam first then responding to emails.

~~~
nindalf
This is the consequence of the spam filters doing a good job. I too remember
when consumers would clamour for better spam detections and different
companies would hawk products that purported to do so.

But now that spam detection mostly works well for most people, it’s a
forgotten issue. Now we have people on this thread questioning Google’s
authority to filter spam because from their PoV, Google isn’t adding much
value to begin with.

~~~
Crinus
The problem is that Google errs too much on the it-is-spam side. Having to
delete a few spam mails isn't a big issue if the alternative is losing
legitimate mails because of overzealous filters.

~~~
Draiken
That may be true for us, tech savvy users.

Imagine your grandma getting phishing emails from banks. If only 1% goes
through, because Google is a bit more lenient on the detection, I can see the
phishing success rate going through the roof.

It's a very hard problem to solve.

------
Santosh83
Sandstorm should have really caught on. We need to make self hosting drop dead
simple so that even non-technical people can do it. The power of these mega-
tech companies can only be whittled down if we take collective, well thought
out action. And it is not just about tackling power imbalances. Owning your
own data is a fundamental aspect of our digital lives which ought to have
become simple and natural, given Moore's Law and the phenomenal device
capabilities in recent years, yet somehow we are going the other way. Even as
our devices become ever more capable (hardware wise), the software is moving
to ever more to the Cloud and we're being locked out of the full capacities of
our devices except in the narrow realm of media consumption.

~~~
Gravityloss
Since people specialize, we have organized societies and legal systems so that
people can use services with reasonable trust.

With new technology, the laws of course lag. You see a wild west, then
monopolies etc before it settles.

------
jen_h
Gonna second whoever said: Use DKIM.

I actually check Spam daily now, after finding support emails whose logs got
snagged in the dragnet & personal stuff — even email from my _Dad_ got shunted
to Spam.

I still tip the hat, though, to Google, whose algorithms are wise enough to
assiduously stow both the “jump on a call” and “donate to my campaign” emails
to spam.

~~~
vidarh
The _vast majority_ of messages in my spam folder are not spam on Gmail at the
moment. Most of them are from providers I've semi-regularly tried to get it to
recognize as not spam for months or years. Of course Gmail also outright
rejects a lot of stuff at the SMTP stage, so their filters are better than
they look, but the amount of misclassification is extremely frustrating.

~~~
jen_h
I have this issue with OSSEC messages (automated messages from an Open Source
IDS). Same thing, too, have been marking them as “not spam” for years. I think
it’s because I don’t always review them...:/ But just because you don’t always
open a message class doesn’t mean it’s spam, Google!

~~~
vidarh
At one place we even had them start bulk-rejecting messages for our Google
Apps domain from a whitelisted source.

The entire point of the whitelisting was to allow our internal mail server to
forward transactional messages to _addresses on our own domain_ , so it was
not even that it was ever reported as spam by anyone, or ever hitting external
addresses where I'd understand if Google was more trigger happy.

It was ridiculous realising that they basically had no way for even paying
customers to tell them that "that e-mail server we told you is ours and we
always want to receive _all_ e-mail from no matter how spammy you think it is,
using the mechanism you say it there to do exactly that, well, we _really mean
it_ ". Instead it'd randomly just stop working. [this is a few years ago; who
knows, maybe they've fixed it]

------
dajonker
Email is not the same it has been for years/decades. These days you need to
use all the security tools available, most notably TLS and DKIM, set a strict
DMARC policy, and don't do anything unexpected such as sending lots of emails
out of the blue.

Email is all about reputation: it can take a lot of effort to build trust, but
just one bad move and it's all gone.

~~~
luckylion
> Email is all about reputation: it can take a lot of effort to build trust,
> but just one bad move and it's all gone.

Is it though? That may well be true for small individuals, but the Spam I get
these days comes via the large mail providers, Amazon SES, sendgrid etc, and
nobody in their right mind is going to block them. "Too big to block" is a
thing now, "too big to have to care about abuse reports" is too.

~~~
dajonker
Yes, the big mail providers are an issue. But it's also an issue the other way
around. We use Postmark at my place of work and unfortunately, that doesn't
prevent all of our mail from being marked as spam. Some mail gets blocked
because it comes from the same IP address as some spam mail. I know that
Postmark puts effort in preventing spammers to use their service but Amazon
probably doesn't care a lot about people misusing SES.

~~~
luckylion
Wouldn't that imply that they have a lot of spammers on their network? As far
as I understand, the value proposition is both "you don't need to worry about
email" and "we have so many customers (sending legitimate emails that are very
similar in content) and so little spam, we have great reputation and you're
inheriting that reputation".

If that doesn't work out, is their reputation not good enough? Is the
receiving server too strict? Are those blocks occurring on major providers or
for individual servers where an annoyed person might just blacklist an IP if
they get spam from them more than once?

~~~
bcrosby95
Note that "a lot of spammers" isn't really a lot in laymen terms. It varies by
provider, but last I worked on this if anywhere from 2-5% of all emails you
send are clicked as spam the provider will start blocking you.

We got blocked once because we got a single spam click: the ISP said they have
a zero tolerance policy. We had years of sending hundreds of email per week
without a spam click.

------
unityByFreedom
OP already received a decent reply,

> A quick look at Talos Intelligence reports a 1600% increase in email from
> your domain over the last day; email reputation os 'neutral' at this time.
> Not good, not bad, but neutral.

> Also you're on OVH, about which a quick look through the list's archives
> will possibly prove instructive. It's reasonably likely (as likely as not)
> that you're running on an IP in a neighbourhood with some poor neighbours.

> As Mathieu pointed out in his second email, building a good reputation takes
> time. Losing a good reputation is a matter of rather less time and can be
> influenced by factors outside of your control.

The rest of that reply chain is the usual debate:

OP. My domain's emails are marked as spam by Gmail

REPLY. Their system, their rules

OP. I don't accept that

Repeat ad nauseam.

~~~
LeoPanthera
Ah yes. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

A "1600%" increase in email could be explained by 1 email yesterday, and 16
emails today.

Which is in fact what he claims lower down in the thread.

~~~
unityByFreedom
The final exchange between OP and someone who works in detecting spam:

[https://www.mail-
archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg09020.html](https://www.mail-
archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg09020.html)

This is where HN discussion should pick up, not at the beginning where we need
to rehash everything.

------
Twisell
This finally get me to the point of understanding the "bad neighbor" signal
that probably get my personal email (and some of my jobs) rejected from Gmail.

Reading the thread was very instructive, but the most irritating point is that
this rejection is mostly silent even if you send only 20 mail a week from your
email address and all DKIM & all are in place. Lots of pedantic comment in
this thread however, it seems that nasty provider are well known by experts,
but for the love of internet, please spread your mighty feedback to small-folk
so that we can act accordingly.

Gonna open a ticket at my provider OVH (now I know).

~~~
tobias3
Ok, so the way OVH can solve the problem is the same way e.g. Amazon SES
solves the problem.

1\. They block all outgoing mail (outgoing 25, 465 and 587) and only open it
up once you have submitted a ticket where you decribe for what purpose and how
often you want to send mail (if you start off wanting to send a million mails
per week they won't open outgoing mail at all). Manually review of those
tickets is required so that bad actors can't get through. Difficulty of
getting through the review needs to be adjusted upwards till it is too much
work for bad actors (and they switch to another provider).

2\. Monitor bounce-backs and have a spam reporting form for OVH IP ranges.
Start blocking outgoing mail pretty soon if a small number of those arrive. Of
course this is a cut-throat business ("email marketing"/spam), so competitors
may submit false spam reports...

3\. Therefore, for (2) you'll have to keep some records of the mail sent, i.e.
you'll require mail to be send via relay... The review and the mail relay
costs something, so you make it a monthly/per mail cost. Voilà, you have
Amazon SES.

Currently they probably block individual instances if they get a lot of
complaints about one sending a lot of spam. They can't distinguish legitimate
mail from spam because it is all SSL encrypted.

~~~
Twisell
Until now I trusted them so I use their own email servers. They are perfectly
aware of my usage since while sending they even implement a trick so that one
can't send bulk email from their SMPTP.

And that's why I now fear they are utterly incompetent...

------
teekert
I feel like there is no way to do this. I was once very happy when I finally
got my own basement email server to work (I tried it off and on for years
before often giving up), running on Arch. For some time I was the happiest
person in the world, I could send emails of >100 mb to my wife, have unlimited
storage, unlimited aliases (which can even go to multiple people). I could
email my server and make it do things. I was using TLS (whereas me.com and
hotmail.com at the time were not!), I was using the internet the way it was
intended!

But then Outlook.com stopped accepting my emails, they were not even in any
spam folders. Several emails later I got a response from someone at MS: We
don't know how the filters work, they are black boxes to us. Sorry, try to
write emails that don't look like spam...

Soon after I gave up on my server. Maybe you can use a third party (paid) smtp
forwarding service?

------
al2o3cr

        I repeated this for three different accounts
    

Registering multiple Gmail accounts from the same machine in close succession
almost certainly isn't helping you _not_ look like a malicious user.

------
pwinnski
"It is always better to let the possible spam go through than to filter out
something that is not spam."

Spoken like an email sender, not an email receiver.

I'm _deeply_ sympathetic with the sender, and not inclined to defend Google
here, but I'm also aware that Google is a very large target with a lot of bad
actors specifically targeting them, and I just checked my spam folder in
gmail: wow!

The problem here is spammers, and a communication system that assumes good
faith on the part of senders. Gmail is choosing one way of trying to
counteract that problem which is causing problems for people in certain IP
blocks, and that sucks. But the problem is still spammers, not Google.

------
odysseus
This guy has an odd (seemingly nonsensical) quote in his email signature.

To a machine learning algorithm, it might look kind of like the random
nonsense some spammers put in spam to corrupt Bayesian filters. He might want
to try temporarily taking out that signature if he’s using that as part of his
emails.

~~~
agravier
He tests this particular hypothesis here: [https://www.mail-
archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08825.html](https://www.mail-
archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08825.html)

~~~
petre
He could have ruined his reputation with that signature?

------
bnegreve
I also have my own mail server, and I have the same problem.

I'm guessing this is machine learning algorithms confusing correlation with
causation once again. Being a small private mail server is strongly correlated
with being a spammer. So even if you are not relying any spam, you certainly
look like someone that would. And even if you have not done it yet, you will
probably in the near future, so they might as well treat you as a spammer
right away to avoid potential problems. (analogy with racism intended).

------
S-E-P
Later down the thread it shows that OVH Hosting's reputation is probably the
reason why it's marked as spam.

[https://talosintelligence.com/reputation_center/lookup?searc...](https://talosintelligence.com/reputation_center/lookup?search=OVH%20Hosting&org_lookup=1#ip-
addresses) ^ pretty nifty look at how your neighbors screw you sometimes

~~~
pera
That's most likely the reason: OVH is well known for their lack of attention
on spammers using their VPSs, so most operators will just filter their IP
blocks.

I run a low volume email server and 100% of the connections from OVH blocks
are spam/phishing/vuln-scanning/etc. It's true that Gmail _could_ do more to
help low volume operators understand deliverability problems, but in my
opinion OVH _should_ be doing something about their spam issue.

My advice when looking for a VPS provider for running an email server is to
read their AUP and check their blocks on Talos.

------
Bnshsysjab
Subbing to this, I’m having this exact issue. I’ve got dkim, dmarc, spf, the
TLS flay and rdns. No other tested mail server blocks me, just gmail.

I’ve googled and cannot find a legitimate way to determine why I’m marked as
spam or how to unmark it. I’m coming from a fresh domain and have no intention
of ever spamming.

Googles support, or lack thereof, will hopefully be their downfall.

------
jedberg
Because of this post I checked my gmail spam folder for the first time in
months. Of the 429 messages, 8 were not spam, which honestly is kind of a high
false positive rate.

Incidentally, two messages from Google themselves were correctly marked as
spam, in that they were advertising for services that I didn't care about.

------
LeoPanthera
Is this problem unique to Gmail? Do owners of self-hosted mail servers also
have problems sending mail to Yahoo, Outlook, AOL, iCloud?

Do these providers have a better mechanism for getting yourself un-blocked?

~~~
Scramblejams
In my experience struggling to deliver email from my self-hosted server,
Gmail's by far the worst. Not that I haven't had the occasional issue with
Yahoo, Outlook and AOL. But here's the key difference: Yahoo, Outlook and AOL
actually offer tools to resolve the issue! For small senders like me who fall
below Gmail's postmaster tools limits, we have no recourse other than trying
to find some sympathetic Google employee and DMing them. The experience really
blows.

I desperately wish Gmail would offer some sort of registration program that
would let me attest to my identity and thereby give my server the benefit of
the doubt. I'd happily cough up my private medical records if that meant my
family's emails reached Gmail's inboxes most of the time.

~~~
tambre
If you actually are looking for advice, then in descending importance order:

* Enforce a DMARC policy instead of explicitly disabling it.

* Enforce a strict SPF policy instead of ~all.

* Send over IPv6. Usually stricter rules are applied and not-up-to-snuff emails are rejected at the SMTP level.

* Your provider hosts lots of spammers for their size. Consider switching.

* Enable MTA-STS.

The first two I'd consider obvious glaring mistakes. The next two are less
important, but would help. MTA-STS is a nice-to-have.

I can't analyse your DKIM setup, since I don't know your selector. Feel free
to send me a sample email if interested.

~~~
Scramblejams
Thanks for giving it a look! Enforcing DMARC and strict SPF tend to screw up
mailing lists and forwarding. I don't see how I can enable them without
causing a lot of other problems for me and my users.

No arguments about my provider. Any tips on how to select a better one? I'm
thinking someone who adds some friction to unblocking outbound port 25, e.g.
Vultr, might be better.

~~~
tambre
DMARC shouldn't be an issue for mailing lists, as long as one of DKIM/SPF
passes. Are you seeing reports of both DKIM and SPF failing for mailing lists
you use?

Properly configured mailing lists shouldn't modify contents of emails causing
DKIM to fail.

I personally use Linode and would recommend them. But basically any tier 1/2
provider, i.e. too big/popular to block, will do. However, I would avoid
DigitalOcean per my experience due to them completely blocking SMTP on IPv6 in
addition to badly implemented IPv6 support and seemingly subpar support.

------
jakub_g
Wild guess but I'm wondering if the problem isn't domain name. *.eu.org looks
like a perfect domain to send phishing campaigns from (i.e. perhaps some other
subdomains of it were caught sending spam and his domain got a penalty as a
side-effect?)

------
hansjorg
It's a bit surprising that he got anything through without SPF and an MX
record. That seems to be the minimum to get mail into the inbox for a new
domain at least, so his domain probably had some positive reputation at one
point.

~~~
technion
A while back I had someone setup a new domain with office 365 email and a
completely broken spf record that only allowed his web server. Gmail accepted
everything without a problem.

I agree an SPF record is an expected minimum but "use a big provider" is more
relevant ime.

------
em-bee
we can argue all day long about why this happens. more interesting for me
would be, what can i do about it.

i have noticed the same problem. since a few weeks, i can no longer reach
gmail from my mail-server.

my mail volume is to small that marking mails non-spam would help. besides i
nowadays mainly use email for situations where i don't have an alternative way
to communicate, so when i email someone, and it gets rejected, there is no
backchannel to let the recipient know about that.

reading through that thread, one solution suggests itself: don't host your
email server with a provider that tolerates spammers.

does anyone have recommendations?

where can i host my own mailserver, and not suffer from being stuck in an IP
block that is on any blacklists?

are there other solutions?

can i use a reputable mailserver as a proxy? so that mail gets forwarded to my
own server, and mail i send out gets sent through them, but i still do all the
filtering, routing, management of email addresses, storage, etc, of emails on
my own server?

i know this is technically possible but which servers out there support that?

------
unityByFreedom
The final exchange between OP and someone who works in detecting spam:

[https://www.mail-
archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg09020.html](https://www.mail-
archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg09020.html)

This is where HN discussion should pick up, not at the beginning where we need
to rehash everything.

------
Benjamin_Dobell
Although the post is about self-hosted mail, I wouldn't be surprised to learn
something fairly major changed in Google's spam filter a couple of weeks ago.

We use Google Apps (i.e. Gmail) and two weeks ago one of my co-workers noticed
that another co-worker's emails were going to spam. Even though we're
sending/receiving within the one GApps domain.

Upon investigation I discovered that one co-workers emails were indeed going
to spam for everyone, myself included _unless_ he sent the email from his
Windows machine. In which case it passed Google's spam filter no problem. His
mail signature is more complicated on Apple Mail, 2 URL links (to our own
domain) and an embedded image (NOT a URL).

He's been using that same signature structure for yonks; yet just in the last
two weeks it's a no go.

~~~
mistahenry
It was two weeks ago when I started suddenly having delivery problems (ie
consistently delivered to the spam folder) for emails sent from SES from AWS.

It’s very obvious to me now when reading these replies that Google changed
their spam filtering and it’s affecting many more than just me

------
kazinator
The issue affects only outbound mail, not the ability to operate your mail
domain as such.

The fix/workaround is to find an SMTP relay which has reputation, and send
your SMTP through that. At least temporarily, until the domain you want to be
gets better reputation.

This is what people do who operate little domains that are physically hooked
up via residential subscriber IP addresses. You will never be able to send
SMTP anywhere from a subscriber IP. Rather, you typically use your ISP's mail
forwarding hosts (usually via an authenticated connection: your SMTP server
logs in to theirs to do its business). (Otherwise they would be operating an
"open relay".)

------
vfclists
The legal naivete and indifference of otherwise technological savvy people is
mind boggling.

It is not the task of mail providers to block or hide email considered to be
spam. It is the job of the end users, ie the email providers cusstomers and
their software.

Consider physical junk mail, ie the type that comes through the letter box.
The post office does not decide what is junk mail or not, their job is to
deliver it and it is the customer's job to discard it.

The proper thing is for the mail provider to tag the emails their systems
consider to be junk and deliver it the customers inbox and let the customers
decide.

Google's customers are the problem, not Google itself.

~~~
xxs
>Consider physical junk mail...

Where I live it takes a sticker 'no spam' glued to the mail box and no more
junk happens

~~~
sambe
I've lived in several places where this practice is common and none where it
remotely works - it's totally ignored. Where are you based?

~~~
daliusd
I will just second that this works in my country (Lithuania).

------
z3t4
I remember when Gmail was new. You got an e-mail that said "hey, we think you
are sending spam, please do this". I replied and said that I always send from
this domain, so if they think I'm spamming, just block the domain, then they
white-listed it instead. I always see DMARC as a solution in these kind of
threads, but the problem is that it's trivial for spammers to also setup
DMARC. In fact almost 100% of the spam I receive follow the e-mail guidelines
better then most legitimate e-mails.

We need a new protocol! Where e-mails are opt-in, like with messaging apps,
you first need to be introduced.

~~~
vbezhenar
It might be extremely weird but not impossible, if Google algorithms classify
properly setup domain as a suspicious one.

~~~
cnst
No, not at all. There are reports that even if you use G Suite, and whitelist
your own domain to send yourself logs through crontab, your may still have
problems with the email deliverability.

My own domain was blocked for nothing more than sending myself a list of a few
dozen domain names through cron, which Google deems as containing malicious
links, even though there are no links present.

------
jtagx
For some reason, Google also marks "Google Alerts" notifications as spam. They
contain spammy search results, but the email comes from Google. At least they
are consequent in not white-listing their own services :)

~~~
usr1106
Gmail also marks messages from gmail or other google services as spam. Gmail
also marks all legitimate mails from Paypal as spam (phishing). I use several
email addresses and google accounts, but in the end I forward most mails into
the same gmail box. Their spam filters cannot handle the concept of forwarded
mail correctly.

------
ping_pong
I'm 100% okay with this aspect of Google controlling mails, etc.

The level of spam I have received has dropped precipitously because of it. For
that I'm grateful. Whatever they have done has worked, and people don't seem
to remember how bad it was 10 years ago. Now my email is relatively clear of
spam and that's a great thing for safety and security as well.

------
penname
OT: Outreach via email and I am not talking about doing some crappy
newsletters has the highest sophistication level in our company. And I am not
talking about setting up some lame DMARC/SPF, we (must) do 10x more. DB
adminstration is easy compared to getting emails through on a large scale.

------
eco
Just to add another experience, our company also started getting a lot of
legitimate email marked as spam as of about two weeks ago. This included
emails coming from the same domain (with all the proper SPF and DKIM setup in
place).

------
c3534l
I see most people saying Google errs too much on the side of its spam," but it
strikes me as better for everyone that spam never get through so as to
incentivize people not to send spam, thereby destroying most spam before it
even makes it to your spam box. You can always check your spam box, so its
just a mild inconvenience mbst of the time. If you're expecting an email, you
can whitelist the sender. If you're sending email to someone who isn't
suspecting it, then maybe you need to take a moment out to think about whether
you're spamming people's inboxes with emails they don't want.

------
secabeen
I run into a similar situation, and I have done every thing you are supposed
to. DMARC, SPF, MTA-STS, DKIM, all of it. I have only one IP address that ever
sends legitimate email from my domain (I proxy all my personal messages
through that IP), on AWS, and it's been that way for years.

Despite that, the reputation systems give my system a neutral reputation.
Sure, I know that there are lots of people who spam through AWS, but AWS IPs
are not allocated in bunches, and anyone can get one. There should be some way
to get my reputation up to good, but I haven't yet figured it out.

~~~
pera
Neutral, in your case, probably means that there is not enough volume coming
from your server, and as far as I know the reputation of your /32 does not
depend on your block (of course, providers may still decide to filter your
block). Did you set up the PTR record and SMTP banner?

------
beagle3
I had similar problems with Gmail rejecting mail from my perfectly configured
domain. I eventually gave up after finding, sometimes months afterwards, that
an email was not delivered (and when found within 30 days, it was always in
the recipient’s spam folder).

I eventually switched to fastmail (from a reputable, but too tiny for google
to care about provider), and all the problems were gone.

But ... I am almost sure the issue was that I had a catchall address cc:ing a
Gmail address; not sure why that would trigger spaminess detection, but that’s
the best I could reason with my data.

------
neop1x
I think the major problem here is IP reputation. Especially if you are hosting
on public VPS or worse your home network. The root of the problem is spam
abuse. Spammers have no problem to spin up random VPS to send spam. They can
set rDNS, SPF, DMARC too. There is enormous amount of spam. Of course it
should be handled on message-by-message basis, using proper antispam and ML.
But it looks like some providers simply block various IP prefixes. :( It makes
their work easier and it is marketing to use their services "which work".

------
yellowapple
The domain didn't even have an MX record defined until recently, let alone
DKIM and SPIF. I'm surprised Gmail _ever_ delivered emails from that domain to
anywhere other than spam.

------
rahuldottech
I have the same problem with my email server. I have valid and properly
configured DKIM, SPF and PRT, so I don't know what else I'm expected to do...?

------
gscott
I have the problem of spammers sending emails faking they are from my domain
but through hacked computers. So I get thousands of rejects. DMARC shows you
where it is happening, spf can cause some of it to get blocked, but you are
stuck with anyone can make up email addresses and send them out through other
mail servers and in-turn your domain is certainly going to start going to spam
due to this.

------
user32556
A few weeks ago, we organized a competition and we asked the top 3
participants to send us their solution to our gmail. Two were using their own
domains (.io and .su) and one was using Gmail. The two with their own domains
just got in the spam folder, and without surprise that Gmail one survived.

"If you want to set up your own email domain rather than using Gmail, good
luck."

------
usr1106
I sent a text format mail containing a couple of innocent words and a youtube
link of a completely innocent clip to my wife. Gmail in their infinite wisdom
classified it as spam. Obviously users need to be protected from watching
youtube clips.

I used the smtp server of my ISP. I'm know that it is tightly monitored and
not the source of any significant amount of real spam.

------
fortran77
This is truly a severe problem, and I've given up trying to fix it. I don't
run my own mail servers anymore. I have an Outlook business account. Microsoft
is big enough that google doesn't mess with their email.

I sort of understand why Google does this--probably 95% of email from random
mail servers are spam! But that doesn't make it right.

------
jayalpha
I like infomaniak. You can buy separate Email hosting. No EU or US
jurisdiction. [https://www.infomaniak.com/en/hosting/web-and-mail/mail-
host...](https://www.infomaniak.com/en/hosting/web-and-mail/mail-hosting)

Gandi offers free email with domain registration.

~~~
beefhash
> No EU or US jurisdiction.

As far as I can tell, they're based in Switzerland. The political pressure if
either of them EU cough a bit will probably cause Swiss authorities to fall
over immediately. I wouldn't consider myself safe in your position.

~~~
jayalpha
My email is not valuable enough for the US or the EU to put pressure on them.
If you are so worried you have to encrypt your email anyway. A Russian hoster
likely would not bend. Be advised that a Russian IP address does not help you
to pass Spam filters...

------
yoavm
This was the single reason I couldn't operate my own mail server. My mails
were just always marked as spam by Google, no matter how much I made sure the
whole TLS/DKIM/DMARC/DNSSEC/etc setup was correct. We tend to think about
E-mail as something that is still distributed, but Google really killed that.

------
Mistri
I ran into this issue many years ago, and I eventually gave up trying to
increase the reputation of my mail server. For all my projects that require
mailing, I've now succumbed to spoofing headers using Gmail's SMTP, which
surprisingly doesn't go to spam, or using a third party mailing service like
AWS.

------
dazbradbury
I've had multiple legitimate emails from Google employees and their sales
teams all end up in my Gmail spam folder, even from senior members of various
divisions.

I still get spam in my inbox.

They definitely know this is a problem and have people working on it - but
spam filtering at that scale is much harder than it may appear at first.

~~~
GordonS
Personally, I find Gmail's spam filtering to be _excellent_.

In the past year or so,. I've had a single false positive, and zero false
negatives.

------
Tepix
If you have an email provider that classifies ham as spam, complain.

If complaining doesn't help, consider switching away.

Remember at Google you're not the customer. The reason Google want to keep you
using their product is so that they can learn more about you and then ask
their customers more money to show ads to you.

------
vizzah
Google Cloud Platform <CloudPlatform-noreply@google.com> \- just found in my
Gmail Spam folder! =D

------
thrower123
Gmail always marks the emails from my veterinarian, who has
{business_name}@gmail.com, as spam. It's slightly irritating. However, seeing
the mails that come in to our sales endpoints, gmail addresses are responsible
for a huge percentage of the obvious spam.

------
pwinnski
This is a pretty fantastic summary of the current state of email:
[https://www.mail-
archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08958.html](https://www.mail-
archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08958.html)

------
fastaguy88
It's not just gmail. When my university went to office365 mail for faculty,
pretty much all of my email from the upper administration (e.g. the president
of the university) was marked as junk. I complained, but there were no
solutions.

------
_wldu
Plain text email with no attachments is almost never marked as spam from what
I have seen (unless there are several spammy keywords). I wonder why people
don't use plain text email to ensure more reliable delivery of important
messages?

------
loriverkutya
I just remember the post not long ago ""The “mail is hard” myth"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20851880](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20851880)

------
fastball
Blame spammers, not Google. Google isn't trying to block innocuous emails.

~~~
daliusd
Why not both? Google can be evil too.

~~~
fastball
Yeah, but in this case Google isn't being evil.

Do you really thing Google wants to intentionally stop your innocuous emails
from getting to your mail box? Why in the world would they want that?

~~~
progval
Possibly to get you to use Gmail instead of self-hosting. (Note: I have no
proof they actively want that, I'm just speculating)

~~~
fastball
The fact that Google emails get caught in Gmail spam should make it clear that
such speculation is completely unwarranted.

------
johnklos
Unfortunately, OVH doesn't care about spam from their networks, so people
really need to move. Too bad we don't have other ways to properly punish
network administrators who ignore complaints.

------
jacquesm
This is just Google's way of getting you to switch to their service.

------
pengstrom
Google will of course argue it's for it's users sake. What are the odds that
if legislation passes, Google simply lets unnecessary spam through and
pretends they can't do better?

------
Ballas
I would hazard a guess that this mostly happens when many people mark your
messages as spam from your domain. Or if you send enough email to gmail users
with certain keywords/phrases.

------
harel
This issue aside, I wasn't aware of
[https://talosintelligence.com/](https://talosintelligence.com/)

The information there is very interesting.

------
ratsmack
This is why I disabled Google spam capture entirely on my account. They were
capturing things that I had marked as non-spam many times over, so to me, the
feature became worthless.

------
casedup
Check your Gmail message and look in the headers. I'm willing to bet you have
some fails and softfails there. That's why you're been labeled as spam.

~~~
Bnshsysjab
Trust me it’s not, I’ve read theM countless times, google just decided I’m
spam, and don’t tell me why. I run a small business and have a business name
registered in the same name which cost $500 AUD, I don’t appear to have an
option apart from paying AWS or Microsoft to host me.

------
mirimir
One could just use a Gmail account for contacting people with Gmail addresses.
If there's extended conversation, then migrate to ones preferred email
account.

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OrgNet
The do that to me all the time and also tell me there is suspicious activity
on my account when I login and there is no way to turn off these "features"

------
jokoon
I think there's a gmail filter where lets you prevent some mail from being
market as spam...

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clairity
it sucks that even though i haven't actively used gmail in at least 5 years,
google is still able to hoover up my personal, and what should be private,
info. and this kind of anti-competitiveness, which seems to come to light
occasionally and only dimly at that, stinks just as bad.

i can't wait until everyone else realizes how insidious a company google is.
it's starting to happen. i'm hearing the low rumbles among (non-technical)
folks i know. thank goodness!

------
mtsx
outlook.com spam rules are much harder.... twitter,edx,coursera, even MS own
mails go to the junk folder .

------
hsnewman
I'm so sick of technology.

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dylanondrugs
google is trying to become a large monopoly for email services tbh. Not only
that but more and more businesses start using gsuite to avoid getting marked
as spam for most clients and customers

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natch
Yep the person in charge of this at Google should be fired.

And I say this as someone who has no reliance on or use of outbound email
marketing whatsoever.

In other words, I’m not an embittered emailer who thinks their email is being
unfairly treated as spam. I’m just a user who sometimes looks in the spam
folder and is aghast at some of the false positives Google has. And yes some
of the false negatives in the inbox as well.

~~~
mav3rick
You don't understand the scale of this problem. It's such a fad to "fire"
someone because you think "it's an easy problem".

~~~
gm
I think it should suffice to know that after one repeatedly trains the google
spam filter with "report not spam" and "mark as spam", it should learn that
well enough, no?

As an example: Some dumb ass Verizon customer gave them my email address as
their own. I got a ton of communications from Verizon that I could not turn
off (bill past due, thank you for you promise to pay, and all sorts of really
annoying messages). I called Verizon, I was told that neither them nor I could
do anything about it because I did not own the Verizon account, and I did not
have the account PIN. Their official solution for this problem: Mark all the
Verizon emails as spam and don't call them again (I kid you not).

The result: I marked about 100 Verizon emails as spam and Gmail learned that
really well; now I do not see Verizon emails in my inbox. Why TF can't gmail
do this with all the other emails I mark as spam and not spam?

I just got in the habit of firing up the hideous gmail app on my phone to go
through my spam folder every day and vet out the non-spam out of there. I
usually go though about 250 emails per day. I end up looking at all the spam,
but it's far faster to fish out the good messages from spam than if I turned
spam detection off altogether.

No matter how complex the problem to solve is, Google is failing at a level
where even I could program it better, which is not a high bar at all.

~~~
shadowgovt
> Google is failing at a level where even I could program it better

You should do so. You can set up filters to hook into keywords, domain names,
etc., and route to spam. If the stuff you're getting is that obvious in
structure, you should be able to kill it with a handful of such filters.

~~~
gm
Do you know by chance know if user-0defined filters take precedence over
Google's spam detection? If so, I might go for it.

I say "might" because no matter what I program into it, I'll never be sure
there's not an important false positive that got trapped, and so I'll forever
be checking my spam anyway. It might be all for naught.

------
sacrificedcapon
Did you try changing your name to Netflix, Etrade or American Express? I
swear, no matter how many times you mark their emails as spam, they eventually
wind up back in your inbox ( admittedly in the Promotions section rather than
the Primary inbox ).

------
carloswilson
Prior to GMail, we used to check our "Junk" folder occasionally in whatever
email service we used.

When GMail arrived with its nice spam classification, it was great. Worked
well, better than any competitors out there. This gradually conditioned us to
ignore the "Spam" directory completely. Now things have moved to the opposite
extreme. It is quite difficult to host independent email servers and send
emails from it without GMail classifying it as spam. The high false-positive
rate has become the norm. Instead of GMail trying to reduce the false-positive
rate, it has now become the responsibility of those hosting email servers to
jump through the hoops to ensure that their emails are not classified as spam.

Makes one think: If we knew what we know today about spam and abuse of
Internet services, would SMTP have been designed the way it is designed today?
What fundamental design change could have made it immune to spam? Perhaps a
pull-based design instead of push-based? Perhaps something even cleverer?

~~~
criley2
My conspiracy theory is that google intentionally has degraded the ability of
spam to be detected.

Why? Google Inbox did it absolutely perfectly. They wrapped up every email,
from every major source, into nearly perfect bundles.

You could receive hundreds of unsolicited ("sOlIcItEd") marketing emails
a.k.a. spam and Inbox would perfectly roll them into one bundle with a 1 swipe
gesture to archive.

Then they killed Inbox and Gmail has functionally no ability to collate spam
into a bundle and hide it.

That's intentional. Email marketing is huge, and google has a massive vested
interest in ensuring that gmail users can see advertisements.

------
helpPeople
Ive tried thanking users for supporting my website, but I rarely get a
response.

I'm not sure if they are "star struck" or are not receiving the email.

Any suggestions to confirm?

------
faissaloo
I'm someone who uses the Cockli email service and I too often have my emails
marked as spam. Makes things a little annoying.

------
chisleu
I moved my private server email to gsuite and this problem went away entirely.

Running your own mail server is very dangerous. I don't recommend it.

~~~
neop1x
Thanks, that means you support these practices and you like that only way to
prevent your mail to go to the spam folder is to actually pay for their
services and send email only through them. Soon we will have to confirm our
identity and pay google in order to use the internet as a whole, otherwise all
recaptchas will fail. It will soon become survailance like in China just
controlled by monopolies (tight to the government anyway). :)

