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Ask HN: What to do about Gmail blocking my email?
39 points by _dh54 on April 11, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 36 comments
Hi everyone,

I’m at my wits’ end. Regardless of how many hoops I jump through, gmail refuses to deliver my email. Everything that comes from my email server is marked as spam. My email server is correctly configured with the following:

* reverse DNS record

* starttls transmission

* DMARC

* 2048 bit DKIM key

* strict SPF policy

* clean IP reputation

Despite doing all of this correctly (gmail confirms I pass all of these tests) it still puts my messages into spam. I’ve used googles postmaster’s tools and the only thing they say on my domain is that they have no data. As far as I can tell I am being punished for being a low traffic / small mail host.

Is this legal? Is this the basis for a potential anti-trust lawsuit? If my only sin is not using a large established mail gateway, is that fair?

What are HN’s opinions on / workarounds for / solutions to this? I can’t be the only one dealing with this issue.

As a workaround I’m considering figuring out a way for postfix to use a mail gateway (like sendgrid) when the destination domain is gmail.com.

Thanks!



It's not fair, it is legal, and there's nothing you can do about it. You will never be able to talk to a human at Google about this. Even paying customers of their all-important ad business can't really talk to helpful humans about things.

The only solution is to support US elected officials who want to break up Google. There is no solution for you in particular.


This is the answer. It's really unfortunate but it's no longer worth while to do a roll-you-own email solution unless you are willing to accept some delivery issues. The big players control the game and you have no say in the matter.


>The only solution is to support US elected officials who want to break up Google. There is no solution for you in particular.

If past monopoly stories are anything to go by, the legislation is a lagging indicator of mass societal or market movement away from the offending product and will dampen Google's decline.


The only practical solution: Don't try to run your own mail server.

I manage a service that sends about 25k emails daily using SES (AWS) with some dedicated IPs. Despite everything done right wrt spf/dkim/dmarc, IP reputation warm up etc, we still run into these issues from time to time with multiple providers. Outlook.com just says 'it is being delivered' and then just deletes the email or something, some local ISPs do that too. And then deny it when you try to 'debug' the issue.

This is simply how email delivery 'works' anno 2022 unfrotunatly


Same exact issue, I could write the exact same thing word for word. I even "contacted Gmail support" 3 weeks ago to see if I could get anywhere on it, whatever void that message went to. Same "no data" in Postmaster Tools presumably because of my low volume, messages just variously go to spam in Gmail. The last one was a message to 9 Gmail recipients I had never contacted before which I guess was the issue.

It's been so frustrating that I'm contemplating going back to a provider, or at the very least paying for one of the "warmup services" mentioned here. If anyone has experience with those for non-business I'd love to read about it.


From what I've seen gmail follows user patterns than all this technical mumbo jumbo.

So for a small business owner even 1 person hitting the spam button can be a kiss of death for deliverablity (and I know people irl who think hitting spam and delete are the same thing <facepalm>).

Basically long story short, if you send 100 emails and 10 people open your email and click on something there is a high probability that the remaining 90 are also going in the primary inbox. Otoh if 2 people were to click the spam button then high chances are rest 98 are also going to spam and soon enough you'll be branded as such.

Its why inbox warmup services are so popular nowadays. While I disagree with such practices in theory as most often they are means to abuse filters, your case seems legit and so you may have some luck with that.


Completely unique email from a new domain that has never mass emailed anything gets put into the spam immediately. It’s a very small chance anyone has ever clicked spam on my email.

If it’s a matter of the domain being “warmed up” then I basically have no chance. This is unfair.


> This is unfair.

Yes it is very unfair. Gmail is basically incentivizing you to send thousands of mails or use hacks like inbox warmups. The same happens for SEO when you have to care more about backlinking and keywords than actual content.

Unfortunately there is nothing you can do about it. It's how things are at the moment :/


> there is nothing you can do about it.

I can speak up about it. Others can too. We don’t have to live under these conditions.


Do you have a better idea to reduce the amount of spam?

It's a good thing that it's very hard to send lots of mails to strangers

Spammers do everything you do and a lot more, yet most of them are blocked(and just imagine what would happen if they could send as many mails as they want without going through all those hoops, we'd get basically nothing but spam)

The only reasonable solution if you're not a big/reputable business is to use a service like mailgun/mailjet/mailchimp/sendgrid, for a small business it would cost next to nothing(or even just 0$, if you can get some free credits or a small free plan)

It will save you a lot of headaches


I’m not a business. I don’t send mass emails. I never have.


when I say mass I mean more than the average user, especially to senders who never messaged you


I don’t send more emails than the average user. I send ~3 emails per week.


Sadly speaking up about it only really helps if someone is listening.


Gmail algorithm doesn't depend entirely on those factors you mention, it's a message per message basis, the problem is that people are marking you as spam. You have to check your emails and detect what's triggering the spam filter inside the content, give it some time to send the next one, and clean your list urgently, even confirming your users if they want to be in your list.


I don’t think this is true. The only people I sent email to are my friends or people with whom I do business. This server is for personal use.


this is definitely not true at all. of course the scale and rate of emails coming from a specific ip/domain is used for spam detection.


Don't forget: complain to your Senators and Representatives, both local and national, mention it as an antitrust violation (because it is).


If you have a new email server you have to do domain warmup. That basically entails sending out emails to show ESPs like Google that they aren't spam. I did this at a previous job, we would have email lists of millions of people and have a monthly plan where the first day we send emails to 1000 users, second day 2000, until at the end of the month we send to all. We'd get blacklisted sometimes and then have to apply to be whitelisted. It is not easy.


Have you checked https://postmaster.google.com/?


Yes, it says it has no data on my domain.


Could there be some content in the emails that triggers spam filters? Are the usernames or domain something that might trigger it? Is your server time correct?

It might also be that many users have marked emails from the domain as spam (I know of that happening with competitors signing up to newsletters etc. just to mark them as spam).


Look for something like email reputation on Upwork, or mechanical turk: you send email to 1000 mechanical turk worker's Gmails, and they click "Not Spam" in their Spam folder, to retrain Google's AI.


Looking at your replies to previous suggestions, I'm gonna assume your previous messages weren't reported as spam, like you say. So why not try emailing people who use Gmail and Google Workplace (née GSuite/GApps/GAFYD) and asking them to find your message in Spam and mark as Not Spam?

I'll happily help. Email me at ST.CyberRabbi@richi.uk (temporary alias—will stop working after a few days). Then reply here, so I remember to go look for it.


gmail has a ridiculous anti-spam, it should use AI and cool stuff but it just ignore most of the email just by IP... My stack is also perfect but the provider i use sometimes ends up in a "light" blacklist due to some spammer not being blocker swiftly.

check your ip here: https://multirbl.valli.org/lookup/


Totally okay, otherwise how you'd prevent spam? trust should not be a given, it should be developed over time.

I don't see how anti-trust apply to this, the barrier of entry to hosting emails is not too high, its just not low enough to be done in an evening, that's like saying needing to buy car washing machines to have a car washer is an anti-trust issue.

Now considering the email going to spam, try different email clients.


Does anyone know if only Google accounts are being affected? I have a customer who claims his emails suddenly started all going into spam folders. The address isn't blacklisted. The mail IS getting delivered. Other than looking at the email contents, how to everyday, common web clients detect spam?


think about what the PM of antispam at Gmail is optimizing for. their job is to provide defense against adversarial spammers.

anything trivial for you to do to get into someone's inbox can also be trivial for spammers. they'll have a bot that do it 1000 times a day. Gmail can't stop spam altogether so the general strategy is to try to make it as painful and expensive as possible to deter the marginal spammers.

any sort of spam at scale is easier to detect. that's why most marginal spam happens with new IP. similar issue in the past with hacked Gmail accounts. this is where google is cracking down harder and why you're running into these issues.


Try a mailwarmer to improve your sender score - gmass.co/warmup worked for me before


Thanks


Same problem here. Small mail host on my own domain.

Everything is set up perfectly, mail-tester.com gives it 10/10, and last week Gmail suddenly starts hard bouncing emails for one day and delivers to spam folder after that. Three days later everything is back to normal.

How? Why?


Most likely, activity on your IPs or IP blocks you can't see. Spam filters use a kind of 'neighbourhood reputation' as well as info about specific domains.

Unfortunately, the case where you have one good but very low volume sender surrounded on all sides by high volume spammers is very difficult to handle for spam filters, no matter how well designed they are. And, programmers who self host mail on cheap VPS systems are by far the most likely to encounter this problem.


Have you tried testing with a subdomain, say mail.domain.com?


Yes, and other domains and other IPs.


Have the domain ever been on a rbl?


pay for a mail warmer service




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