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Comment by jpatokal | Hacker News Reader

Google Cloud Support here. To correct the misleading title, this is not a generalized outage of any kind, but an issue with some applications sending mail that trigger spam/malware/etc filters. Since spammers generally do not comply with RFC 3514, filtering is unfortunately not an exact science, so false positives happen and we're working with the customers in question on a case-by-case basis.

Also, App Engine is integrated with both Sendgrid and Mailgun, and we strongly recommend using these if you're planning on sending larger quantities of mail:

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/sendgrid

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/mailgun

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5 weeks ago your infrastructure stopped sending out mail. Our apps didn't change, your infrastructure did.

Whether it's your outgoing spam filter that's overzealous, or if a datacenter is on fire is irrelevant. Your infrastructure stopped doing what your docs said it would.

Paying customers like myself have apps running on your infrastructure. Your infrastructure stopped delivering the exact same emails that it had been delivering for years. It did this without notification and without triggering any errors.

Approximately 35 quote requests that should have been delivered have disappeared into thin air. You've cost me money, and I'm disappointed to find out that you'd been notified of this issue weeks before it began affecting me.

Why do you think services like sendgrid, mailgun etc exist? It's pretty common knowledge that if you need to send mission critical email, you should use a service specifically designed for that. Sending email programmatically directly from a web server has ALWAYS been a gray area.

At the VERY least you could have easily set up a gmail account and sent them from smtp. Choose the right tool for the job.

> It's pretty common knowledge that if you need to send mission critical email, you should use a service specifically designed for that. Sending email programmatically directly from a web server has ALWAYS been a gray area.

I partially agree with this - dedicated email services have a higher deliverability rate than a random web server, especially a cloud-based server that might be using an external IP that was previously used to send spam. However, I can understand the parent poster being annoyed that their emails were being delivered one day, and not the next, without any changes on their end.

> At the VERY least you could have easily set up a gmail account and sent them from smtp. Choose the right tool for the job.

This is absolutely the wrong tool for the job. You should not be using a Gmail account to send out automated emails that you care about.

> This is absolutely the wrong tool for the job. You should not be using a Gmail account to send out automated emails that you care about.

Agreed, but better chance of delivery than directly from the server.

I really have to highlight how dangerous an approach this is. You have no idea if the previous user of that IP was spamming. You should seriously consider mailgun or sendgrid. They also bring a lot of features that enable you to track when an email was read etc.

You seem to assume a lot of people know about the ins and outs of many different online mail delivery services. I would trust Google to do a little better than drop emails on the floor for weeks and not say something.

Infrastructure always changes. You need to have something in place to detect failure of important features of your apps, that get checked every day, every hour or even every minute, depending on how costly an outage is for you. There are always doublechecks possible.

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