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Comment by liquidgecka | Hacker News Reader

I was that guy many times (Former Spam, Abuse, Delivery SRE). You have to realize that %95 of the time when people reach out to report that mail that they are sending is getting canned its because they are sending SPAM and don't realize it. Seriously, all day, every day I got reports of "site x is unfairly being canned" only to go look up the data and see that the site is basically funneling hundreds of thousands of emails into the system and most users are making them as spam. We know the normal "I want to unsubscribe but I just click Spam instead" rates. We know an order of magnitude more than that as well, and most the time when people reach out they just don't understand email and how to have decent content people actually want.

And sometimes they are a sales rep that work with Pfizer, annoyed that regular correspondence about their top products were going to spam because they contained information about the price of Viagra..

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We know an order of magnitude more than that as well, and most the time when people reach out they just don't understand email and how to have decent content people actually want.

The flip side of this is that many of us know the excuses big email services make about how bad a problem spam is and how our content might be spam and we just don't understand... when the content is the kind of reasonable and necessary communications that 'tzs mentioned further up in this thread.

I'm getting awfully bored of bounce messages from apparently credible organisations whose members have signed up, telling me that the legally required and personalised information we have just sent to our customer appears to be unsolicited bulk email. There has been a small wave of these recently, which leads me to think that someone screwed up a scoring system that multiple organisations are using to vet incoming traffic.

In any case, that's not a minor mistake, that's an automatic recognition system that is hopelessly inaccurate. It could even be dangerous, for example if a customer isn't getting notifications about payments and forgets they haven't cancelled a subscription, or if some action is required of them if they don't want to accept some change in terms for a service they use.

Oh I know.. trust me. I used to work in the team that handled that very problem and yet right now I can't get google to stop spam processing mails that fetches from my private IMAP server for my wife's gmail account. Everybody I know that was in that team has abandoned Google in the decade since I was there so I no longer have an easy in to figure out what is going on.

The problem is that for every single technical, competent person trying to reach google, there are 20 technical incompetent people who "know exactly what the problem is" (and don't), and 1,000 people who have a legit support problem that can be resolved with a google search, and 1,000,000 people who are just going to waste your time completely. =/

The moment you have direct support you have to respond to all of the above. There is no way to create a support team that just handles the clueful people.

I was on the dns contact email address which should be relatively hard to find right? Yea it was spam central with free energy devices, complaints about the government, etc. Its impossible to provide human support at the level that google is playing. =/

The moment you have direct support you have to respond to all of the above. There is no way to create a support team that just handles the clueful people.

Sure. But if my little businesses, with only a few people and a modest budget available to do literally everything, can manage to treat our customers with more attention and respect than one of the richest and most powerful businesses in the world, something is wrong.

Its impossible to provide human support at the level that google is playing. =/

Sorry, but I simply don't buy that. Google have grown huge and incomprehensibly rich thanks in part to technology but also in part to refusing to communicate with individuals when things go wrong (and, frankly, hoping they don't actually get called on it because it's not efficient for every little advertiser to sue for that $50 back when Google served their ads on obviously inappropriate sites or whatever). Like Facebook and other big organisations which have become highly influential through their scale and pseudo-monopoly status, Google now need to hire, train and support people -- lots of people -- in order to provide an acceptable level of communication if those dealing with them have problems.

If they can't do that then IMHO they should be sued, regulated or otherwise impaired until sufficient incentive/deterrent exists. The cost of letting these huge, influential organisations literally destroy businesses or wreck lives through their negligence is simply too high to allow the status quo to continue.

| Sure. But if my little businesses, with only a few people and a modest budget available to do literally everything, can manage to treat our customers with more attention and respect than one of the richest and most powerful businesses in the world, something is wrong.

2.2 Billion users. 74,000 employees. That's 300,000 users per employee. Converting Google's entire current operation into customer support, and assuming 1 ticket per year per customer, would require every Google employee to solve 1.7 tickets per minute (365/8) to keep up. Assuming a 5 minute ticket resolution (and still 1 ticket per year per user) would require 500,000 trained customer support personal to support that; assuming $20K per year, that equals to ~$10B. Google's profit was ~20B last year. This is not very likely to happen; and conditional it does, it would kill very large parts of the IT sector.

Can we kindly attempt to actually get to a solution that is actually mutually acceptable by all parties for this?

Clearly Google need to hire a lot more people if they are going to provide an acceptable level of support.

If that means their profits are significantly reduced, but they finally provide an acceptable standard of communications, I have no problem with that. How much of that $20B profit came from mistakes that hurt other people, which they only got away with because they didn't communicate and it wasn't worth suing them?

The current solution isn't acceptable either.

"There is no way to create a support team that just handles the clueful people."

How about the option of paying $20 for a person at Google to read and respond to an email query? I would love that option and many other people would too, if the response was competent and reasonable.

They need to think of a way to have a xkcd tech support(https://xkcd.com/806/) like system. With all those "think out side the box" mindsets, someone should be able to come up with a workable solution.

What about pay per support request? I'd think the people who are desperately trying to get back their email account legitimately are going to be much more willing to pay, say $10, than a free energy crank. Presumably they could set the price at a level they can afford even if everyone and their brother use the support service.

Under adversarial conditions (basically, any large-scale ops), this becomes the highest-leverage way for adversaries to aggressively DDoS the weakest point of such support queue.

Also, consider the conditions:

* You are a scammer

* You pay $10 to Google to "fix getting back into your account"

* Google knows that account does not, actually belongs to you, but now are in a position, where they either: eat the $10 with a WONTFIX, and pave the way to a mass lawsuit or refund the $10, and have a free way for scammers to exploit.

> There is no way to create a support team that just handles the clueful people

I've wished on occasion that someone would create a certification system, kind of like what we have for software engineers and system administrators, but for end users. Users could get certified in various aspect of operating and self-installing consumer technology, and when a certified user called tech support they could be directed past the tier of support that assumes the caller is an idiot.

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