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Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

It’s becoming less OK to use a small service. Gmail and office365 will often classify mail from small provider as spam, with no feedback to the sender.

I was using s small British provider, and almost by accident discovered at some point in time that emails I sent to gmail addresses in the prior 2 months had been marked as spam, unless they were a reply something sent to me (so it wasn’t true that everything got lost - only stuff I originated).

I gave up and moved to FastMail because I don’t have the time to deal with this (and solving it once is no guarantee it won’t happen again)

So, email is federated but effectively not decentralized - unless you use one of the central services, you are at risk from being obliviously blackholed at any second (that happens to large providers too, but there’s safety in numbers - it will be discovered sooner by someone)

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> I was using s small British provider, and almost by accident discovered at some point in time that emails I sent to gmail addresses in the prior 2 months had been marked as spam, unless they were a reply something sent to me (so it wasn’t true that everything got lost - only stuff I originated).

Looks like Google will have to keep the 5bn "fines for stupid things we do to EU citizens and companies" line on their budget for years to come.

I don't think this will fly when the relevant authorities finds out (a nice mix of protecting local business and punishing an annoying company that have ignored the rules too many times).

And frankly I think that is great!

Hoping Google will sooner or later return to their roots as Internet superhero.

Meanwhile get ready for more fines, I'm especially looking forward to the almost-destroying-browser-competition-on-desktop fine that I've been waiting for a while. : )

> I don't think this will fly when the relevant authorities finds out

I've seen public entities switch to Office 365 in order to "get rid of spam" and thereby losing a lot of incoming legitimate mails in the same process. A fact that is worsened by users using the "Mark as spam" button to delete legitimate emails from their inbox (a practice that is horribly common).

Going from that to billion-EUR fines to Google and Microsoft is a very, very long way.

I get spam from legitimate companies, probably because they don't validate the email addresses their customers give them, and thus incorrectly assume that I have a business relationship with them. I do not, thus it's spam.

Companies need to validate email addresses.

I get AT&T bills, OnStar notifications, etc. I have never used any of their services. Someone else probably signed up with my email address.

Additionally, other companies are violating the CAN SPAM Act by hiding the unsubscribe ability behind a log in. Nextdoor does this.

I don't know a single person that uses the mark as spam option to "delete legitimate emails". In fact, almost everybody just leaves those emails in their inbox after reading them. A small fraction of users use the archive function. I do however know lots of people (me being one of them) who use mark as spam for unsolicited emails. And no, spam is not legitimate, no matter how hard online marketing people are trying to make it so.

You should try working at an abuse desk for an business providing email services at some point. :)

You are, of course, absolutely right re. spam and rightfully so. On the other hand, I regularly get spam reports re. 100% legitimate mails, often in the middle of longer email conversations and so on, and where one side of the conversation marks entire email threads as spam.

We always follow up on spam complaints and the one thing we do get often in cases like that is that the other party only wanted to delete the emails and didn't realise there were other consequences.

Yes, there's a lot of people that knows how to use the "Mark as spam button". I still, however, maintain the position that a lot of other people don't know how to use such features.

If you automatically get the newsletter of a company where you have signed up on their web service, you would mark that as spam?

I would unsubscribe and delete, but have not really thought about marking as spam or not yet. Just interested in some input there.

If I would get it from a company where I have not signed up the answer is of course obvious.

In theory, I agree with the parent post and the sibling reply. If I didn't ask for email, then it doesn't belong in my inbox. In practice, I do what you do - unsubscribe and delete. If I get any more mail after that...

When I get the old "you'll be removed from our list within 10 days" message, I generally reply to it with a quick message: "Please remove me immediately or your next message will be marked as spam". Many times the sender has complied with a personal response provided someone saw my message, even for some large companies with "no-reply" emails.

For smaller companies - especially the mom and pop type operations - I'll usually give them a friendlier notice. "Hi, I unsubscribed and I'm still getting emails. Please remove me as I'd really rather not mark your messages as spam". I usually get a friendly personal response with apologies and a removal.

In all cases, after the company has been warned, I don't think twice about sending them to spam.

Yes, I would. Buying a product off you (or signing up for your free/promotional service) doesn’t mean you get to spam me, IMO.

I thought this too while using a small provider, as my messages were frequently not delivered to Gmail or Office365.

Then I discovered my provider didn't set up SPF and DKIM correctly so emails were failing authentication.

There are many factors affecting email delivery beyond SPF and DKIM, and it can be difficult for a small provider to get everything right.

So if you're having delivery issues I'd start with that, not by assuming without evidence that the big guys are intentionally classifying spam just because it's from a small provider.

This.

Been running my own mail for a long time, and with one big exception[1] and occasionally spotting misconfigured systems, any time I've had delivery trouble it has been my fault.

If someone is bouncing you, make sure your ducks are in a row. One easy thing to do that won't catch everything but will help is to send mail to a Spamassassin-protected account, and look at how it classifies things.

[1] The Deathstar has been bouncing me for a long time, and their postmaster appears to be /dev/null. Given that I've had exactly one person using them I wanted to mail, they can bite me.

Yes, this.

Except sometimes, like when Comcast looks at your DMARC policy that specifically says "p=none" and decides that means "reject all mail from this domain". Gotta love those guys.

Edit: s/spf/DMARC

Even if you setup SPF and DKIM, you still run into issues when your domain does not resolve to the same IP as your mailserver with Gmail.

That's what SPF does.

It allows the owner of a domain to specify which mail servers are authorized to send mail from the domain.

Did you ask the provider about it, and if so, what was their reply?

Being small may not have been their problem. I run a single-user server and haven't had any trouble with delivery to Gmail.

I did, they had no idea why, they weren’t on any Blacklist, and google did not respond to their or my inquiries.

It was only google, only non-response emails, so it is a google specific thing and not general IP reputation.

Switching to fastmail, otherwise exactly the same (domain, equiv dkim and spf setup) solved everything.

Sure looks like I was on the scoring edge, with fastmail being better (or some special trust arrangement) than my previous provider. Which is fine if I had gotten feedback and had a way to resolve this - but practically I didn’t.

Edit: I had a catchall on that domain forward to an account on gmail. It was suggested to me that may have been the problem. But i still do from fastmail, and everything is fine, so it’s more likely that overall reputation or special fastmail arrangements were the issue. Either way, i’m far from being alone with this issue - as evidenced even i this subthread. It is federated but not practically open to everyone, which is an implicit attribute most people associate with decentralization.

Same here. Perhaps I should switch to a larger provider too.

Report it with relevant authorities.

This is anti-competitive behaviour.

Especially clear since, as GP points out mail gets through if it is a direct reponse, meaning they knew very well it was a legitimate address.

This is abuse of bulk mail filter to squeeze out local competitors.

That sounds like a stretch even by EU standards when a acting openly envious. Google can warn or ban their misbehaving users for repeated spam violations. They can't ban people on other people's domains. "Legitimate addresses" can still send spam and it could have been caused by ignorant users who think "junk" is for non-immediate deletion and use it to keep their inbox tidy. In fact they /did/ deliver it but prefiltered.

Even if they could kangaroo court it for standard business practices they wouldn't since they don't want to be known as "the dumb fuckers who banned domain based spam filtering" and face pressure from annoyed constituents now receiving piles of spam.

> "Legitimate addresses" can still send spam

It seems clear from the description above that poster is someone recipient wants mail from.

As for the ignorant users using spam button I've seen that once since I started working.

> Report it with relevant authorities.

Happy to do so, but which are the relevant authorities?

I have lived in Norway more or less my entire adult life so I don't really know about UK but here it is konkurransetilsynet.

I tried searching for it though and this seems relevant:

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/competition-and-...

You local antitrust regulator.

I've encountered services I can't even register to since I have my own domain name, so I had to register a gmail.

If you can list them we can consider what to do about them.

(Edit: just realised GP was probably not referring to email providers, but I’ll leave my question here with apologies)

Microsoft, Apple. I’d move my mail to one of these to get away from Google but I can’t find a way to do so. I already pay for Office 365 and iCloud but I don’t get to bring my own domain for email. Unless I’m missing something.

I don’t pay Google for my email on my own domain because I got in early enough on Google Apps for your Domain or whatever it was called.

I’m happy to pay a reasonable price - I just don’t know whether it’s possible.

Office365 only offers "use your own domain" for business type accounts. $8.25/month. https://products.office.com/en-us/compare-all-microsoft-offi...

Fastmail is a relatively cheap option. Yandex mail will do it for free.

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