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Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

Gmail alone currently handles over 50% of US email traffic, with Microsoft and a handful of other service providers taking up a good chunk of the other half. These large providers all use internal blacklists and filtering rules, which cannot be queried, and no support is available if you get blackholed.

Worst of all, Gmail especially isn't great about tagging messages as spam; a good chunk of messages sent from outside the Gmail network simply disappear. As a Gmail user, there is nothing you can do to verify that you're getting all of the legitimate mail traffic that is being sent to you.

Further, if you're trying to send any kind of business correspondence over email, you have to contend with a massive industry of scammers that are also targeting people with lookalike messages.

I love the email protocol, but from a broader service standpoint, email is terribly broken right now.

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> Worst of all, Gmail especially isn't great about tagging messages as spam

My experience is the exact opposite of yours - I find Gmail's spam detection absolutely amazing. I get essentially zero spam in my inbox, and perhaps 4-6 false positives in the spam folder a month.

>As a Gmail user, there is nothing you can do to verify that you're getting all of the legitimate mail traffic that is being sent to you.

What other communication service/protocol would allow you to do this?

> perhaps 4-6 false positives in the spam folder a month

That's 4-6 valid messages a month the average user will never see.

I disagree, I think "check your spam" is fairly widely understood.

GGP's point is that in some circumstances, Gmail will simply disappear emails, with no trace, instead of quarantining them.

It is not.

Who has time for that when your spam folder is full of hundreds of junk messages per day?

I think the fact that “check your spam” is so widely understood is a testament to false positives in the inbox being an issue for Gmail.

Ideally this phrase would not be so widely known and understood if Gmail didn’t have so many false positives going to the spam folder. I’d imagine that, as a performance metric, the Gmail team would consider false positives to be a metric for improvement, not a metric of pride.

Your mileage will vary I guess. It has been _years_ since I got a legit message caught in gmail spam; every few months I glance at it and go "yup, that's all spam." Proofpoint however, they capture a legit email every other month or so.

I just checked and I missed an important message by somebody I had been on a thread with because gmail thinks it is spam.

Because of that I just added a recurring remainder to go through gmails spam folder every sunday, but that of course defeats the purpose.

Gmail also thinks that every 2fa message from Microsoft is spam for some reason, despite how often I tell it is is not.

little value in a single number like this, it would be better to give a percentage wrt monthly incoming mails... 4-6 seems true to me but I subscribed to way too many mailing lists and the false positives basically always come from them

Today I checked my spam folder for the first time in months, thanks to having read this thread.

Low and behold there was an email in there that was fairly important.

I don’t have this problem with the mail server that I set up for myself. It works as intended. My Gmail account, that I maintain mainly for email lists, gets tons of false spam positives, however. Gmail is garbage.

> 4-6 false positives in the spam folder a month.

That seems like a lot; with FastMail I get basically 0. The last time this happened was years ago.

I do get the very occasional spam, maybe 5 messages/month or so. Most of them are from marketing agencies that want to "collaborate" on my website or some such and have a spam score of 0 or close to it, and arguably isn't "spam" in the same way as "grow a bigger dick!"-spam is. I doubt gmail would catch those too.

With Fastmail I get a lot of messages purporting to be from Fastmail threatening account termination/verification, something along those lines. Most of them are automatically sent to spam.

Interesting; I can't recall ever seeing anything like that.

I run my own email server. The most important people in my life have accounts on my own server. No gmail needed or wanted. I can answer all of those questions of delivery for myself.

We get so much spam from gmail that gmail has earned itself an increased spam score just because its gmail. Its unlikely that my users see much from gmail, unless they want it.

Yeah, that was my experience too as a mail server admin.

From my experience Microsoft is the worst one about disappearing messages. You send a message to an Outlook user, they say it's delivered, but then the recipient just never gets it. At least putting it in spam means they can eventually find it if they check there.

This is an extremely important point, and I find it weird to see so few people mentioning it.

I run my own mail server and have been for years. My e-mails use SPF, DKIM, DMARC, I have a reverse DNS record set up, a score of 100/100 on mail-tester.com... yet Microsoft refuses to accept my emails. They are sent to the spam folder of my recipients.

I tried contacting their support about it, I'll let you guess how well it went. A man from a warm country told me to join some sort of Microsoft partner program, for which I would have to pay.

This is a disgrace. E-mail is behind closed gates now, because of bullies such as Microsoft.

read-receipt isnt handled well by gmail?

Read receipt isn't handled well by my mail server either. Its not a good feature anyway

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