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Comment by px43 | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried using anything non-Google recently? Everything else is much, much worse IMO. Remember we all mostly moved to Google because they were the only ones who could actually deal with spam, gaming, and the more sophisticated attacks at scale. Now that they're the only game in town, adversaries are focusing hard on getting past their filters etc, and some are getting through.

When you have literally millions of people whose livelihood depends on gaming algorithms, or getting past content filters, then some highly intelligent and motivated individuals are going to get through, that's a fact of life.

When someone figures out how to train their robots better than Google, then Google will have some competition, but they seem to be about a decade ahead of everyone else, and only accelerating relative to the rest of the field, so I'm doubtful that anyone is going to catch up any time soon.

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I've been off Google for the past 4 years. Only exception is watching YouTube videos time to time. My digital life has been just fine.

> Everything else is much, much worse IMO.

I wouldn't say it's much much worse. Lot of the digital service I use, I pay for. And they have human support when I need it.

I don't miss Google services at all.

In terms of spam using website specific email addresses has solved it for me (eg. hackernews@mydomain.example) No spam filter required.

Of course Google and Microsoft both punish me by sending my mail to spam (even years later) for using my own domain but that's what I'd expect from the big players.

Since you have your own domain, I'd assume yes--have you gone through the process of improving deliverability using SPF, checking reputation, etc?

I've done the lot. SPF, not blacklisted, DMARC signed and set to reject.

From what I can tell it's just that small domains are guilty until proven innocent. However it seems at lower volumes you can never send enough email to get past the thresholds they've set so you're forever guilty in their eyes. Very convenient.

I've also signed up to both Microsoft and Google's email tools and neither shows any information because I don't send enough mail while they still keep making my mail as spam. It's getting to the point where I'll probably have to use a 3rd party SMTP rely as the family don't appreciate their mail going to spam while all their friends on GMail go straight to the Inbox.

A nice new addition is Microsoft is flagging any links I include in my message as "suspicious" and giving the users scary warnings. Meanwhile I can see they still take the opportunity to scan and fetch the URL and yet still can't determine it's safe.

Is your email coming from a self hosted server on AWS or your home ISP provided IP?

Self hosted on a cloud provider (not AWS).

Interestingly when I logged into Microsoft's Smart Network Data Services I could also see my VPS provider had claimed the IP block as well so they were clearly invested in making sure spam was under control. But nope, still not enough for Microsoft. At one point the mail was even getting hard 550 refused. I contacted their support who to their credit replied, but to less of their credit gaslit me and claimed there was no blocking occurring despite me pasting them full error message with all their tracking IDs in it. The next day mail was allowed in again but still ends up in spam.

Oh yes the scan and fetch on Outlook is magic, especially when you are sent links that can be access once before self destruction. So fun. It was at precious job, forgot if I was able to deactivate it or just had to use another mail.

I think to switch to my own domain mail adress but I think to use Migadu [1] instead or even try to host anything.

[1] https://www.migadu.com/

> Of course Google and Microsoft both punish me by sending my mail to spam (even years later) for using my own domain but that's what I'd expect from the big players.

If only they would send everything to spam. Microsoft outright blocks all mail from my VPS because some other IP on the block allegedly sent spam. Of course since I'm not running a commercial business I can just tell people to use a better mail provider if they want to create an account - not worth my time to deal with shitty megacorps.

> Remember we all mostly moved to Google because they were the only ones who could actually deal with spam, gaming, and the more sophisticated attacks at scale.

No, we moved to google because they provided three orders of magnitude more storage than other free mail providers. Also, the interface was slick and fast.

Spam is an overrated problem - it doesn't take much time at all look over a dozen or so mail subjects a day to determinine if they are legitimate. Scammers are a problem for the more vulnerable but Google is never going to block all of their own kind either.

> Have you tried using anything non-Google recently?

Yes. I went from self-hosted to Proton recently. Spam filtering is better, UI is better, and customer support / transparency is way better than anything I've seen from Google in the past decade. Of course the various outages / issues over the past three days have been frustrating so there's that.

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