Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

"It goes without saying that our messages are not spam" haha no. I don't know what it is with these people who think their god gave them the inalienable right to send messages without rate limits just because they are signed with DKIM. The most likely explanation for why that site "School Interviews" got rate-limited is people marked their junk as spam and their sending IPs got bumped down into the bozo quota. And the most likely reason for people to have marked them as spam is they failed to do verified double-opt-in and just started spamming away at whatever address their customers mistakenly typed.

View on HN

You're correct that a lot of senders have no idea when they're sending unwanted email, and that unwanted email is well within the realm of possibility here. But don't assume DOI is a panacea; you can use DOI and still send unwanted email. It can improve quality metrics (fewer bounces), but engagement metrics are a much stronger signal, especially for gmail.

If you are looking at metrics, you are sending spam. Simple as.

Can you think of a scenario where a well-intentioned organization doesn't realize they're sending some unwanted mail, and by looking at the right metrics they realize they have a problem and take steps to fix it?

I mark every news letter as spam, since I don't ever knowingly agree to receiving them, they are all spam to me.

Same. I don’t wanna subscribe to any newsletter. If some website tricked me into accepting it, or just added me to the list anyway, it’s going to spam. Hope they enjoy the Gmail reputation penalty.

There's also the possibility that their emails are full of links, which is a decent indicator of a low quality spammy email.

There are exceptions, e.g., I sent an email full of research with sources to a family member I've been emailing with for fifteen years and it went to spam, despite it being @gmail.com to @gmail.com. In retrospect, I was misusing email versus sending a document or a link to one with it in.

Sending an e-mail full of links is a 100% valid use-case for e-mail. I don't see how it's "misusing" e-mail.

Is it? If I'd sent a link to a document, they'd have the latest version and I could continue appending to it, and they'd have a version history and could even contribute to it if I permitted them.

The times have changed. It's not unreasonable to expect how people use email to have changed, ergo people sending emails full of URLs are statistically more often than not spammers.

Is it a broad stroke? Yup. But I'm willing to bet that I'm a fringe case and it prevents a ton of spam.

I deal with email at global scale, and yes, you're a fringe case. There are many billions of messages sent every day which have lots of links, and which recipients in general are interested in, and want delivered to the inbox (or promotions), rather than spam.

I agree. I also believe that message contents are much less important for abuse classification than nerds generally believe. Spam is about behavior more than it is about messages.

Content is very important. Experiment with mail-tester and tools of its ilk.

You can even test it yourself without fancy tools by sending emails full of links and mentioning keywords like Viagra et al.

Speaking from quite a bit of experience, content can matter at Gmail if it's very obviously malicious/spammy, but not usually otherwise. Metrics matter more than content at gmail.

For other filters/ISPs, content can matter a bit more, but as a general rule for consumer mailbox providers, metrics are the primary thing that affects filter outcomes.

The real question is why obvious spam enablers like GetResponse and other email services don't get the same /dev/null treatment by Google. None of the email gatekeepers you now need to use to have your mails arrive do any verification (CSV import hello), yet they are obviously not met with the same bans.

Because those companies maintain enough "good" customers that it impacts real businesses if they get entirely shitcanned, and those businesses complain to Google from both sides.

You would know if you read the previous sentence "send confirmation emails to parents when they make a booking:"

It should go without saying that confirmation emails of a user initiated booking is not spam, but let's just say it anyway

Ha, you'd think that. I get 100's of 'report' daily from people reporting booking confimations & invoices as spam :)

This almost makes me want to go through the experiment of setting up a legit email server with all the various authentication mechanisms and see if I could even get one email through to google or protonmail

I just set up a brand new server with a never-before-used IP address. I set up SPF, DMARC, and DKIM, created a brand new account with a fake name, and sent an email to my Gmail account. Within 3 seconds of being in transit, the email landed straight in my inbox with 0% doubt of it being spam.

[Edit]: Forgot to mention that the IP is home IP, not cloud provider/hosting or something.

And as as sidee note: the problem lies with the users and not with the email sender. For instance, if I send an important email to someone about an item they ordered from my site, and they tell me to send it to their gmail account, I connect to gmail to send the email, but if Gmail rejects it, I have fulfilled my part of the deal. If an email is marked as spam or rejected, it's on the recipient's end, not the sender's. The sender did not flag the message as spam before it is sent, the recipient did it after receiving it.

> the email landed straight in my inbox with 0% doubt of it being spam.

So 100% certainty of it being spam? Was that the correct judgment, in your opinion?

You absolutely can. Yahoo and O365/Outlook would be actually difficult, but you can build up reputation with those as well. Making it through small providers' filters will be your endless battle though.

Microsoft ban itself (azure) to spam, they use ml and while they cand add exceptions in general the systems are so complex and have so much hardening that is not posible our "messages are not spam "

I mentioned it before here on an old mail related thread: my Google powered inbox managed to flag as spam an email from Google Domains about an upcoming renewal.

Some things are just baffling. How can they manage to flag themselves as spam it’s beyond me.

If they had allow-listed themselves that would have been much more disturbing.

The specific address they send their domain-renewal notices from? It would have been "disturbing" if they'd whitelisted that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com