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Comment by Nathanael_M | Hacker News Reader

I hope we get regular updates. Email deliverability is a frustration outside of the M365/Gmail ecosystems, but it’s not as bad as it’s sometimes made out to be, and I’m optimistic that increased rigour with the implementation of SPF/DMARC/DKIM will lead to better deliverability across the board. I’m curious if they see increases/decreases in spam, missed messages, successful phishing attempts, etc. Lastly, I’d love to know if they have had to change any security policies, and how are they handling identity management across the organization.

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> Email deliverability is a frustration outside of the M365/Gmail ecosystems, but it’s not as bad as it’s sometimes made out to be […] I’m curious if they see increases/decreases in spam, missed messages, successful phishing attempts, etc.

It's probably not much of an issue in this specific case. If someone doesn't get your email, that's your (the sender's) problem; but if someone doesn't get the government's email, then that's their (the recipient's) problem.

To add to this, most emails are likely within the organization and/or between public institution.

E-Mail was (last time I checked) not an approved medium for delivery of important documents as it does not (per design) have a mandatory receipt of the message being delivered. So a citizens does not need to worry a lot about this for important documents/mail.

(Fax was so popular for public institutions in Germany because it satisfied this standard. It meant it usually was the lowest barrier option and you could rely on it for all (un)important documents)

As former email admin, it’s not bad if someone is dedicated to it and you have your own block of IP. It’s frustrating for self hosting because lack of your IPs and most people don’t want spend free time on this busy work.

Even if you do ALL the techinical work you can still find yourself banned/ignored as I learned years ago the hard way.. even big providers outside MS/Goog duopoly finds themselves partially unable to deliver business emails at times.. fun times for a small shop (not).

We operate an MSP business for tens of thousands of customers and have our own ASN, but gmail outright refuses all our corporate email. Why? We do not know and gmail refuses to tell us. Their postmaster tools lie, are incomplete, display no data, display errors or contain no useful information. There is no human postmaster to contact, all our attempts have been ignored successfully. It’s downright silly but we have to send our corporate mail via a paid third party relay to be delivered to gmail.

These gmail postmaster tools seems to exist to make antitrust cases difficult, not to enable other MSPs to deal with deliverability issues.

At the same time gmail is emerging as the number one source of spam for our customers. If our spam fighting is too tight we falsely flag important mail as spam, and this is absolutely unacceptable to customers. As a consequence we have to relax our spam classification for gmail senders, which manifests itself in false negatives from the perspective of our customer.

But to the customers this reflects on us, not on gmail.

It’s just gmails best interests to make other MSPs miserable to operate. It drives our users to them.

Can I ask if it’s the domain or the IP?

Are you suggesting that people who want to communicate with their government might have to have an account with a service that is not M365/GMail?

And?

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