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GMail is Breaking Email

Email is an open system, right? Anyone can send a message to anyone... unless they are on Gmail! School Interviews uses two email servers t...

73 comments
  • And this is how you kill an open standard. Good resource to share with people cheering for Meta to adapt ActivityPub etc.

  • Yeah, I think this is done to provide the illusion of choice. The rate limits are high enough to allow personal emails through, but for any mass emails or corporate emails this forces you to use Google. Unfortunately a standard corporate strategy, it's why corporate office suites are so generic and tend to be from one of the big companies.

    • When I went to the DMV my independent mail server was immediately filtered into spam when I tried to email them my proof of insurance. It was no trivial thing for them to get it out of the spam filter, either

  • In my experience Office 365 is even harder to deliver to. The email envelope can be in perfect shape and sent via sendgrid (their recommended partner) and it will still silently drop mails for no obvious reason and if it does deign to deliver them it will often mark them junk.

    I’m only sending low volume transactional emails. The amount of time I have to spend tweaking the email content just to persuade Microsoft to deliver the mail is absurd.

    • In my experience Office 365 is even harder to deliver to.

      Yep, this is my experience as well.

      I've had some issues with google, but at least they tend to put them in Junk, or tell me the messages are being rejected.

      Microsoft will give me a 250 message, and then route the message to /dev/null.

      That's contrary to the RFCs, and really annoying. Since it doesn't end up in Junk, the receiver can't say 'not junk', and since it doesn't bounce, the sender thinks it has been sent.

      I'm signed up for Microsofts junk mail reporting, and when this happens the UI shows no issues with my ip, and doesn't admit to any e-mail filtering. The only way I can detect it is by sending messages to my test accounts, or waiting for users to yell.

      Fwiw, anyone else who runs in to this scenario, expect your first support ticket with microsoft to be rejected. Keep responding to it. On the second or third try they might end up removing the silent ban.

  • That's why I only use Gmail for website signups. It's very unreliable for any emails that you depend on.

  • Confirmation emails when they create a booking being marked as spam but is that the only email they send out. Do they send out unsolicited ones to folks like me who mark them as spam? Are bots making booking and using my email. Its great they are doing everything right but im skeptical that something else they are doing is not causing the issue. I get plenty of good email in my gmail spam but the ones that do I can bet get marked as spam for good reason. Like from my alma matter which Im sure has a good and trusted endpoint but they can be a bit annoying with their emails and some folks likely mark them as spam. I don't but I could see them getting a reputation of sorts.

  • Could someone please ELI5 this? I get the overall concept but I don't really understand why doing this is convenient for them.

    • They stand to benefit by having a de facto monopoly over email by exploiting their position as one of the biggest email providers in the world

      "Monopoly" may not be the right word since Microsoft and Yahoo! also seem to be engaging in similar anti-consumer practices, but basically they seek to end the days of independently hosted email providers, which is obviously not good for us

73 comments