Comment by LeonM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LeonM | Hacker News Reader

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Rarely have I seen such concise and respectful way of describing the typical rants I see on HN way to often, bravo! I can only wish I had your writing skills.

> It's insulting to the folks that are pouring their time replying to what they think is a user in need of technical assistance, only to eventually stop replying when it becomes obvious that he only replies with questions of morality and treats most answers as if they were platitudes specifically attempting to dismiss his efforts to communicate.

Yes, I have been bitten by this many times. Every time I see a topic like this one I try to help that person by offering technical advice, basically doing my consulting job for free for everyone to read. And many times the post gets downvoted till its dead.

Slowly I learned that people don't want a solution to their problem, they just want to vent their (understandable) frustration about $BIGCORP. But it still hurts to get downvoted when you just try to help.

This is essentially HN with every single Google related post nowadays. Good or bad, people hate Google, they hate it the way they used to hate Microsoft, they see everything it does as being nefarious.

People ignore the email spammers, SEO spammers, automated password crackers and blame google for the solutions they put in place to combat those things.

It's impossible to reason with them, honestly I think it's just best to ignore posts like this.

I am not an email spammer, an SEO spammer, an automated password cracker, or a jaded failed Google canidate.

I have my mailserver configured in pretty much an optimal way, with all the special bells and whistles, have never sent spam, and never will.

Gmail refuses to deliver my mail, so please don't lump me in with malicious people and then say my concerns should just be ignored.

And is your server sitting on the same IP range as those that do? Do you know?

Google provides a service to its users, they don't provide a service to you.

Why would you assume that?

Isn't receiving legitimate email and delivering it to Inboxes part of the service it provides to its users?

Filtering SPAM mail with an acceptable false positive and false negative rate is part of the service.

Unfortunately for you, the e-mail providers' customers (the users receiving the mail) get to decide what is an unacceptably high false positive/negative rate --- and not you. If e-mail recipients get too much SPAM or if they get mail that they want landing in their Spam folder too often, then they will switch. This provides the economic incentive for mail providers to Get Things Right.

Unfortunately, there is so much spam out there that if you are too relaxed with letting marginal e-mails (or e-mails from marginal network neighborhoods through) the false negative rate could result in so much spam in users' inbox that they will get mad, and switch.

However, it can happen that the email provider can be too sensitive, and there can be too high of a false positive rate. For example MIT recently tried relying Microsoft's spam filtering system. Way too much stuff landed in the spam filter, and while you could go to the spam filter and manually mark e-mails as "not spam" and eventually Microsoft's ML algorithms would hopefully figure it out, the false positive rate was too high and the MIT community (especially the ones with the real power, e.g., the professors) rose up with an outcry, and MIT abandoned using Microsoft's Spam filtering service.

My experience is that the email provider's customers have very little say in the matter. I deal with complaints from Customers who use Office 365 and Gmail about false positives regularly. They aren't MIT-profile Customers, so their complaints are ignored. The complaint usually turns into "Why can't this sender just use Google or Microsoft for their email like 'everybody' else?"

It depends on the customer. If you're an Office 365 customer who is a major enterprise with huge numbers of paid users, and your CIO goes golfing with Microsoft board members, you have a huge amount of power. Similarly, if you are an MIT Professor you have vast amounts of power.

They can be pile driving right next to the machine room, and causing disk drive errors, and Physical Plant won't care if the I/T folks complain. But if some Sloan School professors complained that it was disturbing their cogitations, it immediately stopped and Phys. Plant called a "stakeholder meeting" and it was really obvious who had the power.

All customers are equal, but some customers are more equal than others.

That may be true, but unless you post relevant technical details, that means nothing to strangers in the Internet.

Have you considered using a full TLD and hosting and/or relaying through a reputable service. I've used mailgun and sendgrid both for moderate accounts for outbound email and didn't have any issues. There's also hosting options for mail ranging from fastmail, to google, MS and others.

In the end, TFA is from a subdomain that seems to have a lot of spam, and to avoid it may mean using A commercial option, if not a specific commercial option. It sucks.. but the mail relays I mention above are relatively cheap and easy to properly setup with limited issues on the other side.

I am not interested in a third party handling mail for me.

If you were doing everything right it would work, unless you sent email from an IP known to send spam in the past. That doesn't necessarily mean you did, but it does mean your IP did at some point. Given the saturation of the ipv4 space this isn't exceptionally unlikely. In any case, your post is contrarian and doesn't offer any substance aside from the fact that you are angry. That's kind of saddening because that was already pointed out as exactly the problem.

"People irrationally hate X" may be perfectly true, but is not a reason why any particular, or most, or the most significant, criticisms of X are wrong or should be ignored.

Even the particular people who irrationally hate something are obviously likely to also run across the good reasons for hating it.

It's not reasonable to say "criticism X doesn't count anymore because we've heard it too many times".

That can be annoying...

Pro tip: start by briefly acknowledging the frustration, then offer the technical solution/workaround.

Even technical people are people. This tip can help defuse the frustration, making the recipient more willing to listen to the technical solution.

People forget sometimes that the person on the other end of the screen isn’t a computer that is completely unmoved by silly things like emotion and frustration.

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