Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

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They hurt more than competitors. If anyone from gmail is reading and gives a crap about the collateral damage from policies like these, they have set me back at least a few months in my attempts to adopt a child. The agency my wife and I had been getting licensed through dropped us, citing lack of responsiveness in completing paperwork. But I've been e-mailing them for months with questions clarifying how to fill out unclear forms and they've been ignoring me. I presented them with a history of all the sent e-mails they never answered, and even gave my e-mail address in person last time I was there, asking them to add me to an allow-list, but it didn't make any difference.

It's particularly disappointing because even just getting the process started was delayed when no one answered our initial inquiries of interest for nearly a month. That was when I first figured out it was because my e-mails were getting routed to the agencies' spam folders. At this point, I'm probably just going to have to give in and get a gmail address for the sole purpose of completing an adoption, and then stop using it and go back to my real address.

Who'd have thought this would be the thing preventing me from completely de-googling?

Hiding messages in a spam folder is essentially ghosting. Email servers should reject messages that they consider spam.

I've run into countless problems because of my messages being marked as spam. The worse is that now it as become socially acceptable to ghost people, I never know who ghosted me, the mail server or the person! I've run into "I ignore your email, get the hint" a few times when thinking I was marked as spam and tried to contact people through other means.

Too many false positives to reject everything they consider spam.

Right, and this is exactly why they need to reject. At least the sender would know and could try to contact the receiver to let them know Gmail/outlook is blocking them.

Right now, when you send an email, you don't know if it was received or not and if the lack of answer is a conscious decision or because of filtering.

You can blame the spammers for that.

Do you remember the bad old days of spam?

Left unchecked I think it might have destroyed the e-mail ecosystem entirely.

Regarding the block vs reject, that unfortunately gives a big tip to the people whose working hours are spent trying to defeat three blocks and send you more spam.

Yes I remember, but this was a different world, it was a world without reputation networks, without ip black lists, with SPF/DKIM.

There is not reason at all to suspect that a message from a small server with proper SPF and DKIM that has never sent spam (for real or spoofed, see SPF), is spam. The other half is from small servers that sprung over night and have no reputation.

Half of the spam I receive is from google/outlook/amazon. They don't block each other, do they?

My loss isn't as big as this but I've gotten some Paypal disputes because those users didn't get any of the welcome emails (for a rather costly purchase). My issue has been more with Apple's mail for some reason though.

Thankfully all my customers have been super understanding and were kind to take the disputes back once they were able to locate the emails in the Spam folder. Also I finally decided to just use a "reputed" smtp server to fix my problems (feels like extortion but what can you do).

I've written this before, but it's so sad that something so important and vital like email is so broken and we are the mercy of corps like Google/Apple/Microsoft and everyone has their own secret policy.

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