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0 pointsjandrese5y ago0 comments

I don't think it is an attempt to drive out small players, it's a natural consequnce of domains being almost free to stand up. They just don't provide any level of assurance that the owner isn't a spammer. So the blackhole systems treat them as "probably spammer" and fire up a block at the first whiff of malfeasance.

It's harder to sign up for a Gmail account than it is to register a domain and get some hosting. And Google has their own protections against sending large amounts of mail built-in. The system is as it is now because spammers will abuse it otherwise.

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10 comments · 2 top-level

throwaway20485y ago· 6 in thread

gmail is effectively block by default these days, unless Google has some reason to not block your mail, it will be spamboxed.

bachmeier5y ago

True. It's a mistake to do a job search using gmail. Interview invitations and job offers are going to go straight to spam.

alyandon5y ago

Sending email to Google is always a crap shoot and I still find to this day that sometimes when I send email contains logs to my own account using my own account credentials it'll end up being classified as spam.

Right now, Google is refusing to deliver email from logwatch - giving me the "Message rejected. See https://support.google.com/mail/answer/69585 for more information." so those are going to /dev/null with no recourse to fix it because Google literally doesn't like the content of the email.

The fact that I can't hit a button and tell Google that yes indeed I'm not trying to spam myself is ridiculous.

vbezhenar5y ago

That was the case for me few years ago. But I decided to set up mailserver once more recently and Gmail to my surprise accepted my mails. I configured everything mentioned in article.

That said, my outcoming mail traffic is almost non-existent outside of few test emails, LoL.

hedora5y ago

I have an old, but frequently used email address that got force-moved from a pass through relay to gmail.

After setting gmail to forward everything, I noticed it was sending 33% of my legitimate email to spam.

They don’t let you disable the spam filter, but you can set up an escoteric filter that prevents it from actually putting stuff in spam.

I honestly don’t understand how people cope with gmail. Fastmail is cheap and orders of magnitude better.

mulmen5y ago

I created my gmail account in 2004 I think. Things were different back then. Now there's just 16 years of momentum preventing me from switching.

I like the idea of hosting my own email but even if I get around to doing that I will still need a backup. Fastmail is probably where I will go.

Sami_Lehtinen5y ago

With Outlook you can't unfortunately do that. Create rules, which would un-spam mail. Because filters aren't applied to spam emails at all.

dorfsmay5y ago· 2 in thread

I disagree.

The big email players are accepting mail from universities and large companies with misconfigured email servers. If you use the same rules that Google and Microsoft use to refuse emails, you will be bouncing emails from valid domains. If you don't apply them, you end up accepting spam. The big players are able to deal with the spam using specialised teams and I suspect advanced algos including machine learning.

IF the big players applied their famous rules to everybody equally, everybody, including universities, big companies etc... Would quickly configure thier mail servers properly, which WOULD reduce spam, possibly eliminate it.

Being able to keep inboxes fairly free of spam in a world full of spammers is what distinguis big email providers and enable them to sell their services.

peterwwillis5y ago

> The big players are able to deal with the spam using specialised teams and I suspect advanced algos including machine learning.

I remember when I imagined big companies might use their considerable resources to put together something like that. Then I found out it's just a handful of random engineers cobbling together crap and hiding it behind a fancy domain name.

It is probable that Office365's entire spam filtering system is a very large and ugly spreadsheet that gets passed around between a few teams using a ticketing system.

vitaemec5y ago

I used to work on the O365 antispam team, and I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say in public, but I'm pretty sure I can publicly say "a very large and ugly spreadsheet that gets passed around between a few teams using a ticketing system" is not accurate.

Relevant wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_Online_Protection

Originally, the product started out as an acquisition, and there's still some legacy code that references the old Forefront name. There's about 50 people on the team.

DKIM/DMARC/ARC is worked on by two engineers.

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