#GMail is harmful to e-mail ecosystem; its antispam blocking policy matches too many valid messages as spam.
It blocked LastPass email leak warning email, because it contained "a link" to a leaked site.
It blocked an e-mail from goverment agency addressed directly to me.
It discriminates all non-gmail servers, and it's pretty much impossible to own a private SMTP server these days, because GMail will classify everything as spam.
It's not how e-mail should work.
Consider dropping GMail.
@tho I have an account on ymail.com, but I'm not using it much. Is it worse than gmail?
@antekone the spam filter is infinitely worse. almost every other email is a false positive to me
@tho Well that sucks. I'm using e-mail hosting without its own antispam, and I'm building my own SpamAssassin ruleset. It doesn't do false positives at all, since i.e. I can boost trust for e-mails with my name in them, etc.
Consider dropping Yahoo as well :D
@antekone what for? :O I just moved to it from protonmail (f*ck them tbh, I think protonmail is hugely overrated) aside from the spam issue I like it so far (been using for a couple weeks
@antekone not to mention i was a paid subscriber for a year
@tho Can you elaborate on proton being over-rated? I just moved their last June and Im genuinely interested
@kiudecan I've been using protonmail since beta in 2015 or so (don't really remember, but I applied to receive an invite on their site), I was a subscriber for a year. It is an alright service until you start thinking about moving to another one (right now I can't pay for a subscription), because
1. you can't configure redirection from protonmail to another service
2. you can't export your emails from it to your computer unless you pay them for an extra month 1/...
@kiudecan besides all this encryption thing is not worth a dime. one shouldn't really discuss sensitive stuff via email (and i didn't), but use an instant messenger with good encryption such as XMPP or Wire etc. so all my email is a bunch of spam from sites where i signed up, or changed password etc. there was a case when I couldn't request password change (or something, idr) on a site because I couldn't send mail from a @pm.me address (which I only had read-only access to, after my 2/...
@kiudecan ... subscription expired
@tho thanks for sharing your insights, I actually didnt see that way, and you made some solid points..
Can I ask to what service have you/do you plan to migrate? Tutanota, Zoho, Fastmail.. ?
@kiudecan I moved to yahoo :D
@sossalemaire see my answers a bit above yours
@antekone Another horrible related thing that's starting to happen a lot is that many email sysadmins are getting lazy when it comes to spam set up and simply rejecting all incoming messages from any mail servers that aren't google, ms etc which helps to cement their monopoly even more 😞
@lschuermann @antekone I've been running my own mail server for about 15yr now, and I'm finding that sending to G,MS etc servers is actually working very well nowadays, but you do have to ensure you're config is rock solid including rDNS, IPv6, SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Use a tool like mxtoolbox.com to ensure your server's IP is not blacklisted anywhere, and a tool such as mail-tester.com to analyse and report on the email your server sends.
@aran @antekone Yeah, I'm running mine for a few years now and with the big providers (which *know* how to do Email correctly but sometimes deliberately decide to fuck things up) I never had an issue. Its medium to large company's sysadmins which apparently don't know that services other than their domain and the big webmail providers exist. Even worse, I've got my MX on a subdomain (with is.currently.online, that's a must :D).
@antekone it also blocks sometimes legit emails from Debian without any reason given. not nice :(
@antekone Gmail sucks, more than ever today. @Tutanota or @protonmail all the way.
@tapaniraja @antekone @Tutanota @protonmail You might take a look at https://posteo.de/en/ and https://mailbox.org/en/ also?
@svenbrier @antekone @Tutanota @protonmail Yes, familiar with both. Great alternatives as well.
@antekone The links the send in the reject messages also point to "help" pages that are not helpful and not telling me what they want to see, e.g. https://support.google.com/mail/?p=IPv6AuthError doesn't mention IPv6 at all...
@cm @antekone Speaking of GMail's IPv6 support: even with perfectly configured IPv6 FCrDNS, DMARC, SPF, DKIM, ADSP, etc., Google keeps randomly rejecting e-mail sent using IPv6. Only option: force all outbound e-mail aimed at Google to be sent to a hard-coded IPv4 GMail inbound relay, overriding their DNS. Very clean & convenient... 😕
@antekone The problem with the email service provider market is that people choose their one provider for life. It takes too much time to change hundreds of online (and offline) accounts that have the old address. Most people don’t have a record of who has their email address so they don’t even know who and what needs their new address. This protocol-level vendor lock-in allows for unchallanged abusive policies and hurts competition.
@antekone Longer-from reply at https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/email-identity-provider.html
@antekone I agree with you on most points but "pretty much impossible" does not fully match my experience. I manage my own SMTP server and I interact with Gmail people.
Same, and by run I mean cheat and run mail in a box. But after some initial bounces and spam labelling, I now can send email to new Gmail users without issue.
@robjloranger Same here, too - but I agree with the sentiment in general. @bortzmeyer @antekone
Ya it was disheartening when I had to sometimes use a different email.
I would love to. anybody has some how-to/guidelines/tutorial on how to achieve it?
@robjloranger @bortzmeyer @antekone Gmail is actually not that harsh against self-hosted mail servers, as long as the mail server has a few weeks/months of history. Outlook on the other hand is an absolute mess...
@kindly @bortzmeyer @antekone Gmail doesn't like xyz domains though, which is sad because they are so affordable
@antekone I completely agree! Consider dropping GMail in favor of some smaller provider (not Yahoo or the likes) - there are many remaining and doing a great job in keeping the Internet as open as they can.
@Ventronik @antekone I really like mail.de for example.
@antekone
Yes, definitely. You should drop it.
@antekone (don't let this discourage you from running your own email server though. There are tricks to it, but it's definitely possible, I do it)
@antekone Google provides the dominant service in a number of areas now and shows in all of those areas that if you dominate the market you don't need to provide good service. In many cases the main feature they provide over the competition is unlimited space.
@antekone Okay.
For what?
@antekone gmail should have stayed garfield mail
@antekone Bonus, almost everyone bulk drops any "residential" IP.
@antekone @widerspenst in all of the cases I've seen (people complaining on the internet), peoples mail servers were not blocked because "they're not gmail", but because they weren't implementing the modern abuse protection measures such as DMARC. Given the gravity of the spam problem in email, I would suggest that those are no longer optional. I would hope that any reasonable email server admin would block those emails too.
@antekone
Drop Gmail. Only use for the account here is for login authentication on Google -powned essential infrastructure. The ASB Bank, for example, now insists on a Google account for NFC payments.
@antekone Lol ok, disable gmail anti spam and receive 200+ nigerian spam mails a day!
@antekone
If I could, I'd use gmail only to receive email from people i consider likely to send me spam or for websites that require you to have a valid email to sign up but don't want emails from.
@antekone did that yrs ago.
@antekone I switched to Fastmail, but I get spam in my inbox every day now :(.
@antekone is go so far as to say that Gmail isn’t Internet email, and I suspect that their system isn’t even SMTP standards compliant (though I haven’t had a chance to prove that yet).
It’s like any myriad of old proprietary email systems (AOL, Compuserve, etc.), and you’re right, it’s making its users more and more undeliverable.
@antekone Well, I turned that horse around: my mail server auto-responds to mails from Gmail, telling the sender that I won't (and that they should get themselves a "real mail provider" that respects the privacy of their correspondents).
@IzzyOnDroid
That's the attitude. 🙂
I do that when people send me links to #Dropbox or crap like that.
“Dear X, Your link doesn't work, please upload your files to https://mynextcloudinstallation.example.com/upload” (where /upload is a redirect to a shared directory configured as a file drop).
@antekone
Let me say, in my smuggiest voice:
I
Don't
Have
A
Google
Account.
Never
Had.
😎
😎
😎
@antekone outlook.com has similar issues. It blocks whole IP ranges (e.g. the whole Hetzner IP space) and drops or bounces mails from there (sometimes even silenty).
@antekone Goog seems to put emails from SDF accts in to spam now.
This problem is bigger then most realize. Tons of companies now outsource their email to goog (or outlook) because they get tired of fighting to say off blacklists. Just because it isn't "@gmail.com" doesn't mean it isn't powered by Gmail. You can get yourdoamin.com powered by gmail.
Goog & Outlook.com basically run a protection racket today. Hire them for your email hosting or risk having your domain labeled as spam. 😡
@antekone i see you never used yahoo