Gmail email blocking is off the rails (again)

George Michaelson ggm at algebras.org
Thu Dec 5 01:56:39 UTC 2019


I own domains backed by gsuite/postini and they are awesomely spam
free, and good. What I say here shouldn't be taken as saying I don't
want that goodness.

I also work in domains which routinely get mis-tagged as spammy by
google, and that can include replying to google staffers. This isn't
good. Understandable, faking flows into your own mail must be a big
problem for big mail hosters, mainly doing mail for other people.
Oddly, no other enterprise I deal with does this: Only google tags
google staffers as spam, when they interact in GMail and G/Suite.

It would help enormously if google told us A/B Black/White techniques
for our own mail investments in GSuite, which are functionally able to
do things, not just community curated hints. But, the "things you can
do" feels more like "things you can try"

Part of this, is the freemium levels in Google don't go to people. You
have to pay google money to get people to talk to. The second part is
that we want to believe the awesome, but most people you can talk to
in Google are robots with scripts. I have had the great pleasure of
speaking at a meeting, with Google staff present, showing a thing
which is in some sense "something is wrong" and having them get up to
the microphone queue and say "I fixed that" -And it is awesome but its
not repeatable, its not sold as a product to everyone, its rare, and
it actually hurts more than it helps: Privilege outcomes is why people
mail NANOG asking for help. Its not service level, it drives to tweet
storms about problems to get fixed.

For instance, it isn't clear to me how adding addresses to your own
address book does materially interact with spam tagging. I added all
the google staffers I deal with, they are still spam boxed. This is
one of the recommendations from some years back. Did it ever work? Is
it "official" or just an idea? How do you tell?

I fully expect the usual ASCII list of "your idea won't work because"
but the quality I am trying to get to here, is that mail un-spam and
un-filter and un-protect is basically now not just a heuristic, but an
undocumented heuristic: we don't know the interactions of the moving
parts, and when we ask about the moving parts, the answers feel like
smirks. Who you are alters what kind of reply you get back.

-George (posting from a g/suite free edition hosted domain btw)



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