DKIM, DMARC, SPF, rDNS/PTR, EHLO… all correct and verified in the email “original source,” BY GOOGLE. Still goes to SPAM folder because **** you, apparently. I hate Google.
I stopped thinking of any email as “private” regardless of where it’s hosted, when I realized that everyone I email uses Gmail anyways; so all my emails end up going to Google anyways.
It made me an email nihilist
I hate it. it was supposed to be open standard
Microsoft Exchange and the web-based Outlook probably still has a plurality of email volume, because of their dominance in enterprise. Even on the web based consumer space, Apple and Yahoo still have significant market share.
I work for state government and even we have trouble with email reputation issues from the big orgs. It’s a pain for everyone.
This is done on purpose, to make people to switch to their e-mail or use them for hosting.
Google did the same thing with XMPP (they were welcomed when they joined, then they made it so XMPP users couldn’t message GTalk/Hangouts users, but the other way worked), they tried similar thing with Usenet, but they never get dominance there so they let their services to be major source of spam on Usenet until they were blocked, ultimately removing Usenet indexing from Google).
I would really encourage to contact our local reps (both federal as well as state) and encourage them to introduce legislation that would punish this practice.
Me and a couple other people have ran into on the internet have thought that we need to invent “email 2”, a clean slate implementation of email that serves it’s asynchronous long form and attachment friendly function while leaving behind Decades of Cruft . We can make it into an encrypted by default and have conveniences that we never had before. It might even be an actual useful thing instead of just being the thing you sign up for accounts with to get to 2fa codes and spam from websites you buy stuff from
Frankly, I’m rather shocked it hasn’t happened by now.
We’ve tried to bandaid over it with various weird things, but fundamentally SMTP is just weird.
I could easily imagine a domain having some SRV record to advertise “hey, I support NeoSMTP”, and peers switching to that instead, possibly pinning on successful NeoSMTP negotiation.
Get rid of a lot of the relaying which has not been useful in modern times and only a liability, and perhaps offer an https option to be less likely to be blocked (a TXT record to indicate url, and a node could declare their NeoSMTP entry point as https://mail.server/NeoSMTP/ or whatever works for them).
Oh, there have been plenty. The issue though is the classic “make a better standard, and now you have N+1 standards”.
Everything is wrong with SMTP. It’s still in use because it’s supported everywhere. Anything that wants to replace it either needs to entirely replace it in one fell swoop, or it needs to be backwards compatible.The result is that occasionally a new thing comes up, a handful of people try it but there isn’t critical mass to make other features really useful so it fades.
Hence my references to DNS records in addition to MX to determine if an endpoint is SMTP only or better. For compatible interop.
But that’s the thing: now you haven’t made an email replacement, you’ve made email more complicated.
If you’re backwards compatible you need a very compelling feature to get people to switch, and using the feature is limited until people switch.
That’s how we added spf, dkim, dmarc and starttls.
The biggest difficulty is managing the layers of compatibility.
It’s fine if Legacy email Remains the thing that could spend whereas email 2 can be used for actual correspondence between people
You’ll have to walk me through what you mean by that. I’m not sure how what I’m hearing you say would improve anything.
I run my own mailserver in docker and it’s not so hard! There was some difficulty at the start with mail going to spam, but after a little while “warming up” the IP with usage, it works fine. It’s hardest to build an IP’s reputation in the beginning because if your mail goes to spam, it doesn’t typically lead to healthy conversations that can support it’s history.
My trick was to forward all my incoming gmail messages from the account I was replacing into the new server - that way I could receive and reply from the new mailserver if people sent mail to the old one. Once it built up a bit of a history it started working fine, and that took maybe a few conversations over a couple of days.
The thing I have noticed is that you very quickly get destroyed by incoming spam - a more advanced filter is definitely on the list.
One of the problems with self hosting is that a lot of IP addresses have historically been used for spam and still have a bad reputation. If you get assigned one of those IP addresses there’s very little you can do about your mails going to spam.
Another is most ISPs will put your IP in the PBL so unless you use a relay your outbound email is going nowhere. Google fiber was slow on updating their PBL when they rolled out service in my area so I got to send direct for several months before having to use an external relay.
You can use MXToolbox to check for blacklists on your IP. If you find any, you can submit to each party to get removed. I’ve done this for a previous company and it was super easy.
*fuck
I have this problem for a while as well. Similar to you all mechanisms are implemented multiple sites say the configuration is correct, even headers in Gmail say DKIM and SPF passed. E-mail arrives everywhere except for gmail.
Thanks for posting, at least I know I’m not the only one.
Most email providers block new domains… You need to have the DNS records up for like 2 years before they start getting accepted… Or contact all the big doers to get yourself whitelisted
They claim its for spam prevention which is why most ISPs actually also block outgoing SMTP port 25.
The dumb thing is, all it really does is push spammers onto using botted/stolen accounts which work way more effectively, and everyone else is forced to set up their email with Google or Microsoft.
If your domain isn’t big enough to be recognized, all that SPF and DMARC won’t mean crap to them.
i never had problems with Google, but Outlook always blocks my emails, just because it’s not a standard .com .net etc domain…
I put dog shit in my ass and Google knew five minutes before it happened, filmed it, and sold it back to me as a custom highlight of my home alone shenanigans. I find this a bit egregious, personally.
Probably bad place to ask but.
Self hosting email is complicated only for sending mails or for receiving mail it’s also hard?
Depending on what you want to do you might not need to actually send any mail.
Also, the anti-spam rules do also apply if you are answering a mail, I suppose it does as a response envelopement doesn’t have any evidence that it’s an actual response. But I have no experience self hosting email.
Self hosting receiving mail is honestly, pretty straightforward, all things considered. Setup your MX record to point at a server you control, configure software to save messages however you want. Perhaps the most complicated step is wiring up certbot or similar software to get your SSL certificate for your mailserver. A Debian Linux system,
apt-get install postfix; apt-get install dovecotwill get you nearly 90% of the way there.Depending on your preference. there are docker containers that can do 100% of the process too, with all sorts of nice bells and whistles. If you don’t care about sending email, you can skip DKIM/SPF/DMARC. (though, if you are never sending from your domain, check here: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/dns-records/protect-domains-without-email/ – there are some entries you can add to DNS to make sure everyone else knows)
Running your own email server is also a good way to get a ton of headaches from your isp
I’ve started mine and it works fine. All the Google shit goes straight to the bin though.
Do you send enough email to classify for Google to allow you to contest your status as spam? Because there is a minimum.
Google can still automatically mark your message as spam if enough people mark it as such or you trigger spam identification too often (this can happen if you send frequent test emails with not much in them) - it’s not neccesarily an attack on you. But plenty of spammers will send perfectly well verified emails today, so you are just caught in the crossfire.
Try sending a gmail account you still have access to a couple of genuine looking mails (eg. At least a paragraph of legible text and with a signature), then marking the messages as not spam. That worked for me. Even after that though, one line messages can still trigger the spam detection.
