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 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.
Running your own email server is also a good way to get a ton of headaches from your isp
Wrong. If you aren’t up to the task of hosting email that’s fine but discouraging others from trying is the opposite direction we should be going.
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.
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.
It’s fine if Legacy email Remains the thing that could spend whereas email 2 can be used for actual correspondence between people
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.
Jmap is also an emerging standard. https://jmap.io/
Looks like replacing IMAP rather than SMTP, which is significantly less thorny.
Love this idea!
I feel like Arcane/Delta Chat is a step toward this. It somehow uses an email protocol and it works just like Signal or any other message app! I dunno how the heck it works but it’s super cool.
That’s something I want too: An open standard my friends and family can be on, where “the market” isn’t.
Edit: I see, it seems the issue in the main thread is:
- Gmail blocks custom servers as spam 99% of the time.
- 99% of normieverse uses Gmail. :(
But getting people on other email providers to talk to each other… shouldn’t be an issue then?
“normieverse” hit me like a brick
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.
If you want you can PM me your dkim and dmarc and SPF policy. Or just send me your url and I’ll look it up. I used to fix these for a living. It’s likely an issue with your SPF not being properly annotated.
Do you have any go to guides or even an overview of how you generally diagnose email problems would be awesome!
Just reading the bounce backs and spam errors when sending to Gmail and other providers.
That’s cool of you to offer that to them.
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.
They claim its for spam prevention which is why most ISPs actually also block outgoing SMTP port 25.
European ISPs block egress port 25, not American ones, generally. Not sure about the rest of the world.
In Europe, one refuge is to send using the GSM networks, which tend not to block egress 25 for some reason.
not American ones, generally.
Well then screw you AT&T lmao
AT&T is the worst of the worst. And I boycott them for countless reasons like snooping on their own customers voluntarily without a warrant. It’s really a hard-right corp. In any case, never tried them so I didn’t know they blocked egress 25.
One trick that works if truth-in-advertising laws are in force: ask the sales people before subscribing if the block port 25. They always say “no, we block nothing” (in my experience). So you subscribe and sign the contract. Then when you see they actually block 25, you have a false advertising situation and also a contract violation (if either verbal contracts are enforcable or if you can get it in writing that nothing is blocked). So you complain. In my experience, they give a gratis upgrade to an enterprise level of service that generally has a static IP and no blocks – for the price of the residential plan you signed up for.
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.
i never had problems with Google, but Outlook always blocks my emails, just because it’s not a standard .com .net etc domain…
Google Groups allows spammers to subscribe you to their groups in a workspace account, but doesn’t allow you to unsubscribe since you’re not part of that workspace account… Worse - all autoresponders for the spam will also be forwarded to all members of said group.
Since I do not participate in Google Groups, the nuclear option is to file all mails from Google Groups as spam with a Sieve script.
Note the
requirepart may be too large as may sieve script also contains more rules than this one.require ["body", "date", "editheader", "envelope", "fileinto", "imap4flags", "mailbox", "regex", "reject", "variables"]; if anyof( header :contains "List-Subscribe" "groups.google.com", header :matches "X-Google-Group-Id" "*" ) { if header :matches "Subject" "*" { set "subject" "${1}"; } else { set "subject" ""; } deleteheader "Subject"; addheader :last "Subject" "[Google-Groups-Spam] ${subject}"; fileinto "Junk"; }autoresponders for the spam will also be forwarded to all members of said group.
This sounds like a pretty effective way to get yourself unsubscribed from groups you don’t want to be in.
They will be drowned in hundreds of „Thanks for your email, but we don’t do support via mail. Please open a ticket at $URL“ and „Thanks for your mail, we will get back to you shortly. Your ticket ID is #123456“. Also everything you add as an auto response will be distributed to all other victims in that group, so I chose to not be a dick.
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.
You can request to be removed from the list by SpamHaus. Worked for me. But for still need to make sure everything is set up currently (which is true is tedious) or you go right back onto the list.
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
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
I self-hosted my own email for a few years, everything was set up and reporting correctly, but Google just would never have it. I think the worst is it would be a bit inconsistent.
Anyway, I switched to an email provider with my own domain and it’s much more reliable. That is until this week, I have noticed that some services are rejecting my domain. I think there is some whitelisting nonsense going on, but in those instances I just use an alias and that seems to work.
I just want to have control of my data!
I just want to have control of my data!
Google:
IP rep?