This may be a fair sentiment for an educational institution (you're not directly making money from email sending / hopefully admissions marketing doesn't have this problem), but as a candidate I'd be extremely concerned if a company I was going to work with A) couldn't deliver to gmail and B) held the view that it was everyone else's problem. As it is you're statistically leaving half the candidate pool at the door, which is recoverable. A biz that can't deliver to gmail is a terrible smell though.
You have it the wrong way. Noone can make it so that gmail accepts their e-mail. It's the gmail's job after it receives the connection to process the SMTP commands and deliver the message to you.
I mean, assumming that the sender doesn't have broken SMTP client or doesn't follow standards.
It's gmail's user's problem if they don't accept mail or check their Junk folder or use an e-mail provider that they can't contact to solve issues on their side.
In the old days, if I didn't receive mail because my mail provider was rejecting it, it was me who had to talk to them. Free has a cost. And it's gmail users who should be paying it in their time and fruitless attempts at communicating with google. At least they'd realize what company they're enabling and how much it doesn't care about their e-mail.
You can absolutely make it so that gmail accepts your legitimate email if you're delivering email at high scale. A lot of people here running their own email servers would have no problem with the same emails getting delivered if they were hosted on any decently-sized platform, because part of the cost / value of those platforms is that there are human beings doing relationship management with counterparts at Google, fixing deliveribility issues when google is hard-bouncing, or maintaining reputation of IPs (which you can't do -- thats what the original article is running into, it doesn't matter if you've been delivering off the same IP for years if you're only sending small amounts of traffic).
> In the old days, if I didn't receive mail because my mail provider was rejecting it, it was me who had to talk to them. Free has a cost.
In the old days average email user was being inundated with low-quality spam and getting mired in fraud. Google fixed that problem for their end users. In doing so, they made it hard for a small % of people who want to run their own email servers, but they've given all of these people an out -- go sign up with someone who knows what they're doing, and google is going to effectively outsource the fraud/spam management to those companies.
You can tell me I have it wrong but I'm literally just describing the landscape that actively exists and how to navigate around it for anyone who wants to, but you're not taking out google.
> thats what the original article is running into, it doesn't matter if you've been delivering off the same IP for years if you're only sending small amounts of traffic
That suggests a simple solution to the problem that can be done on the gmail side: for any small mail server (to pull a number out of my behind, say less than <200 emails a month to any @gmail address for the last 12 months), white list them if they satisfy the rest of the usual requirements.
Even if someone attempts to game the system and creates a number of servers, for an effective spam campaign it means a large number of servers, costs go up.
It might be worth experimenting with "abusing" this behaviour to put your small server on the Gmail whitelist. Start sending a large number of generated emails to a @gmail.com mailbox, log in and ensure none of it ends up in spam (ideally automate that too :), and there we are. Anyone have any idea how many emails that is? :)
IP churn is a huge problem with email that everyone has to fight, these are the emails you’re getting from like list sellers and the like. And you don’t have to even have to spin up new hardware or vms, you can be in something like aws where you’re attaching new network interfaces, go and do your damage, spin it down and up goes the next one. This actively happens all of the time right now and it happens because you can profitably do it.
We are a relatively small company and we operate our own mail server, mostly out of a shared belief in data privacy among myself and our staff. We self-host most of our tooling (mail, internal chat, Gitlab, CI/CD, and so on). It turns out this is all pretty simple given modern virtualization infrastructure and, in my estimation, has many upsides versus the alternatives.
That said, like the OP, despite having DKIM, SPF, proper DNS, and every other measure applied, it's conceivable that gmail might reject some emails from us. I don't have any memory of that actually happening, but I have heard stories like the OP's several times. It's a fairly common topic in conversation forums about self-hosting email servers. I don't expect the situation to change any time soon—I don't expect Google to change their ways and it would require significant pain for me to surrender to the gmail hegemony.
Gmail's spam filters always err on the false positive side. It's always been like that. Add the opaque nature of google operations, and you can't in good faith place the deliverability burden on third parties. It's like trying to hit bullseye in darts in pitch black darkness.
Best to assume gmail is flawed, which it is, as the parent poster did. At some point Google will realize the image problem and act.
Judging by what ends up in my gmail, very few people "can deliver to gmail" in any kind of reliable fashion. It depends entirely on how messed up the spam filtering is for individual accounts. The only reason I'm still on Gmail is that it's so entrenched in my life that tidying things up to move is a massive pain and will take a long time (and no, forwarding is not a reliable solution; my experience is that even forwarding from one gmail account to another will invariably cause some mail to go the spam folder of the account you forward from - yes there are options that are meant to prevent this; no they don't work reliably, and haven't in the years I've been using it, so it means one more place to check mail).
Getting started now will make it easier though. I just bought a domain, and started emailing from it and using it for new accounts. I still use both emails, but I always reply from the new one. It's a slow transition, but quite a smooth one (I have email clients that can show an unified inbox).
I still have quite a few a accounts under Gmail, but I'll probably do a full change this year.
Having control of my email is very important for me. Google could close my account for any number of reasons (billing dispute, hacked account, etc), and I would lose my actual address since the domain isn't mine
Absolutely, it's gone from "maybe I should move somewhere" to working on untangling things because I know I have to move.
I do have a very old address that is on my own domain, and though that is currently routed to Google, at least that simplifies things a lot, but unfortunately for many years I was not consistently using that address for signing up to things etc.
> A biz that can't deliver to gmail is a terrible smell though.
If anything, it means that teams are probably too independent and that there is no central approval process for things like sending emails.
For example, a lot of companies use products like Greenhouse. I am sure this will send email from your domain on your behalf. If you don't know what you have to talk to the DNS administrators to add a bunch of TXT records to enable that, you will just notice that some percentage of emails never get delivered (or if the product doesn't tell you that they're bouncing, you may never know. how could you?)
If you use something like Zendesk, you'll note how many people have been burned by this. By default, they end up using something like support.yourdomain.com because despite detailed instructions on how to set up the necessary DNS records to send email from youdomain.com, people still fail to do it right and then complain "nobody ever sees my support tickets".
My point is, email has been abused so heavily that it is somewhat difficult to set up a working system. That was my experience when I ran my own email server. Although I did OK with delivery, I also aggressively filtered messages and used greylisting. This broke a lot of broken email systems, whose administrators immediately blamed me. (I had a long back-and-forth with some company that wanted to hire me. Their email system was super broken. They blamed me and said that they weren't interested in a programmer that couldn't set up a mail server. LOL.)
> They blamed me and said that they weren't interested in a programmer that couldn't set up a mail server.
Tangent, but this kind of stuff is super annoying and probably happens far more often than anyone wants to admit. A few friends and I have been commiserating re the incompetence of potential employers who've rejected us because of their own misconfigured environments or fundamental misunderstandings of the systems they run. We had one interviewer close out a candidacy because the code sample "didn't run" on their interview's system -- the traceback showed he had a broken half-Py2/half-Py3 install.
Yeah, you hate to see it. Sometimes you are so far behind in hiring that you can't even get out; there is nobody to ask about that half-Py2/half-Py3 install. It is unfortunate.
In the past year or so, pulling non-spam out of my gmail spam folder has become routine. Previously it was very rare that legitimate mail ended up in my spam folder, including personal mail from my father from an email address he's been using for decades. A biz that call's gmail's problem gmail's problem is not a terrible smell.
