On 4/14/2022 12:02 PM, Grant Taylor via mailop wrote:
On 4/13/22 9:32 PM, Rob McEwen via mailop wrote:
fwiw, I've confirmed at some point within the past couple of years -
directly with Brandon Long of Google - that, yes, Google does have
this extra after-connection filtering, where a message can
potentially be spam filtered even though the sender's mail server
received a "250 OK" response.
Pre-coffee Devil's advocate here.
Where do the RFCs say that a 250 (2xy) response message after the end
of the DATA means that the message MUST be delivered to the mailbox?
RFCs often only cover the bare minimum of "best practices" - and are
often antiqued, too (although that would apply to other things). Many
poorly run email systems, /*do*/ barely follow RFCs. Furthermore, fwiw,
MANY professionals in the business world (perhaps most of them?) - have
the strong impression that a lack of a bounce message - on a hand-typed
non-spam message - means that the message was delivered to the inbox.
That's a hard reality regardless of what RFCs say. When more systems do
this badly - it frustrates people and makes them hate email. ("RFCs this
or that" - doesn't change this! And we can and should do better!)
That the message may have been in the recipients' google spam folder
- is something I already acknowledged, but that's "besides the point".
Is it /really/ besides the point?
In those situations where a message is spam filtered *after* the
connection and the sender got a 250 OK response - AND - it was a hand
typed not-spam false positives - the message being in the spam folder
does NOT solve/fix/justify/resolve a number of bad things that harm
people in this scenario. So yes, that it was in the spam folder *is*
"besides the points" that I was made in my earlier post.
So -- if I may twist your words a little bit -- you admit that you are
okay with filtering /after/ the message is accepted.
You twisted my words so badly - that this doesn't deserve a response. I
don't think that any reasonble person reading my original post - would
have characterized what I said this manner - it's a very inaccurate
summary of what I said - almost offensively so. Certain, reading your
summary of what I said was FRUSTATING - almost like dealing with a
Troll. Come'on Grant - you're better than this!
ALSO - this reminds me - another inferior practice of some of these
largest email providers - including Google - is the lack of support
and willingness/ability to make changes in response to egregious
filtering mistakes. IT staff of their customers are OFTEN told by
these large providers - "it is what it is" - with no willingness to
look into SMTP logs and figure out and fix exactly what went wrong -
but level of service doesn't scale, right? (But yet they STILL charge
premium prices per mailbox - so in spite of this - their REVENUE
"scales"!)
On the flip side of the coin, when was the last time you had /any/
company of /any/ size make /any/ change based on a complaint? Of
those complaints, how long did the change persist? -- My limited
experience, only the smallest of companies will be willing to make a
change. There might even be an inverse relationship between the size
and the likelihood that a change will be accepted and persist.
Some very large providers do a much better job than Google. Google is
just extremely determined to reduce labor costs as much as possible and
squeeze as much profit as possible. Some other large email providers
have a better balance between this and customer service and quality of
service.) I can understand Google being like this for Gmail - but I'm
reguarly hear first-hand examples of this from paying G-suite customers
(or from their IT staff or vendor who was involved).
In short, yes, Google sends LOTS of spam. But based on the percentage
of numbers, it's probably much smaller percentage spam to ham leaving
their network than it is leaving most of our networks. So....
Not accurate. For just 2 examples - while Microsoft's freemail system is
NOT doing that great in this area either - but for just one example - I
just did the math - and the number of gmail addresses hitting my
spamtraps in the past 72 hours - is a 37-to-1 ratio of gmail spams vs
Microsoft's freemail system (outlook/hotmail/etc). While Gmail has a
larger system, it's not nearly 37 times larger. It's something like 4x
or 5x larger. So that calculates to about a 700% increase in addresses
used by spammers compared to total number of users - in comparision to
Microsoft's freemail system. OUCH! So I don't buy this excuses for Google!
Then, when you compare the amount of spams sent from paid business
hosting - spams from Google G-Suite - absolutely blows away spam sent
from Proofpoint/Cloudmark - that's not even close - this is likely a
larger ratio than 37-to-1 - and those are likely comparable sized
systems. I don't have the exact numbers - but I'm confident that the
number-of-outbound spams ratio per number of users (and per outbound
legit email) sent from Google G-suite - far surpases this same *RATIO*
for Proofpoint/Cloudmark. (Proofpoint/Cloudmark has somethink like 1
BILLION business mailboxes!)
Plus, at least for G-suite - their increased revenue - also negates much
of that "but they're too big to do it" excuse.
-- Rob McEwen, invaluement
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