On 10/01/2026 11:23, Peter N. M. Hansteen via mailop wrote:
On Fri, Jan 09, 2026 at 10:43:04PM +0100, John Fawcett via mailop wrote:
I am not sure it makes sense to talk about "the worse the domain reputation"
for domains that actually have never sent a single spam, have never had any
complaints raised by recipients and meet all the requirements (DKIM, SPF,
DMARC etc), but nevertheless have email blocked or sent to spam folder
because they are not big senders for which statistics are calculated. Such
domains have 0% spam whereas Google is accepting email from senders that
have up to 0.3% spam providing they send enough of it.
I've had some communication from people plausibly claiming to be close to the
actual developement and maintenance of the gmail codebase after I posted the
message that started this thread (and after I had already published the
current https://nxdomain.no/~peter/blogposts/00_LATEST_ENTRY.html).
My impression, or at least the way I read what was in that communication, is
that
* It's a large code base that has been evolving over a *long* time
* The system is complicated enough and with enough factors (in the hundreds)
involved that feeding the same message through the system several times is
likely to produce different results each time
* The messages the system produces for external parties to see are unspecific
at best and may in fact point to factors other than those that actually
determined the pass/no pass decision
* The code has passed through many hands, and I at least get the impression
that nobody currently there can honestly say they understand all aspects
of the system
Despite all of this, they trust the system absolutely, claiming that it has
a negligible false positive rate.
The last bit *I* at least thing is a delusion that is sustained by the fact
that they have made it pretty much impossible to file a problem report. It
likely is easier for paying customers, but the only way in I have found is
to post my gripes in public.
And yes, for every incident (there have been quite a few over the years)
I have used side channels to contact my GOOG-using connections and ask them
to file a problem report with as much details as possible. That seems to
help, sometimes.
I had thought up a really snappy and harsh one-liner to end this one, but
I'll save that for another occasion.
All the best,
Peter
I am largely in agreement with the argument "my network my rules", since
in my opinion no provider has to accept other people's email and the
provider's customers are free to make their own choice if they find they
are not receiving email they want. But on the other hand for providers
with a significant market share the very negligible overall effect on
people sending and receiving email will tend to work against resolving
the problem and I can well believe that there is a low false positive rate.
However the fact remains that that they end up blocking or sending to
spam folder messages that not only are not spam, but for which it would
be impossible to point to any characteristic that would indicate it was
potentially a spam, except for the low volume of (non spam) email being
received. Seems to me that it could potentially fall within the realm of
antitrust practices (i.e. abuse of a dominant market position), but it
would need someone who was that interested about people not receiving
their email to pursue it.
In the meantime, maybe the best work around would be to host a few
legitimate mailiing lists to pump up the volume of email over the
threahold to be noticied as a non spammer.
John
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