On 2022-04-13 at 17:43:58 UTC-0400 (Wed, 13 Apr 2022 23:43:58 +0200)
Paul Vixie via mailop <[email protected]>
is rumored to have said:

> it's troubling me that in a recent thread asking where to host mailboxes, 
> google was recommended several times, in spite of the fact that google is 
> provably wrong and provably non-transarent in how they decide what inbound 
> e-mail to reject.

Yes, but they are a step above their most direct competitors (MS & Oath) in 
providing cheap retail mailboxes, in that they do seem to absolutely positively 
deliver if they say 250 at end-of-data. Maybe they deliver it to the Spam 
folder, but they deliver. The others, not so much. And for the normal everyday 
use by the end user of the mailbox, GMail is as decent as webmail gets and 
their IMAP support is somehow better than MS.

From the PoV of managing mail for smallish senders (people-to-people business, 
discussion lists, small-scale non-spam B2C) GMail is absolutely the least 
problematic large mailbox provider I deal with. GMail delivery to the spam 
folder can be annoying, but it IS soluble. MS rejecting mail from an IP that 
their feedback systems insist is not being blocked is not. Yahoo accepting mail 
that never arrives anywhere is not. GMX having completely opaque failure modes 
is not.

> of all constituencies, this one, mailop, is one i would have expected to know 
> better than to cooperate with your oppressor.

It's a great theory. Unfortunately for the non-spamming mail system operator, 
the email world is dominated by de facto bad actors. Mailbox providers have 
settled on ZERO as the base value for their mailboxes, so the big competitive 
ones are all pretty shoddy in absolute terms. End users of the mailboxes do not 
see it the same way. Until they have an inappropriate delivery to Spam or 
rejection which they notice, they will not see Google as problematic. Most will 
not have such issues regularly. That's true of any retail mailbox. Very few 
will ever have trouble with mail that they send via Google, which is also true 
of other big providers but not so much out on the long tail of providers trying 
to deliver to them.

At a higher level, Internet email is premised on universal cooperation. The 
narrative of "oppression" just can't fit that. Google deliverability is nowhere 
near the top of my list of chronic problems as a mail admin. I wouldn't choose 
them for my own use, but my tastes are not those of a normal user. No change 
they can be reasonably expected to make would substantively reduce my headaches.




-- 
Bill Cole
[email protected] or [email protected]
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not Currently Available For Hire
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