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 -- Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team https://nxdomain.no/~peter/blogposts https://nostarch.com/book-of-pf-4th-edition "Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network traffic" delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after 42673 seconds. _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list [email protected] https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
