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.
> 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.