FYI: comments like yours are more effective when posted at least a day later, lest they end up looking silly when the "silence" is eventually broken - as it is now.
It is still very effective, it took you a day later to respond to the parent.
OP Comment: 25 April 2023, 00:41:52 AM
Yours: 26 April 2023, 03:18:06 AM
I was expecting a response much earlier than that since the answer is very obvious. Instead you decided to come up with a typical anecdote which can easily be dismissed.
The main fact is, almost everyone knows that you lose LOTS of users emailing you once a provider like GMail blocks you as it is the most used email provider. [0]
> It is still very effective, it took you a day later to respond to the parent.
My apologies for not being terminally online.
> Instead you decided to come up with a typical anecdote which can easily be dismissed.
Which is fair, but
1. It still makes your "silence" comment look premature, and
2. If even I can still get mails delivered to GMail inboxen as an ordinary person running a personal mail server, an actual (legitimate) business should have no trouble with that whatsoever, and
3. There was more in that comment besides the anecdote, and your decision to dismiss it out-of-hand - much like your decision to prematurely declare the existence of "silence" on a topic - does not reflect charitably on you.
> The main fact is, almost everyone knows that you lose LOTS of users emailing you once a provider like GMail blocks you
Do you have any examples of GMail blocking its own users from sending an email to a domain it doesn't like? Like I mentioned in the other comment: it's more typical for it to be the other way around, and more typical than that for it to be a soft block (mail going to Spam) than a hard block (hard bouncing of mail).
Unless you've got such an example, calling that a "fact" (let alone the main one) would make Elastigirl pull a muscle; like sure, that'd indeed be pretty thoroughly inconvenient, much like it'd be inconvenient if Behemecoatyl took over my mind and compelled me to shut down my mail server, but I'm unaware for much (non-fictional) precedent for either. Even in my anecdotal case where AT&T does indeed hard-bounce emails from me to my grandpa, my grandpa can still send me emails just fine.
So says the one with 9000+ HN points, sitting here for a decade and still commenting here every. day.
There's no need for you to apologize for making me laugh at you for not being able to look at the time and it's clear you're very upset over the *silence* comment.
> 1. It still makes your "silence" comment look premature, and
Premature to what? The answer is obvious to everyone and the link I gave earlier already explains the amount of email users one would lose if they were filtered and blacklisted from Gmail which is the whole point of the parent's comment.
If I were to collect lots of emails for a newsletter, I can guarantee you that most of them will be Gmail users and if my domain was blacklisted by Gmail, my reach will be significantly limited, either having it being sent straight into the spam folder or even outright blocked by Gmail by the advanced spam filters.
> 2. If even I can still get mails delivered to GMail inboxen as an ordinary person running a personal mail server, an actual (legitimate) business should have no trouble with that whatsoever.
But most people still go with centralized services as outlined by the article I gave earlier, and they don't run their own email services either. What if this 'actual (legitimate) business' is using GSuite, Exchange, etc which has the same anti-spam checks and blacklists as well?
> Do you have any examples of GMail blocking its own users from sending an email to a domain it doesn't like?
It has been known that GMail has a so-called 'dangerous url' list(s) to prevent its own users from sending emails to domains on their blacklist. [0] There are countless reports on social media which GMail blocks the sending of emails from such domains. Once example: [1], and another [2].
In both cases either way, the centralized email providers get to decide what goes through their spam filters and blacklists and that negatively affect those running their own email servers and trying to reach users that are on centralized email providers like Gmail. Henceforth such problems like this [3].
So in conclusion: Your reach will be significantly limited if you do not pass Gmail's spam filters (or any other of the major email providers filters) and users don't run their own services because: (1) They are not techies or sysadmins, (2) Even if they were they can't deal with the insurmountable spam issues and (3) They would rather sign up to a managed solution on a centralized platform than maintain it themselves. Hence this again: [4]
