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Tell HN: Gmail Is Not Email

23 points by pcdoodle ↗ HN
Gmail is not Email

We were lucky enough to have a product idea that sold out immediately after some coverage on a few tech sites (A tiny hardware product for nerds).

Trying to update our customers, we sent out an email to about 500 people via Shopify, the spot the little guys use to do eCommerce. No links in the email at all, just a text based update that we’re here and working hard to keep up with demand.

Ever since then, every email we send to a gmail user (including friends and family) get’s bounced. It’s not even in their spam box! We have since added google dns txt records and via something they call postmaster tools and we still can’t get emails out.

Text only, no links, no phone number, just a product update from a small company.

Gmail is not Email anymore.

9 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 26.2 ms ] thread
mguerville
While I sympathize I would say that if you're emailing from a new domain and have not done your SPF, DKIM and DMARC records correctly (or at all) it's understandable that your emails are getting blocked, and it's probably not just by Gmail.

You wouldn't buy from an ecommerce site that doesn't have SSL and HTTPS, in fact your browser may try to slow you down if you even attempt this. Likewise emailing people for business reasons now requires doing the bare minimum of work to inform the various email providers that your messages are legitimate, and at the scale that Gmail operates filtering messages based on crude but generally good rules seems like a good idea for the benefit of their users.

Setting up your email properly is a couple hours worth of work at most by the way, look up sites like MX Tool Box or search for the topic of "email deliverability" and you'll find tutorials tailored to nearly any email provider you may be using.

Good luck

jacquesm
This does not match my experience. Even mail from trusted addresses that have been working for years and whose mail servers have not changed routinely gets dropped entirely, spam binned, flagged as malicious and whatever else. And I don't mail all that often to begin with. But the biggest source of spam is gmail itself.
mguerville
I've heard enough of these horror stories to know it's a real problem, even if only for a relatively small percentage of users it's not acceptable (even more so because of their notorious lackadaisical support/recovery process). That said in the case of OP it seems they didn't do any of the basics steps to improve deliverability, so in that particular case I think pinning the blame entirely on Gmail is a stretch.
jacquesm
I don't see them claiming the same happened to Microsoft, Yahoo or other email providers and I know for a fact that all of that stuff has happened to me from mail servers that seemed to be configured just fine.
pcdoodle
Thanks for sharing.

We can't reply to email questions from gmail users asking for an update on our shipping progress, so in this case, the customer is emailing us and we're not able to reply. We've since reverted to calling the customer to respond. Left a voicemail to one this morning and got a text back: "Don't worry take your time".

reachableceo
They said they sent the email via Shopify. Are you saying Shopify doesn’t have good deliverability?
heartbeats
Disagree. Email is Gmail. If other email providers do not comply to the de-facto GMail standard, that is an implementation error on their part. It is not possible for Google to make a mistake, only to accidentally invent a new specification.
tomklein
I run my own email server an never had any issues with email deliverability. There must be a reason for these bounces. Any SMTP logs?
edmundsauto
I understand your frustration, but your title just... doesn't make sense? Unless your definition of email includes letting your emails through.

And while you're frustrated, you're here to vent. That's fine and good, but when you make absolute statements that are clearly not true for ~99% of the audience, you lose your opportunity to land your message. In this case, I think you would have been better off asking this community for help - but you came in hot, didn't include any debug information, and concluded with a line that actually made me laugh a little because of its absurdity (sorry!).

IMO, the best way to work w/ big players when you are a small one is to treat them as a force of nature. You don't get mad at the weather, you adapt to it when it throws you for a loop.