[carbonica]

It is truly disheartening to see you'd been downvoted when I came into this thread.

The truth is, the OP's domain was probably considered to be in a bad "neighborhood" because his mail server had been compromised for spamming purposes at one point or another. It's dreadfully easy to either misconfigure a mail server or to end up with your mail server compromised.

Regardless, it's easy to hate on Google, especially in a primarily entrepreneurial forum where those posting are often trying to solve tough problems with far fewer resources. But Google is solving tough problems, even when you feel you've been wronged by an algorithm. Gmail has had an unbelievably successful spam filter for years, forcing the competition to rise to the occasion and match it, to the point where people forget how serious a problem spam is. It's not trivial, and it doesn't mean there's a democratic crisis when your e-mails end up in a spam bin. Especially when it's quite likely because your mail server was compromised.

[davidw]

> Regardless, it's easy to hate on Google, especially in a primarily entrepreneurial forum where those posting are often trying to solve tough problems with far fewer resources. But Google is solving tough problems,

I didn't feel the 'hate'. I read that he didn't particularly care for Google's approach. He certainly says nothing about Google not solving tough problems.

I thought it was a pretty fair piece actually, giving Google credit where it's due, and without trying to demonize them; just stating that he doesn't agree with where they're going.

[kragen]

No, our mail server has never been compromised for spamming purposes. I'm well aware of how easy it is to misconfigure a mail server, and it's not that I think we are too smart or paranoid to have done so; it's just that in the years that we've been struggling with that problem, we've never discovered that misconfiguration, or discovered outgoing spam (other than bounces from e.g. kragen-tol-request.)

I hope I didn't come across as "hating on Google."

[jff]

All it takes to be considered a "bad neighborhood" is to have a dynamic, ISP-owned IP, as I found out when I tried to send mail from my personal server. And yes, I'm too cheap to pay Comcast even more money for a static IP.

[kragen]

That problem is serious, but our server has never been on a dynamic IP or an ISP-owned IP, so it's a slightly different problem than our problem.

[abecedarius]

I run my own mailserver too and saw some similar problems from early on, though not AFAIK with gmail in particular. If it ever has been compromised, I doubt it was right away.