(no subject)

[denise]

People getting mail at Gmail are reporting email delays of about an hour. As far as I can figure out, it's because some of our recent changes to our network have wiped out our existing sending reputation with them and made us start building reputation again, and they're refusing all mail on first delivery and making us re-send it. (It's a common spam reduction technique, because spammers don't bother retrying if the first attempt fails.)

There isn't much we can do about it but wait it out until Gmail decides that we're legit senders again, but we'll poke at it and see if there's anything we can do to make the process go faster. (I doubt there will be, though; Gmail is persnickety.) In the meantime, to get comment notification email faster, you can switch your confirmed email to a different provider, or just refresh your on-DW inbox.

EDIT: And people are now letting me know that mail's delayed to other providers, too, which is probably follow-on effects from having to send everything to Gmail at least twice. There isn't a lot we can do about it; I'm sorry about the hassle, folks.

Comments

Re: a friend at Google

[denise]

Given the volume we're discussing, whitelists are hella impractical for this sort of thing, alas. There are a number of protocols that have been bolted on top of email that providers can use to cause a receiver to identify their mail as more likely to be legit. They're extremely bolted-on, massively imperfect, and each of them can break various things a mail sender might want to do in various ways. We use most of them -- the ones that don't break our particular use case -- but since they're extremely bolted-on and massively imperfect, major email providers don't always put a ton of weight on them.

The fundamental, basic problem that email is a protocol that assumes trust and good faith, deriving as it does from the days when everybody knew everybody who was on the internet and if somebody was doing a dumbshit thing you could call up the network admin at their institution and ask them to walk down the hall and tell their user to stop doing dumbshit things, and therefore doesn't scale at all to tens of billions of emails being sent daily. Major email providers like Gmail have zero incentive to ensure perfect delivery and significant incentive to reduce the amount of spam they pass through and store.