Re: Google blocks ISP arbitrarily contrary to their "don't be evil", ignorant fools debate merits of political correctness on NANOG

[Erik L <erik_list () caneris com>]

After you're done adding hate speech and spamming to my list of alleged criminal offences, can you and others please 
not post or e-mail me off-list if you have nothing new to contribute to the resolution of the problem?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ryan Hayes" <ryguillian () gmail com>
To: "Erik L" <erik_list () caneris com>, nanog () nanog org
Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 2010 5:08:18 PM
Subject: Re: What must one do to avoid Gmail's retarded non-spam filtering?

Can you please not use the word "retarded" in a pejorative sense?

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 3:15 PM, Erik L <erik_list () caneris com> wrote:
> I realize that this is somewhat OT, but I'm sure that others on the
> list encounter the same issues and that at least some folks might have
> useful comments.
>
> An increasingly large number of our customers are using Gmail or
> Google Apps and almost all of our OSS/BSS mail is getting spam
> filtered by Google. Among others, these e-mails include invoices,
> order confirmations, payment notifications, customer portal logins,
> and tickets. Almost anything we send to customers on Google ends up in
> their spam folder. This results in a lot of calls and makes much of
> our automation pointless, never mind all the lost sales.
>
> The problem is compounded by those who use mail clients and do not log
> in to the webmail at all, since they would never see the contents of
> the Google spam folder.
>
> We have proper A+PTR records on the edge MTAs, proper SPF records for
> the originating domain, proper Return-Path and other headers, and so
> on. There isn't anything that I can think of other than the content
> itself which would be abnormal, and obviously the content is
> repetitive and can't be changed much. Is there something obvious which
> we've missed?
>
> Aside from the following clearly impractical solutions, what can we
> do? 1. Asking everyone (including those we don't even know yet) to
> whitelist all of our addresses, to check their spam folders, and to
> click on "this is not spam"
> 2. Providing our own free e-mail service to everyone (including those
> we don't even know yet) and putting up "don't use Google" ads on all
> of our customer-facing systems
>
> At least this isn't Hotmail where mail is just silently deleted with
> no NDR after it's accepted by their MTAs.
>
> The call volume has been going up instead of down lately and it's
> gotten to the point where we're sending MTA log extracts to people to
> prove to them that we really did e-mail them.
>
> Would greatly appreciate any advice.
>
> Erik