This happened to me. I managed to log in to my childhood Email account (or rather, have it recreated since my dad owned the domain) and open the link from a password recovery email and google still refused to let me in even though I had been logged in on the same computer just minutes ago.
So because their authentication used some stupid heuristic combined with the “no reusing old passwords” thing I was forcibly deplatformed. I’m not making another account, I already wasn’t happy with google and that was enough to make me give them up.
You can self-host. Don't use cheap VPS providers, spammers like cheap VPS too. I can't give US specific advice, but in EU business Internet connection with static IP is good enough. If your finances allow, reputable colocation provider is good way to go. Now you can make your own little digital home; file storage, mail, homepage and so on.
That is worked for me over 15 years, over 5 ISP-s.
Additional bonus: instead well known "+" trick in gmail address you can make real throwaway addresses.
Unfortunately, this may not be enough. I used to self-host, and ended up moving to Fastmail because of deliverability problems to GMail. This was on a physical server hosted at a reputable colo in San Jose. Nobody could ever figure out why I'd often end up in the Spam folder. Not the HN commentariat, not even my SRE friends at Google.
Honestly, it's a huge relief. Self-hosting has gotten much more complicated over the years. It's very nice to know that there's a round-the-clock staff of professionals taking care of security, deliverability, and fighting spam. And software upgrades, of course!
> Nobody could ever figure out why I'd often end up in the Spam folder. Not the HN commentariat, not even my SRE friends at Google.
I had this exact same problem 3ish years ago and bailed out to Fastmail for the same reason. The thing that made me throw in the towel completely was what I found out from someone who looked into it for me after I shook the tree of my professional and social contacts. This person was involved in Gmail but not directly in anti-spam, but told me that my domain had "limited reputation."
That domain, which predates the existence of Google by at least a year, had been hosted on the same IP address (IPv4 and IPv6) for almost a decade, with the same MX, A, and PTR records for the entire time. Nothing at all changed about how that domain was configured. Yet it was intermittently being flagged as "limited reputation" and either dumped in the spam folder or simply accepted for delivery and silently dropped.
I took that domain and moved it to Fastmail 3 years and 3 months ago--I know the exact date because I paid for three years of e-mail service at the time and recently renewed it--and haven't had a problem since because, unlike my single-server operation that used to be considered an equal peer on the Internet but not any more, Fastmail has enough pull and reputation to not have messages from its subscribers blocked by other e-mail hosts.
That makes total sense to me, and my situation was similar. I have often suspected that the problem was just that my mail volume was too low. Which totally fits with my impression of Google as being entirely ok with bad outcome for individuals as long as the percentage is low enough: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23059071
It is notoriously impossible to host your own email. Large email providers have created an oligopoly of email "quality" acceptance, and there's effectively no way to get your deliverability to a reasonable rate unless you use one of them.
I don't think it's necessarily malicious in nature - more the product of spam filtering.
I wonder if email authentication methods like DKIM/SPF/etc.. help this problem these days.
So, You point out that gmail was opaque and unpredictable in thread about google being dangerous? Seems fitting.
Sadly, that is on google, you aren't really safe anywhere, if gmail is involved. You think that using big provider protects you, but in reality some people are complaining about spam marking issues even gmail to gmail communication.
+1 for self-hosting. Doing that for nearly 10 years now, by far the most difficult part is setting up a mail server, but after that you can put on your resume that you know how to configure Postfix (which I am quite certain is one of the most difficult Linux server applications to configure). Backups, webmail, file storage, calendar etc. are quite easy to set up.
Postfix has flexible configuration system with many knobs. I would say though, that official documentation is nice and detailed. Last time I checked Debian defaults looked pretty good, so you don't need fiddle too much to get reasonably useful and secure setup.
I saw migadu in a recent thread on HN and am now a paying customer. But even the free tier is impressive (unlimited domains!) and support is human & very quick so it won't delete your account for non-payment (looking at you mailbox.org)
It's been few years. I am on Mailbox's 12 Euro/year plan which has "forum" only support (I am not sure it changed after I became a customer). My emails suddenly stopped working once and I received email response after a week (which just had an irrelevant link). I had reset the mail setup by then after backing up email from local client. I replied to the email asking what went wrong and never received a reply. They seem very aloof and high-handed about customer support if I may say so.
I am looking at moving my mail provider. I have stopped using @mailbox.org mail for online a/c signups etc (which I did a lot earlier) and have started removing it from wherever it is used already.
Is Migadu stable and been around? How's their service and privacy track record? Did you evaluate any other provider in Euro 12-20/year budget range? My email usage is extremely low volume.
Migadu fan here. They recently overhauled their admin interface and have updated the SPF/DKIM setup. Its $4/month and certainly good. They’re based in Swiss so GDPR compliant. Data stored in France though in a ISO/IEC 27001 compliant datacenter.
Their privacy policy is well written (I have read 100s if not thousands of them in grad school, I can tell you they’re not vague)
Support is human!!! It’s really good to know there’s a human on the other side.
So because their authentication used some stupid heuristic combined with the “no reusing old passwords” thing I was forcibly deplatformed. I’m not making another account, I already wasn’t happy with google and that was enough to make me give them up.