It’s Official: Google is censoring emails from me

JadedByPolitics

a few people via google as well and it’s making ME CRAZY Probably just all US right-wingers…LOL!

strategerist

As someone who worked in IT, specifically in email and messaging, it occurs to me that there are a number of possible scenarios that could find your email not being delivered that have nothing to do with your ideology.

That said, I am open to the idea that Google might be hostile to conservative email users but it seems to me that the risk / reward ratio for that kind of policy is way out of wack. That someone might whistle blow or figure it out through data analysis or experimentation would be some bad PR and yet – what is Google to gain from this? It’s not like shutting down the RNC.

Call me receptive but skeptical.

Bill S

But it gives Neil another chance to get in a Google hit, though, so it was worth it…

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

- My server is a dedicated server which I’ve been running for months.

- My server only hosts email and website for a few domains that I control, including moelane.com and unlikelyvoter.com

- I don’t send bulk email. I don’t send unsolicited email. I never have. I never will. The only emails my server has ever sent out to gmail.com are to people I know or to people who have registered to comment at MoeLane.com.

And yet I’m getting this message from Google:

Our system has detected an unusual amount of unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily Please visit http://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html to review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines.

It’s a lie. Just like when they block conservatives at Blogger for spam, when they aren’t, or block videos at Youtube for being inappropriate, when they aren’t.

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

If you have seen email from me today it’s because it was bounced through redstate.com.

http://stixblog.com Black River Wolf

also acting up on Google Groups.

I noticed that Gmail, Google Groups have been acting up the past week or so. I wonder if it has to do with the launch of the new Googel Docs, they rebuilt the whole thing.

Bill S

That does sound a bit suspicious…

mcg

Perhaps a spambot has identified your server as an open relay and is using it to funnel unsolicited mail. Just a thought. It does happen…

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

The only gmail.com accounts my server’s emailed are emails by me or to MoeLane.com registrants.

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

I mean for crying out loud, is there a single SMTP server anymore that even defaults to open relaying?

You’d have to actively turn that on these days. I Certainly didn’t.

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

No relaying allowed for public addresses.

SteveLA

Neil

Could an evil doer Liberal IT type reported your domain as a spammer to Black Spot or one of the other spam reporting which I am going to assume Google utilizes? No real spam problem, just a report.

The trick of reporting a domain as a spammer without proof has been done before.

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

It’s the same garbage that happens on every other Google service.

Broken by design.

Considering I coincidentally *just* got around to adding my personal domain to the site along with ML and UV, and spent a lot of time adding getting IMAP and client-side spamassassin going, it’s the wrong time to try to tell me my MTA is misconfigured. Of all times, I know now it’s not.

SteveLA

http://www.spamhaus.org/

See if someone playing games put your domain in as a spammer.

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

This is clearly a Google-specific thing.

Which is what I predicted all along. Legitimate RBL maintainers use good faith efforts to keep honest people from being caught.

Google is not operating in good faith. They’re happy to let conservative be caught in these traps.

SteveLA

Neil

OK, I don’t have a goat to gore in this one, but it will be interesting to see if it’s like you think or is some sort of other screw up by Google at work.

Stuff does happen, and no I’m not defending Google.

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

Well, Google has one easy way to prove their innocence: Tear down this wall.

http://www.800cart.com Ron Robinson

They are mad at you because you keep things like KDE at sourceforge instead of code.google.com?

Obviously, just kidding =;-)

Others will eventually notice that Google is heavy enough to try to tilt the world left, but it won’t work, and it won’t serve them.

Small wonder they dropped the ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto just over a year ago. One has to wonder whatever led them to adopt such a slogan in the first place – it’s such an obvious giveaway to a twisted mind. What were they thinking? What are they thinking??

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

I never spammed, so if it’s technical, it’s done in bad faith.

They can prove me wrong simply by tearing down this wall.

mcg

But my server gets regularly pinged from China with all sorts of common username/password combinations in hopes of hitting on winning combination. Even if they fail to bust through it’s a drag. I opted to remove my SMTP server altogether and use a third-party’s server. For my other more irreplaceable services I had to set up some firewall rules and I still have to monitor my logs diligently. Anyway, I’m glad you checked.

snowshooze

And the best way to battle them is not to use them.
I have an account there, but I don’t utilize it.
With them sucking up to Obama and seeing dollars in it, they sort of declared themselves. Just dump ‘em

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

… all four of which I created, and all four have real random passwords. No dictionary attack possible.

Plus again, I checked the logs for the last week. No spams sent go gmail.com at all.

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

But I try to email people who *do* use them, and those emails are being blockaded.

Some of us need to keep hustling for work in this Obama economy.

edstate

If I hadn’t seen several “conservative” videos blanked from YouTube, or had their numbers frozen (as to halt it’s “viral” nature) I’d think you’re crazy. But it’s happened too often to ignore.

qixlqatl

I’m no IT guy, somehow Google just doesn’t pass the smell test for me. As a private enterprise, they are free to run their operation anyway they see fit….and as a private citizen I am (currently) free to not use them.

GregInFla

You only get what you pay for, gmail users! If enough people realize this, maybe they’ll give up Google. Google scans all emails its account holders get, so as to customize the google ads they put on your screen. With enough hosting services, like my provider, offering hosting at $6 a month with a free domain, with ability to host many domains, why would I want to trust google with my email? Does not anyone ask themselves: why am I getting this stuff for free?

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

No legitimate RBL is blocking me.

It’s just Google.

Put 2 and 2 together.

Conservatives who want to be able to communicate with people must not use gmail.

GregInFla

You may not be getting all your email. Change email providers. The time is now!

klondike

Does anyone remember when G**gle blackballed first MyPetJawa because one of its members had outed a radical Islamist planning jihad on the United States? The suspect was investigated, charged, and found guilty. G**gle prevented the web site from appearing in its search engines because it said the site contained “hate speech.”

Google then prevented Michelle Malkin’s site from showing up on searches. I can’t remember if she sued or threatened to sue, but G**gle backed off.

When China demanded that G**gle and Yahoo turn over the e-mail addresses of users, Yahoo said h*ll no, but G**gle readily turned them over, knowing full well that it very well could mean imprisonment and possibly death to its users.

I have not used G**gle for at least ten years. It has a license to store your every search term for 32 years. There are alternatives. One is Scr**gle, which uses G**gle’s search engines via proxy but does not store any information beyond 48 hours. I have donated to that site because they expose G**gle for the radical leftist site that it is. There is another search engine that claims no storage beyond 24 hours, but it hijacked my default home page to itself and I had to obtain technical assistance to fix it, so I will not offer the name.

G**gle is as radical as our current president. Do not trust it. It wishes to control information, which I suspect is the reason it is so enamored and partnering with the current administration.

GregInFla

Our family is an Apple family (and has been for 25 years), and I’d rather pay for me.com and mobileMe than use google’s cloud stuff for free. Nothing is truly “free”.

klondike

I have a conservative military friend with whom I have kept in touch with for years via e-mail. Last year he sent me a new g*mail address. I replied that he would never receive any communication from me to that address. He’s been deployed so many times that there is no way he can keep up with this stuff, even though he is technically quite savvy. He is one of the least naive friends I have, but when it comes to technology, he is. I’ll give him a pass because he takes his job of keeping my a*s alive seriously.

qixlqatl

That does tend to earn an individual a fair amount of latitude among men of goodwill.

skavoovie

Taking a look at your mail environment, there are several things that you can do that will ensure you’re not getting blocked.

1) your PTR record is generic — this is a big no-no:

aa.aa.5746.static.theplanet.com.

something associated with one of your domains.

2) you have no SPF records to indicate what IPs are authorized to send mail from your domains

$ dig -t txt unlikelyvoter.com +short

$ dig -t txt moelane.com +short

3) See if you can sign up for GMail’s FBL (“feedback loop”). This will provide information on emails sent from your server that are being tagged as spam.

If you want to get all conspiracy theorist, it would most likely take only several subscribers who signed up to get your mailings for the explicit purpose of marking them as spam, in order to block your mail and cause you headaches.

4) if you want to go all out, look into DKIM-signing your outbound messages.

skavoovie

Oops,. #1 got lopped off. That should have read:

“Have your hosting provider set it to something associated with one of your domains. moelane.com or unlikelyvoter.com would be ideal.”

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

What does any of that do to refute the fact that I don’t send bulk emails and that google is the only one saying I spam?

You are changing the subject.

P.s,, you’re even wrong as my personal domain is spfed and blocked. Ha ha.

http://www.libertytreehugger.com reverelth

Google is the new Area 51.

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

The FCC isn’t implementing real NN but just plain Internet regulation.

acat

The Obama administration seems to be offering ISPs a devil’s bargain – implement the “fairness doctrine” stuff and the government won’t force them to implement the technical parts.

As well as Obama did among techies, I’d like to believe that this bait-and-switch would sour them on Dems but .. too many techies are utopians at heart, willing to believe that the Dems can bring about the impossible.

Mew

http://erickbrockway.wordpress.com/ Erick Brockway

…it BETTER be going in my spam folder, where ”I’ll” decide if it’s legit. I don’t need them telling me.

mcg

They would flag *incoming* email as spam, and *refuse to deliver it*. Not even in some sort of quarrantine envelope with SPAM or something written in the header. This was not good—our customers were seeing their emails to us bounce.

GoDaddy hemmed and hawed, claimed that it was due to their spamhaus filter, (but guess what, even GMail emails were being blocked). Finally figured out for *ourselves* that certain URLs embedded in the email were flagged as suspicious. Nevermind that they were OUR URLs.

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

If I emailed you tonight, you would not get it.

Time to find a new email service, Erick.

http://www.libertytreehugger.com reverelth

Whose identities and spam blocking logic they guard like kryptonite. Which is why I ping-pong some inbound and outbound stuff through G-man-mail, ironically.

Viator

I use gmail and find that many communications from groups on the right are routinely marked as scams. As far as I know they are not not delivered, but then how would I know? I am an avid consumer of political information so I also get communications from left wing groups. Not one of them has ever been marked as a scam. Whether this is Google Corp or just the left manipulating rules by singling out our email as scams I don’t know.

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

No reputable RBL would, eihter, because guess what: I don’t send bulk emails. I don’t send unsolicited emails. I don’t spam.

http://erickbrockway.wordpress.com/ Erick Brockway

And it isn’t gmail for the critical stuff.

mcg

I’m just saying, I sympathize with the frustration that when you can’t depend on email getting to its destination through no fault of your own. These email providers seem more than willing to step on the little guy and just let email bounce or even disappear to save a bit of bandwidth.

skavoovie

No, I’m not changing the subject. You’re being offered some helpful tips from an anti-spam industry expert — take it leave it.

I guess the question is what your main priority is — getting your mail through or bad-mouthing the google behemeth.

The odds that Google has decided to reject your mail based upon content is pretty small, unless others are running a coordinated effort to flag your mail as spam to grief you.

That being said, your best bet is to do everything you can to ensure your MTA is as standards-compliant as possible, thereby reducing your odds of getting blocked again once your IP is cleared.

You indicate you have an SPF record for a 3rd domain…if it’s coming from the same source IP as these other 2 domains, it doesn’t matter — if your MTA got blocked for traffic from one domain, it’s blocked.

Good luck.

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

So I’m here to educate and to expose the dangers of activists relying on Google.

The fact is too many conservatives and Republicans DO use them and they need to know how much of an unreliable, bad faith actor the company is.

The fact is I don’t send bulk emails. I haven’t run a single, solitary mailing list of any kind on the server in question. I also don’t send unsolicited emails. I don’t spam.

Google is either grossly incompetent at this or shamelessly biased. Pick one.

strategerist

OK Neil, it definitely sounds plausible and even likely – especially after reading about the experiences of others.

I switched my home page to bing a while back after the Google suggestions would not even hint at climate gate. I still use it to search, but not automatically.

It has been in the back of my mind that as interesting as they are, they are becoming so large and powerful that it is hard to imagine them not being tempted to, at the minimum, “nudge” things in directions they agree with. Maybe it’s not concerted, maybe its not focused (maybe it is) but just a few tweaks here and there – now right wing emails are statistically more likely to be encumbered and lost, left leaning search results (and companies) bubble to the top and annoying little websites can get “lost”.

Once you realize that they have more money and material success than they could spend in a few generations, you start to ponder what might make people like that tick. Usually it is the bigger picture stuff – making the world “better” and influencing people and outcomes.

You should continue to exhaust every possible technical solution, but you might also consider calling them.

Viator: it would be interesting to do some testing to see what happens when you sign up for leftist mails vs right wing mails and see how they are handled.

I honestly have no problem with companies trying to influence things, as long as they are open about it which, if half these things are true, they clearly are not.

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

I’ll just warn everyone I deal with, including paying customers of Google’s, that Google is doing this.

I gave them a warning of their server bug via their site as a courtesy to friends of mine who can’t get a new email address at the drop of a hat.

That’s it though. I’m not going to work for free to try to please them when my site is fine and not spamming.

The idea that you think I’d spend valuable time doing that is laughable. I have businesses to run. I have values to fight for.

I’m not going to bow to Google’s embrace-and-extend of SMTP.

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

GoDaddy lied to you.

Google is lying to me.

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

But I’m not going to spend valuable time reconfiguring a working, non-spamming server to please them.

Unless they want to pay me my full rate for consulting, andt hen I’ll consider it.

http://www.barrypopik.com barrypopik

My website uses Google Adsense and I make less than five bucks a day on over 5,000 researched articles.

The Dallas Morning News profiled me two weeks ago, and the writer called Google to ask if it makes any sense that this guy’s earning only $6 a day. Google responded that no, he (me) should be earning more. It was part of the story.

Ever since then the article came out, my web traffic has DECREASED by a third and my Google Adsense earnings have DECREASED to a mere three bucks a day.

And there’s no way to check Google.

Google can place you first or they can place you last, and you’re at their mercy.

There’s a reason why Teddy Roosevelt broke up monopolies.

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

People just need to use other services.

http://xmmlbchat.blogspot.com katesmith

A couple of years ago, was finally turned back on after a few days. I wouldn’t even know how to spam anything, am completely non-commercial and non-technical. There was no reason whatever to shut me down (except that my point of view on any topic would have been opposite google’s and I’d received information that I was pissing a lot of people off-even though almost no one reads the blog). I researched the matter at the time and found many accounts of conservative sites being shut down by blogger/google for farfetched claims of spam blogging.

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

And that’s why I long ago predicted this would eventually happen on gmail.

Rob_McEwen

Neil,

Please take skavoovie’s advice regarding your reverse DNS.

Sure, if google doesn’t have spam on file sent from your IP,, then it is their mistake.

HOWEVER–if you don’t fix your rDNS, then you give them every right to have a “hair trigger” on your IP.

WHY? Because it is now industry standard that the domain at the end of a properly formatted and NOT-dynamic-looking rDNS conveys both *reputation* and *identity*.

But leaving your rDNS as one with a bunch of items separated by dots and hyphens… then ending with a hoster or ISPs domain… that fails to convey identity and reputation and then appears to various spam filters as a dynamically assigned IP that shouldn’t be sending spam. (the new spam assassin actually adds points to the spam score over this!–or at least a very popular addon to SA does that)

Think of this another way… >99% of all spam comes from IPs with a dynamic-looking rDNS (your IP is better than most of those, but still not quite right). And 99% of spammers do and what <1% of legit senders do if you want to be treated fairly and without bad unintended consequences by ISPs and spam filters. Make sense?

Similarly, it is a bad idea to walk into a bank and waive around a squirt gun that looks exactly like a real gun. Such a person can argue all day about how they never did (or could) actually shoot somebody… but they’d be on shaky ground complaining about getting tackled (or even shot!) by the bank’s security guard.

BTW – the invaluement.com blacklist which I manage does NOT block merely based on someone having a bad or dynamic reverse DNS. However, in situations like your IP, the “rug is pulled out” from under my False Positive Prevention filter and that puts a “hair trigger” on IPs like your IP. Most of the time, this doesn’t cause problems because it takes an actual spam to trigger an invaluement listing (and very few mistakes are made). Incidentally, even with your rDNS situation, your IP still just score just barely high enough in my FP-prevention-filter to not be listable on invaluement, even if a spam from your IP hit my traps… but that is actually unusual for an IP with such a dynamic-formatted rDNS. In contrast, had your rDNS ended in “.moelane.com” or “hakubi.us” (without too many hypens/dashes), then that False-Positive-Prevention score wouldn’t have even been close.

So please follow industry standards and change your rDNS to something that conveys both *reputation* and *identity*, and is not dynamic-looking. Then, at the least, you’ll then know if gmail is REALLY targeting you, or if this is just a case of your poorly-configured rDNS combined with some OTHER strange (but innocent) factor to cause this listing.

So you have much to gain by fixing your rDNS, and little to lose.

(btw – when you change that,, make sure that the hostname you change your rDNS to resolves back to the IP as well.)

I hope this advice helps you!

Rob_McEwen

Particularly that one sentence which SHOULD have read:

“If you do something that >99% of spammers do, that <1% of legit senders do, and which doesn’t follow industry standard ‘best practices’, should you really expect to be treated fairly and without bad unintended consequences by ISPs and spam filters.”

http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

Google has accused me of sending bulk, unsolicited email, which is false.

None of what you say has anything to do with that.

So you’re just changing the subject.

If Google wants to pay me to do free work for them, they can pay me my usual rate. I don’t work for free for socialists.

RS

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It’s Official: Google is censoring emails from me

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