Started looking into ente to replace Google Photos and Gmail marked them as spam
Coincidence? Surely Google knows this is a legitimate company.
Coincidence? Surely Google knows this is a legitimate company.
It’s more likely that Ente is:
All those hoops with their market share make it poisonous to the whole E-Mail space, same as Outlook. And despite that, 90% of spam i receive is from a random Gmail adress still. I strongly recommend ditching Gmail for a paid provider, better for your privacy too.
For the few things I can't change, gmail is filtering 99% of the actual spam. Only got a handful of emails that actually went through the filter.
My point is, despite the hoops to not be marked as spam from gmail, there's a lot of gmail spammers around.
Honestly virtually all verification mail lands in spam on most free providers.
And it's no wonder. Try running your own server sending these mails before you judge. My company needs to put a lot of work into this.
Why?
Because spam is rampant. So in return, anti-spam filters are extremely strict. And there's dozens and dozens and dozens of hoops to jump, and holding one leg just a tiny bit wrong immediately gets you spam filtered everywhere.
You might think "This sucks, just don't block as much!", but you're not seeing the thousands of mails that never even reach your spam folder because the server-to-server traffic already blocks them and they don't make it through that. The percentage blocked is crazy. Spam is that bad.
Yes. And spam filters aren't hand picked and written. Haven't been for a few decades. They're learning and statistical.
Like another comment said, the mails are hitting some traffic rules and having correlations in their text with phishing scams or something that pushes their score to the negative enough to "warn the user" level but not enough to file as spam or reject completely.
Also, even if "Google knows it's a legitimate company", it's somewhere between stupidly hard and impossible to tell if an email came from that company. And again, nobody would keep a hand curated list of "legitimate companies" and their email for an ever growing list of companies. Even if that was possible to do.
Of course it's possible to do. We've already done it for physical mail.
If (enormous if) the EU or FTC cared to issue a digital signing certificate to legally registered companies then this would basically solve the problem of trust. Now it'd be up to the government to deal with fraud cases, which would be much more manageable since spam offenders would necessarily have a uniquely identifiable certificate with a literal physical address attached (yes, fraud exists there, but the barrier to entry is orders of magnitude higher).
Plain SMTP's trust model is broken but only legislative apathy enables Google to position themselves as the internet watchdog/bouncer.
If their spam filter is “learning,” and if new signup verification emails are a consistent decades-old practice, how much longer should we wait before it’s okay to question whether Google’s filter could do better at learning?
When worked at Google I remember hearing a rumor from the GMail team that more than half of all messages are rejected early in the pipeline before even running the main spam filter. As in the majority of attempts to send mail to Google users is so obviously spam that it doesn't even end up in the Spam folder. What does land in your spam folder is a tiny fraction of all spam.
People understand how bad spam is.
I wonder how much more profitable would it be for the spam mail centers to just switch over to mining crypto
Not a lot at all, as you can run a spam mail center on a potato. People underestimate how power-/hardware-inefficient crypto really is, and how that alone already makes it unusable for banking at large.
Yeah but how much do you get out of your spam server if most providers just discard what you send out?
It's funny how Google can data mine and use AI to target the user for ads with pinpoint precision, but they can't effectively filter spam.
Yes, spam is rampant, but it's not that difficult to filter when you're Google.
The truly wild thing about subscription pricing to me is how viscerally I'm against it. I'm not shitting on this business model, I think it makes perfect sense and is probably the only logical way to run a business like this. I'm just saying that everything in our lives is trying so hard to turn everything into a recurring fee that my first reaction to every recurring fee is pure hatred.
Alright, so the amount of data I'd need for pictures is probably the 500GB tier, so $9.99/mo. My first thought is that's way too expensive, my second thought is that I'm not doing another subscription. My subscription-trauma addled brain will happily justify buying a little server, and a 1TB hard drive, and spending hours configuring them. By the time I'm done, I'll have spent the equivalent of at least 3 years of the cost of this service, plus tons of my free time, and it will never work exactly right because there's always going to need to be updates, and sometimes those will break something, and I'll need to fix it myself.
Anyway, it looks cool though.
Cloud storage is something I'm okay paying for. In general, if I want near 100 percent uptime, I'm ok paying for it, because the alternative is making sure it works by myself, and I have much more important shit to do.
I'm ok with subscription cloud storage provided it's easy to move everything off of it to somewhere else and they don't make me jump through ridiculous hopes to access it.
I was paying for Google drive until they killed the Back Up and Sync desktop app. The original app let you sync any individual file in any directory, and you could pick and choose how each was synced.
Then they killed that and replaced it with a desktop app they have now that creates a Google partition of sorts that the user can't enter, shoves all your files in it, and forces you to use the app to manage what files are currently sitting on your own computer.
You can still do the individual syncing I think but you can't pick and choose which files are synced and which stay on the cloud. You have to keep it all downloaded and synced or none.
I got all the rest and I see your issue with wanting to sync only individual files. But I didn't quite get what you mean with this: "...that the user can’t enter". You can enter and copy/move/edit files... I cannot understand what you meant with that.
Regarding the sync thing, I am not as annoyed by it as much as you seem, and my use case probably was different, but in case it helps somebody what I opted to was to use it as a disk and use tools that work with disks, so in my case although other tools could be used I use FreeFileSync to copy files from the Drive to a local drive and viceversa. Mostly for backup purposes.
I would be tempted to say in some cases it is even better as in the past you needed to to use their APIs or use their tool to setup those specific sync options and now I can use any tool that works with copying/using normal files.
That said... for other environments like a server or similar, then you are back to RClone and API auths or similar to do actions on your drive.
You have to keep it all downloaded and synced or none.
This is me just nitpicking, but you can flag folders/files to be available offline and it will keep a local copy always, but it will be in their drive thingy. So you can access it even when offline but it's not copied outside their virtual disk. It's just a right click menu option.
Makes sense. Are there any alternatives which lets you pick and choose which objects to sync on the file level? I didn't really know that was an option except for finangling rsync with cron jobs or something.
One of my biggest concerns with subscriptions has to do with death. It feels gross to imagine companies just entitling themselves to my bank account after I’m gone, providing no value to anything, until someone comes along and cancels everything. Feels like one last free cash grab that could go on for years. I imagine board members congratulating each other for legally looting a dead man’s corpse.
One of the reasons that I use Google photos is for the automatic backup of pictures I take. I'm working towards self hosting, and I haven't got to this one yet, but that service is pretty nice. Also, when I'm traveling, I'll take a handful pictures side by side, and Google will stitch a panorama for me. I spend time snowboarding in the mountains and hiking in tropical areas, and that's the best way to capture a landscape that I've used.
GCam and photospheres! I'm so mad they dropped photospheres on the Pixel 8 line, it's so good for travel landscapes.
I’m just saying that everything in our lives is trying so hard to turn everything into a recurring fee that my first reaction to every recurring fee is pure hatred.
But OTOH, it has ~always been that everything semi-worthwhile in our loves has been a recurring cost.
Food, sex, children, relationships, even things luxury/benign such as cars which are often mistaken for a one-time payment but really are not.
I doubt it's because it's a competing service and it's more likely because it's a .io TLD... which is notorious for being used by phishers, spammers, and scammers unfortunately.
I have sent an email to my gmail from an io domain with no issue… it took a lot of server side configuration though.
Not so sure about that, a quick search through my emails reveals emails from mend.io and codesandbox.io that had no trouble getting to me.
That said, I have found that even some sites that have .io don't have it in their emails, they use a slightly different domain.
So maybe some sites have been whitelisted or it's one of many heuristics Google uses.
Seeing lots of wrong answers here, though I can't guarantee I'll be any more accurate. But I have a feeling this has to do with how ente.io's email egress is set up.
They have three email origins provided (all from Zoho): Zoho, ZCsend, and TransMail. I would expect that Zoho is for support and business email, ZCsend is for marketing, and TransMail handles transactional emails such as billing and password resets. That said, I only see a domain key for Zoho attached to their ente.io domain. This means when Gmail's SMTP servers might not be able to successfully authenticate the email's origin if it's sent through ZCsend or TransMail, leading them to take the default action of marking spam for an unauthenticated marketing-/phishing-esque email.
TL;DR Google most likely isn't doing this intentionally, but rather ente.io's email service might not be configured the best and Gmail is unable to distinguish it from what it considers spam as a result.
"ente Verification Code" also looks like a misspelling of "Enter Verification Code". Might also be tripping something up.
Wow, this is really insightful! Thank you so much for digging into this. I learned something!
This might help too:
https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126?hl=en
There’s a “Requirements for all senders” that’s got a note:
Starting February 1, 2024, all senders who send email to Gmail accounts must meet the requirements in this section.
Didn't knew the service, tried looking it up. Was surprised at first but, yeah "Ente" is "Duck" in German. So, that makes sense. (Funny though that it not shows me facts about the animal, but the best way to eat it)
But no it's Malayalam for "Mine". Devs are not German but Indian malayalees(mostly).
എന്റെ
I think you need to search specific species to see facts about an animal e.g. Stockente (Mallard).
Nvmd. the german collective article for "Ente" has the article for duck meat at the 2nd position right after the definition :p
Is tasty though.
I wouldn't read too much in to it. I have recently received false positives on GoG emails. I suspect Google would much rather have a whole bunch of false positives than one missed positive. Bad PR and such.
If you haven't already just report it as not spam
How do you like it? I'd be interested in leaving photos but it looks like it's be a pain to set everything up. Do they have a good import system?
I hear good things about them. The core team seems solid as far as engineering experience goes, and as long as they don't sell out or get acquired they're a pretty viable replacement.
I've only been using it since... well... since I posted this. But so far the experience is great! They have an easy guide for migrating from Google Photos (basically they can import a Takeout export directly).
https://ente.io/faq/migration/from-google-photos/
I've got it installed on my phone with automatic backups enabled. It had no issues with duplicates from both Takeout and the existing photos on my phone. (I even did the upload twice due to running out of space the first time, and there were no dupes). The app has a pretty similar design to Google Photos, so it feels familiar. It also supports Google's version of "live photos".
You can create links to share albums or individual photos, and you can also add people to your plan.
I enabled the local machine learning analysis and, while it's not perfect, it does make for a pretty nice searching experience.
P.S. I promise this is not an ad! I'm running out of Google storage and figured this was as good a time as any to de-Google my photos. Ente came up as a frequent cloud solution. If you're looking for self-hosted, Immich is far and away the most popular.
