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

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.

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.

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??

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

Google is the new Area 51.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.”