email doesn't work

Email doesn't work.  The main issue is that spam gets through, whereas legitimate messages get blocked.  This is not fixable -- it is built into email by design.

I thought by using gmail, things would "just work", but it's worse than ever.  Receiving corporate notifications from "noreply" addresses about "omg you've logged in from somewhere", or "you've ordered this product" mostly works.  Conversations about individual business enquiries can not happen because messages either get misclassified as spam by gmail, or rejected by the remote server, or otherwise fail.

Just as the web is a totem for saying "I tried this on your web site, but it didn't work, and what I want to do is ..", so the email is a totem for sending it by post, saying "I tried to email you, but it didn't work, and this is what I wanted to write to you".


In this case, it looks like Sure (the business name) is using an email gateway filtering product from mimecast.  Based on mimecast's documentation, the individual user has blocked my mail domain, which in this case is gmail.com.  For those reading from the future, gmail.com was the bigliest email domain.

I phoned the person, and they hadn't heard of mimecast, and said they hadn't blocked anything, but they would ask their IT to look at it. 

And day after day, millions of people toil away at trying to use this as a communication tool, when it is orders of magnitude less reliable than the traditional postal system.

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