My mail has been back up for a couple of days, but I'm still sorta mad about it. In the end I lost an unknown number of messages between March 29th and April 3rd. Some of those came through, others did not.

GMail needs to cope with spam, I understand, but there were some bad communication choices:

They didn't tell me

I understand that if you immediately notified the account in question, the spammers could adapt. But the fact that gmail-to-gmail email still got through had me off looking for all kinds of other problems.

For people who have had accounts in good standing for years, you'd think they could safely give some subtle indication, perhaps difficult to machine-read, after 6 or 12 hours of rejecting my mail.

They didn't tell my senders (very well)

The error message I posted is a good message: informative, verbose, etc. But for whatever reason, the code 450 doesn't seem well defined as a bounce or delay, because different things happened.

Even worse, for at least some email clients, only the last line is reported to the user, which in this case is "450 4.2.1 your message will be delivered.", (coming from the end of the last sentence: "Please resend your message at a later time; if the user is able to receive mail at that time, your message will be delivered.")

So for some people who tried to send me an email that never got through, they got a bounce that said "your message will be delivered". Perfect.

Anyway, enough ranting. Everything seems fine, and I have a new more robust email architecture.

Today's photographic nomination is in Objects:

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