The Benefits and Downfalls of Using Gmail or Outlook Hosted Email.

So, lets start off with the fact is we use Gmail for Work.
Nice Interface for accessing email, everyone can work off a single email address, add as many as Alias' as you might need and works 99.5% of the time.

Let's talk about the 0.5%.. you know.. you hit an issue and then you get stonewalled by everyone and told that it's someone else's fault!

So, we sent an email, got delivered.. follow up email, 3 days later and still not been delivered.

So, this is where I look into it...

Delivery incomplete

So, this makes perfect sense to me. There is a DNS Error and Google can't find the MX record of the domain and it's failing...
Going into the Google Admin and Email Log Search and go for the email log.

DNS Error: DNS type 'mx' SERVFAIL

So, that is clearly a DNS Error... Great, let's contact Google Support.


So, they first asked for my domain to which..... they checked to make sure the MX records were correct, surprisingly. they are! So, I tell them again, there is a DNS issue...

I get transferred to someone else, who then couldn't care less... They tell me nothing useful and I tell them I'm not getting an email to send.
They ask for the Message ID which I supply.

Who can guess what they tell me........

The problem is with Outlook.. (Oh yeah, they are using Microsoft365)..

As I tried to say, it's a DNS Error, you aren't contacting Outlook, they say, get your client to contact Outlook.......

No, it's not Outlook's Problem, it's clearly a Google Problem.

I gave up and just closed the chat window... I don't have the time to educate idiot's on something they clearly know nothing about.

This is the problem with Google, Outlook, Yahoo and all the big email providers, they do it by using hundreds of email servers. At any moment in time you could have your email rejected for Spam thanks to one of Googles email servers being listed.
You could have an email not send due to Google DNS having a problem.

You contact support, they tell you something else is the problem, blame it on the other provider, you tell them they are wrong and they just ignore you.
You are just 1 out of 10,000 emails they send in that hour? minute? second? Who cares aslong as you pay!

This is why I love hosting my own email server, OK, it has it's up's and down's.
But, if I get an issue, I can fix it! No, 3 days of this one email not sending, No contacting a moron who doesn't know his DNS from his SMTP..

Support your smaller IT people.. I'm here at SquareComp!

Fuck Google, Fuck Outlook, Fuck Yahoo... They suck when things go wrong. OK, you might have a bit more downtime from the smaller company, but the support is probably 100 times better!

Would I see any recompense from Google for this? No.

It's always great when it works, but when something breaks, bloody Google suck.

I'm slowly building out my small hosting business, WhatsApp support, Friendly, Honest and can tell you exactly what happened, (if you wanted to know!)