> I'm actually pretty happy this whole conversation is starting to gain more traction.

This exactly. I've been a Gmail user since the day when they've required an invitation in order to signup, and I'm not quite a Google hater, either, but it's extremely disappointing to see the number of people who simply defend Google against the wrongdoing irrespective of whether or not the complainant has a valid complaint, like in this very case.

What happened to the whole notion of believing the victims? Why no matter how hard you try to explain your setup, and the things you've tried, and that all the automated tests pass, that you still get blamed to be the culprit for the issues you experience when dealing with someone who has a monopoly on the service at stake, instead of considering the possibility that maybe it's Google Mail having the monopoly on email that's an issue here.

Oh, I do think that Google is absolutely more aggressive than they probably should be on filtering... On the flip side, there's very little other choice. The VAST majority of email comes from a handful of hosts/providers and everything else has a much higher noise to signal ratio and gets much more scrutinized period.

Also, if you aren't sending a lot of mail, consider relaying outbound through mailgun or a similar service (I used to use sendgrid myself). Nearly zero issues when doing this on the lowest level paid account. That said, inbound spam was so painful to deal with I just gave it all up.

Check your neighborhood :) you can use Talos to see the reputation of your IP block and ASN:

https://talosintelligence.com/reputation_center/lookup

Even after reading that, I'm not sure what an email hobbit is. Someone who just wants to live in a cozy hole in the ground with a few nice email amenities?

It was an extended metaphor categorizing an ISP's (or a cloud provider) customers into multiple buckets: Kobolds, Lizardmen, Hobbits, and Princesses.

Princeses were the customres which sometimes required a lot of customer support, but paid really well because they purchased a lot of services/VM's. Hobbits were customers who basically minded their own business, and didn't guy a lot of stuff, but didn't cause any problems.

Lizardmen were customers which had possibly clueless marketing departments that would occasionally send e-mail marketing campaigns which crossed the line, but which also sent plenty of legitimate e-mails, and which were mostly trainable after the ISP/cloud provider smacked them on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper --- and Kobolds were spamvertising companies that did nothing but send spam, and were constantly switching ip addresses / VM's, and knew d*mn well that they were doing something evil, and were not trainable.

The problem is that if the ISP / cloud provider has the vast majority of their customers being Kobolds and Lizardmen, it becomes economically hard to just cut off the bad actors, because the vast majority of their customer base are bad actors. If the provider originally had a good mix of all of these customer mixes, but wasn't proactively cutting off the Kobolds and educating the Lizardmen, then their network block would start getting a bad reputation, and all of the major e-mail providers (not just GMail) would start blacklisting the netblock, or at the very least, treating any e-mail sent from that network block as a strong SPAM signal, and this would cause the other customer types to find other providers.

So if you happen to be a customer of such a network/cloud provider, you could try complaining to the provider, but they are really in between a rock and a hard place, because if you're the 1 good hobbit and all of the otheer customers for that provider are Kobolds and Lizardmen, what is the provider supposed to do? You're probably better off switching to a better provider. Unfortunately, the better provider may also cost more, but you get what you pay for.

My impression from that was (almost) everyone is a hobbit. Hobbits being normal people who don't want to send marketing spam.

But still want own their own domain so that they are not tied to any internet king.