A conversation with Google support

 You’re connected with agent Grace.

3:59 PM

G

2-4213000032568

Hi Michael Tobis. Thanks for being a Google One member. My name is Grace. How are you today?

Grace · 3:59 PM

OK thanks

I'm getting emails from an account hosted elsewhere flagged by gmail.

Gmail could not verify that it actually came from electricstreet.art. Avoid clicking links, downloading attachments, or replying with personal information.

This is interfering with my relationships with customers and vendors

My hosting service says DKIM is set up correctly

4:01 PM

G

I see, don't worry we will check on that.

I’ll do my best to help you. If we can’t find a solution, I will collect feedback for our developers and give you an external resource you might be able to use.

Can you please provide me with a screenshot of the error message you were getting when trying to send email messages?

Grace · 4:04 PM

The messages go through but they are flagged as quoted above...

Screen Shot 2022-02-23 at 4.05.00 PM.png

4:05 PM

G

Checking, thanks.

Alright, may i know when this issue started? And are you getting the same message when trying to send to other recipients?

Grace · 4:09 PM

Yes, all email from electricstreet.art is being flagged in this way; I have such an account and my wife has another. This was working fine until last weekend.

I have admin privileges at the host. These emails have all been sent via gmail via the 3rd party host

4:11 PM

G

Okay, and may I know if this email is a G=suite account or under Google My business?

Grace · 4:12 PM

I have no idea...

4:13 PM

G

I mean this electricstreet.art account, is it a Workspace account?

Grace · 4:13 PM

My screen says "Google One" and I have a "Google My Business" account and I never have any idea what these terms mean.

4:15 PM

G

Alright, but the email you were having issues with is a Google My business email, right?

Sorry for the delays as I experience technical issues.

Grace · 4:20 PM

I'm sorry but I am confused. I manage a small business listing through Google My Business. I am looking to see if the emails are listed there, but I don't recall connecting any email to this listing.

The domain is managed by a2hosting

4:22 PM

G

Alright.

Grace · 4:22 PM

You guys are flagging emails from there suddenly and they don't see anything wrong on theor end

4:23 PM

G

Please check your emails (both body and signature) for spammy content e.g. lots of exclamation marks; "must read"; attention getting, large and/or gaudy coloured text; text the same colour as the background; tiny text; [almost] zero height images; links hidden under text, images or links with a different URL; etc. All or any of these may mark you as a spammer at Google.

Grace · 4:23 PM

Promise there is nothing. We are a very staid little business. We sell original artworks and we communicate in plain text.

But the domain extension is ".art"

I am thinking this may have been a mistake!

4:24 PM

G

I see.

Also, if your recipients have previously marked your email as Spam, Google will have learnt from this. The recipients will need to mark as "Not Spam".

Grace · 4:26 PM

Look, this isn't marked as spam, it is marked as "not authenticated"

4:27 PM

G

Okay.

MIchael, when you create or set up the gallerista@electricstreet.art email account, have you done this via Google My business?

Grace · 4:28 PM

no

Just through gmail settings

4:29 PM

G

Do you mean the gallerista@electricstreet.art is not an actual email?

Grace · 4:31 PM

It is an email account at a2hosting; gmail is set up to interface to it.

We send from gmail; it authenticates with a third party host; then other people's gmail accounts flag it as illegitimate.

Or, to be fair "unverified beware of the rabid tiger"

I *need* to know how to turn this off. Your help screen says something about DKIM, but DKIM is set up.

4:36 PM

G

Alright, here is what we are going to do since your emails seem to be business email accounts which I have limited access to, we have a separate team that can help you further with this.

I'll provide you with the contact link for better help.

Grace · 4:37 PM

I'm not sure that "business email accounts" is correct from your point of view. These are just accounts.

However if you wish to put me in touch with somone else I will be fine with trying again.

4:39 PM

G

Please try this contact link https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213#contact=1.

Grace · 4:39 PM

I do not have a google workspace account

So that won't work

The hosting service says everything is OK on their end. I need to get Google to stop flagging me.

4:41 PM

G

Okay, however your email does not have a Gmail domain, so this might be the issue preventing me from digging deeper in sorting things out.

Kindly provide me the page where you originally created the email?

Grace · 4:43 PM

page?

This are ordinary gmail messages

4:44 PM

G

Yes, the site where you created gallerista@electricstreet.art account.

Grace · 4:44 PM

you mean the host service? a2hosting.com

4:44 PM

G

Checking,

Okay, I’d like to be respectful of your time and point you to the best resource to have your issue resolved. The Help Center is the same resource we’d use on our end.

I'll check possible reasons why your email is being flagged.

Grace · 4:48 PM

Authentication-Results: mx.google.com;
spf=softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning gallerista@electricstreet.art does not designate 209.85.161.48 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=gallerista@electricstreet.art
Received-SPF: softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning gallerista@electricstreet.art does not designate 209.85.161.48 as permitted sender) client-ip=209.85.161.48;

4:48 PM

G

Michael, can you please try to send screenshot instead?

Grace · 4:49 PM

Of the headers?

I already sent a screenshot of the warning

4:49 PM

G

No, the authentication settings page.

Grace · 4:49 PM

Screen Shot 2022-02-23 at 4.05.00 PM.png

here it is again

Look I found a clue "(google.com: domain of transitioning gallerista@electricstreet.art does not designate 209.85.161.48 as permitted sender"

I am not sure what you are looking for, though

My gmail settings for the account?

4:51 PM

G

Yes, the authentication results.

Grace · 4:51 PM

I am sorry, what do you mean?

4:52 PM

G

And upon further checking, if this is about more on email forwarding issues , just note that some email software or services change the envelope sender to your domain when forwarding messages. If the envelope sender is changed to your domain for forwarded spam, Gmail might learn that your domain sends spam. Gmail might treat future messages from your domain as spam.

I am referring to the authentication results that you have sent above, if you can send a screenshot instead of pasting the text.

Grace · 4:52 PM

Again, this isn't about spam. It's about "does not designate 209.85.161.48 as permitted sender"

4:53 PM

G

You may refer to this community link https://support.google.com/mail/thread/26865570/the-e-mails-that-i-send-are-being-flagged-as-spam?hl=en.

You can see possible reasons there why you are being flagged.

Grace · 4:54 PM

This is not being marked as spam

I'm sorry but I have already said this several times. This is not a spam filter issue.

I am asking how to resolve "does not designate 209.85.161.48 as permitted sende

4:56 PM

G

Here is something about DKIM https://support.google.com/mail/answer/9981691?visit_id=637812495711021292-2479296958&rd=1.

Grace · 4:57 PM

We have established that 209.85.161.48 belongs to Google. So what is happening seems to be that Google does not trust Google.

4:58 PM

G

It seems that this might have something to do with your email domain. Gmail doesn't accept allowlist requests from third-party email senders. We can't guarantee messages will pass Gmail’s spam filters.

Grace · 5:00 PM

This has nothing to do with spam.

Two different gmail loging have both started sending out error messages to my customers telling them to beware of me.

and my partner

Pretty much simultaneously.

https://dmarcly.com/blog/how-to-fix-spf-softfail-domain-does-not-designate-ip-as-permitted-sender

5:04 PM

G

Alright, let me further check on this.

Please allow me 3 - 5 minutes.

Grace · 5:06 PM

I guess I need an IP range to permit

5:06 PM

G

Let's see.

And when you try to send out using your personal email are you getting the same messages saying that it's been flagged?

Grace · 5:08 PM

no, if I use mtobis@gmail.com as far as I know there is no problem. The problem is pretty clearly authentication at a2hosting.com accourding to the link I found (through your excellent search engine!)

It appears I have to greenlight some google IP addresses

5:10 PM

G

Okay, thanks.

Thanks for patiently waiting.

Can we please try to add the email address in your contact and see if it's not blocked?

Grace · 5:17 PM

Again I don't understand your question

5:18 PM

G

Can we please try to add the email address in your contact?.

Grace · 5:20 PM

"the email address in your contact"? I do not know what you mean

You probably should be pointing me to https://support.google.com/a/answer/10684623?hl=en

5:23 PM

G

Oh, please try these steps.

Please open the email from the sender you want to add to your contacts.

Grace · 5:25 PM

I think you're typing into the wrong conversation at this point.

There is no "sender" other than myself

5:29 PM

G

I mean the recipient.

Then please tap the three dots icon to the right of the message.

Please let me know if you need more time.

Grace · 5:35 PM

You want me to open the headers of the message I sent?

5:35 PM

G

The email where you get the error message.

Grace · 5:36 PM

I have clicked the 3 dots

The sender doesn't see the message; the recipient does. I can give you either one as I have two accounts open in 2 browsers

5:36 PM

G

Then please click Add to Contacts list and it will be saved instantly.

Grace · 5:37 PM

I'm sorry, add whom to whose contacts?

5:38 PM

G

To your contact please.

Grace · 5:39 PM

The sender or the recipient? I have both accounts open.

But I do not have access to the account of my customers and vendors, so cannot add a contact. Further, this will not resolve the issue with the SPF record.

This is not a spam filter issue.

On the Essentialness of the Inessential (or, The Resto Rant)

The shutdown taught us that if rich people don't indulge themselves, poor people starve.

This is obviously a design flaw in the economy. 

(I wrote this at the peak of the shutdown. I should have posted it then, but the lesson still holds.)

The economic lesson of the pandemic is this: the inessential has become essential. I’d like to consider this as a design flaw. How can we repair our society so that luxuries for those of us with more access to capital are not necessities for those with less?

Here’s the paradox: for rich people expensive restaurants are a luxury, but for society as a whole, they and their like have become necessities! The same can be said for other luxuries; travel and furnishings come to mind. But let’s consider restaurants.

THE REQUIEM

Since I get most of my news (and these days, my daily fix of the Spelling Bee game) from the New York Times, I have been offered up a lot of requiems for restaurants from underemployed restaurant critics.

Here’s a typical example; well-written and fluent, I suppose, but wholly unsurprising and verging on predictable:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/19/opinion/sunday/restaurants-closing-covid.html

The Greatest Restaurant City in America Is Hurting More Than You Know

Subtitled “The coronavirus has come for the trattoria you love.” it’s an op-ed about the loss of restaurants in New York City.

Away from the city or cloistered in our apartments or hesitant to visit communal spaces until the pandemic ebbs, we won’t know or register that a beloved trattoria is gone until some safer day when we try to make a reservation and learn that there’s nothing at 8 p.m. or even at 5:30 p.m. because there’s nothing, period. Until we walk down the street where sated brunch-goers once spilled out of our favorite bistro and see an empty, still patch of sidewalk instead.

NECESSITIES VERSUS LUXURIES

Restaurants provide a mix of services of luxury and necessity.

On the one hand, everyone must eat; few of us want to cook every meal we eat, and many of us lack the time or the skills. Outsourcing cooking and the ancillary support activities (shopping, dishwashing) outsources a necessary service.

On the other hand, a restaurant cannot survive without providing palatability. The customers can always take their custom to a comparably priced restaurant with tastier food. Between acceptable palatability and extraordinary culinary delight there lies a vast range, and it is the most extraordinary experiences that are no longer available that we rue the most.

This complicates my case a bit; each individual has their own standards for minimal palatablity. But surely for most people it doesn’t cost more than say $US 30 to prepare and present an adequately palatable meal, so for purposes of clarity, lets say that anything costing more than $30 to the diner constitutes a luxury service.

MOURNING THE LUXURIES

Let’s start with two obvious observations

1) Nobody *needs* a $200 meal.
2) Few people would refuse a gift of, say, a gift of a pair of $200 meals at their preferred restaurant with their preferred companion.

As $200 restaurants go away, there is definitely a real loss. But what does that loss mean in a time of emergency?

DEFENDING THE LUXURIES

The restaurant requiem genre is not about whether it will remain possible to pick up a soup and a sandwich. That doesn’t seem to be at risk. What is at risk, rather, is the unique personal vision of chefs and restaurateurs. And of course, any of us who can afford this luxury will mourn the loss of such opportunities.

But the author is presumably aware of how much struggle and fear there is in the world today, and how decadent bemoaning the loss of such luxuries appears in this context. “First world problems” and all. So a common refrain in the Restaurant Requiem is to bemoan the fate of the (mostly underpaid and frequently exploited) people who manage to glean a meager living from the industry.

And it’s not just the owners and managers and cooks and bartenders and servers and dishwashers who are losing — though their pain, make no mistake, is most acute. It’s all of us, and we have absolutely no idea how much we’ve lost.

...

The tragedy is national of course, and it has had profound effects on the American economy because, as Matt Goulding noted in The Atlantic, the restaurant industry “generates $900 billion a year and employs 15 million people.” He meant in normal times. That’s what it did generate; that’s what it did employ. Not now.

...

“People don’t understand how large a ripple effect on the economy one 30-seat restaurant can have,” said Gabriel Stulman, who has had to close two of his nine Manhattan restaurants. What dies along with a restaurant is money that went to a landlord, to food producers, to food deliverers, to linen suppliers, to appliance repair workers. “For most people in our industry, 90 cents of every dollar that we make goes back into the economy in one form or another,” Stulman told me.

This sort of talk is deemed as necessary but it’s also deemed as sufficient. My luxury is not decadent. My luxury “provides employment for less fortunate people” and “stimulates the economy”.

And there’s the end of it. Everybody knows that full employment is the goal of society, and that to attain it the economy must be stimulated. Not the ‘droids you’re looking for. Nothing more to see here.

THE NECESSITY OF LUXURY

There is a Jedi mind trick happening here, and to see through it we have to consider what is going on at the whole systems level.

In past emergencies, society was urged to “tighten its belt”, to bravely accept a certain level of privation for the benefit of society as a whole. This changed notably in recent decades.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when the economy was reeling, President G W Bush encouraged everyone to keep spending.

“When they struck, they wanted to create an atmosphere of fear. ... Do your business around the country.  Fly and enjoy America's great destination spots.  Get down to Disney World in Florida.  Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”

https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010927-1.html

( see also https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691159584/beyond-our-means

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/business/consumer-spending-as-an-american-virtue.html )

TIME magazine commented:

Taken on its own, this wasn't such a horrible sentiment. But Andrew Bacevich has made a convincing case that it was part of a broader pattern of encouraging financial irresponsibility. "Bush seems to have calculated — cynically but correctly — that prolonging the credit-fueled consumer binge could help keep complaints about his performance as Commander in Chief from becoming more than a nuisance," Bacevich wrote in the Washington Post in October.

http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1872229_1872230_1872236,00.html

A SOCIETY ADDICTED TO INDULGENCE

What’s happened in living history is that we have developed a system that itself is addicted to luxury. If wealthy people stop indulging their whims, poor people starve.

It seems to me likely that this wasn’t the case in the past; luxury consisted of a small enough fraction of the economy that the rise of fall of particular luxury sectors had modest effect on society as whole. Regardless of whether my surmise is true, we do now have a situation in which many people of modest means coping with necessity are dependent on fewer wealthy people indulging expensive whims.

One might naively anticipate that the less wealthy person, with less demand upon them to serve the whims of the wealthy, would be blessed with additional leisure.

What’s missing, of course, is the capacity for that person, now underemployed, to allocate resources. In the present emergency, the resources are still there, though. The essential sectors, farming and shipping, are functioning at only slightly reduced capacity. That poor people are going hungry because rich people are demanding fewer plates of pappardelle with sea urchin is not a law of nature.

It strikes me as a design failure, a deep flaw in social organization. The production of essentials is solid. But the poor person is denied a way to allocate that production because of the absence of demand for supposedly "inessential" services. So we are left encouraging a revival of demand for luxuries, for travel, for restaurants, for renovations. This is excused not because we miss those inessential indulgences but because poor people miss the essential employment that they "provide".

One might prefer a world in which, when expensive whims were less indulged, there would be more to share among everyone else. That the “inessential” has become “essential” is a conundrum that needs some serious thought. It ties into questions about the nature of money, of labour, of wealth, and most of all of "growth".

Some will argue that all of this is an inevitable necessity, that it's built into the human condition, but I don't think they have provided compelling arguments. I doubt that this bizarre paradox that we are living is even stable, never mind inevitable.

Only Connect!

 “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”

― E.M. Forster, Howards End

Irene said something wonderful in our morning chat today: "The purpose of emotion is to guide behaviour."

This formulation triggered a number of interesting thoughts.

My first response was to consider the connection of planning to behaviour.

Of course those of us who are educated as intellectuals intellectuals we are led to believe that planning SHOULD guide behaviour.

Irene pointed out first of all that emotions (animal) are more deeply rooted than intellect (purely human). Older, more established in our evolutionary structure. We are more animal than human.

We have, as individuals, limited reservoirs of will power that we can draw upon to override our emotional structure. Some of us seem to be better at it than others.

Consider taking up a musical instrument. It's immensely frustrating at first. Many people WANT to play an instrument, but fewer of us can muster the self-discipline to tolerate the squawking, especially of our first instrument.

We can override the frustration with will-power. We can over-ride it with externally imposed discipline. When I was a child I was subjected to piano lessons not through my own interest but through my mother's. (I rebelled after passing level 3 at the conservatory and quit.)

I'm not a person with strong self-discipline. The reason I can play the piano now is because in my university years I discovered the black-note-blues. (a 12 bar blues pattern in e-flat requires only the black notes on the piano! It's super easy to improvise a solo.)

David Bloom (bloomschoolofjazz) helped immensely by saying that you should find a way to ENJOY playing scales.

If you play scales out of will power, you'll do it a lot less than if you LISTEN to the beauty of the scales as you play them.

Irene said her psychology/coaching practice was almost entirely based on this principle; to align emotional motivations with planning; to set up an environment where what you SHOULD do is what you WANT to do.

So we diverted a bit into "why art", "why music"?

We agreed that humans love art and music because they are ways of communicating emotion.

And communicating ties back into planning. And planning ties into our collective sustainability quandary.

We started talking about how visual art emerged in cave wall drawings. I noted that the earliest drawings represented game animals. I speculated that they began as instructional videos. "You should aim your spear HERE to take out the animal."

But then, suddenly "Wow! That's so cool. It really looks like a little bit like buffalo! I don't just want to kill a buffalo. I also want to be able to represent a buffalo. To give people that feeling of wow that I just had!"

When we became a hunting species, we had to learn to cooperate. To cooperate, we needed to learn to communicate. So a love of complex communication became adaptive, evolutionary favoured.

(And as a huge side benefit, it makes art and music possible.)

But where does this leave us today, as we endeavour to organize ourselves in complex societies (hard enough) or as an entire world (harder still, and suddenly necessary)?

Here's the "deficit model" fallacy, a problem which I think supposed experts in science communication have grossly misunderstood, but which is a real problem. Convincing someone of a fact is INSUFFICIENT to motivate a change in behaviour. On the other hand, I think it's beyond stupid to imagine a world where convincing someone of a fact is useless. (An implication that many seem to draw from the insufficiency of understanding to motivate change!)

The issue is to connect. To connect to our animal motivations. Only connect!

Propagandists and advertisers understand this perfectly. They are trying to motivate behaviour not primarily by convincing us of the superiority of their product or strategy, but by appealing to visceral emotional structures of fear, anger, pleasure. Animal emotions.

How do we resist this manipulation? It can only be by connecting our emotions and our reason, as our distant cave-dwelling ancestors did when the first capacity to plan in groups emerged. If we survive this, it will be by taking visceral pleasure in reason.

Only connect.

My father's blind date with Leonard Cohen's Sister

This was not as a young man; my parents were married when they immigrated to Canada. It was shortly after my mother's passing, which would have been 1990 or '91.

She seems like a wonderful woman;

https://allanshowalter.com/2019/09/07/in-memoriam-esther-cohen-leonard-cohens-sister-died-sept-7-2014/

Shown: Esther and Leonard Cohen

The date must have been arranged through some network of Jewish widows and widowers in Montreal.

My father was an arrogant self-absorbed person at the best of times, his main charm being as a raconteur. He had a repertoire of stories and jokes, but a hard shell beyond that point and an astonishingly complete lack of human empathy. As he got older, he lost the knack of being a good center of attention without picking up any skill at paying attention to others. So I'm not surprised there was no second date.

I found out about it because my father asked me if I had "ever heard of this Leonard Cohen", which shows how well he knew me. I had collections of his poetry from when they were small runs on a marginal press in Montreal. He's been a huge influence on me all my life. I allowed as I had heard of him.

When my father found out Esther was related to someone famous that he had never heard of, he was eager to meet the fellow, but Esther said "well, he's a very private person" or something to that effect.

A few years later, on a pilgrimage to City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, I picked up a recent volume of Leonard's and chanced to mention my father's blind date to the dude at the cash. He said "wow, so Leonard Cohen could have been your uncle!"

It was a confusing observation, but I'm good with it. Leonard Cohen is my contingent imaginary uncle. I feel even closer to him now. But just the same I'm glad the poems about my father never got written.