alt Hacker News> if you don't use it you should blame only yourself that your messages are not accepted
I think it's a gray area
- If the receiver declines your message because "Message-id" is required - then I blame the receiver; because that's not true
- If the receiver declines your message because "most systems do include it, and it's lack of presence is highly correlated with spam email", then it's on the sender
Admittedly, the end result is the same.
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Does it even matter when in reality it's more likely that this is intentional anti-competitive behavior by Google?
They once made all emails from my very reputable small German email provider (a company that has existed and provided email services long before Google existed) go into a black whole - not bounce them back or anything like that, mind you, their servers accepted them and made them disappear forever. I was in contact with the technicians then to get the problem fixed and they told me it's very difficult for them to even reach anyone at Google. It took them several days to get the problem fixed.
Of course, no one will ever be able to prove an intention behind these kind of "technical glitches." Nothing of significance ever happened when Google had large optics fiber connections with NSA installed illegally and claimed to have no knowledge of it, so certainly nothing will happen when small issues with interoperability occur and drive more people to Gmail.
I think it's the latter. But, in either case, you're right in that you get the same result.
Now, let's assume that if it is the latter (it's spam related), and Google were to accept the message, but then internally bin the message, it would be worse. At least in this case, they are bouncing the message. Because of this, the sender is at least aware that the message wasn't delivered.
Also, the author was able to get their mail delivered to a personal gmail.com address. The issue was with a Google Workspace custom email domain. This further makes me think of this as a security/spam related issue. Google is clearly capable of processing the message without a Message-id, they are just refusing for business customers.
My takeaway is that I think that Google is doing the least-wrong thing. And by being explicit in how they are handling it, it at least made the debugging for the author possible.
Also note: in a quick reading of RFC5321 (SMTP), rejecting messages for "policy reasons" is an acceptable outcome. I'm not sure if it applies completely here. The author should probably also be taking into account RFC5321 (SMTP) instead of just 5322 (message format).