Email is a black box. When a message goes missing, the sender cannot prove it was sent, the receiver cannot prove it never arrived, and the logs that could settle it sit where neither of you can reach them. We cannot see inside Gmail’s spam folder. Neither can anyone who tells you they can. What we can do is show you everything that reached us: every hop a message took, how it fared against SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and exactly why it scored what it scored.
None of this is neglect. Email was declared finished a long time ago — infrastructure, a solved problem, something to keep running rather than something to keep improving — and a field declared finished stops moving. The people who run mail do careful work. Innovation around them stalled.
Meanwhile the parts that kept changing became a specialty. SPF, DKIM, DMARC — the records that decide whether your mail is believed — now take a specialist to get right, and most organizations do not have one. So they hand the domain to someone who does. We think checking a DNS record, and repairing it, is work software should do in front of you.
And the address that carries your name is not quite yours. Your domain, your archive, your correspondents live inside someone else’s product, on terms someone else wrote. It works well enough most days, which is what makes it easy to stay. But good enough is not the same as chosen, and most people running their mail this way never chose it at all.
Email stopped moving. We are moving it.