by carlesfe on 9/4/22, 5:28 PM with 728 comments
by zahllos on 9/4/22, 6:38 PM
Agree with a sibling comment that many major providers fail to operate the SPF/DKIM/DMARC tools they insist you do.
Each to their own, but ultimately if we don't hold on to the freedom to operate our own mailservers, it will be taken away through inaction. This means doing some things right: DMARC, DKIM, SPF of course, server maintenance, good password policies and of course IP reputation. The best way I can recommend for IP reputation is to use a dedicated provider or VPS provider that disallows things like VPN endpoints, where it is less likely they'll assign an address with a poor reputation. A good provider might also ask you what you intend to host, and you might be able to discuss IP addresses with them.
by jwr on 9/4/22, 8:21 PM
Reading the comments here makes me incredibly sad. Every answer that tells me to use a provider misses the point. The Internet was created so that there could be many independent nodes, not so that everybody has to rely on one of several blessed providers. I should be able to run my own E-mail.
The real problem is lack of incentives. The big corps do not care about e-mail. It doesn't make money and isn't easily controllable. You can't turn it into a walled garden and lock users in. So, it gets minimal attention, and only defensive measures are developed.
Either we solve the spam problem, or things will get worse. The big tech corps won't solve it for us.
by femto on 9/5/22, 5:09 AM
by jasode on 9/4/22, 6:11 PM
Same philosophy for exposing a your personal blog of html files or content like mp4 videos. The sweet spot is to focus on buying a domain name you control. Then let Amazon S3, or Cloudflare, Hezner etc, host your html or mp4 files.
I quit self-hosting email at home over 15 years ago. It's just not something I want to babysit anymore because I have other things to focus on. As long as I control the MX record on my own domain, that's really all that's necessary.
by armchairhacker on 9/4/22, 7:19 PM
Spam is a real issue.
The amount of spam emails which get sent are absurd and likely orders of magnitude more than non-spam. And spammers do a lot to mimic real emails, including just hacking legitimate addresses and adding them to botnets.
Even on gmail, I still get spam sent to my inbox. Fortunately very rarely, but it still happens.
And even if it isn’t bad today, spam has the potential to be much worse in the future with transformer networks and hostile state actors.
And even if it really isn’t that bad and never will be, the big companies and those arguing against self-hosting will claim it is. They don’t want to allow a relative few self-hosted email servers in exchange for much more difficult and less effective spam detection. Forget Gmail and Outlook, why not just use Fastmail or Protonmail?
If you want a legitimate argument for self-hosted emails you need to address the spam. It may be as simple as registering your official email with some organization sponsored by open-source, and all the big companies can trust that one organization. Then the org has to deal with spam registrations but maybe there won’t be much and it will work out. idk much about self-hosting so this org might already exist.
But this article doesn’t mention that org, in fact doesn’t say much at all about spam besides “keep existing spam-prevention because it already works”. But you should at least explain why. Because spam is a legitimate argument for big-co forming an oligarchy that’s not just “so they can make more money”, and it’s the main argument that big-co uses.
by hardwaresofton on 9/5/22, 1:39 AM
https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy
https://blitiri.com.ar/p/chasquid/
These options are much easier to set up, will do things like generate DKIM for you, etc.
I talk about this a lot[0]. There are positively awesome tools for email out there.
[EDIT] - Since I'm repeating myself I've collected all the options into a post[1] I can just link to.
[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[1]: https://vadosware.io/post/its-never-been-easier-or-harder-to...
by jacobsenscott on 9/4/22, 6:47 PM
It seems like one solution is to bcrypt hash (or some similarly expensive algorithm) the email and include the hash in a header. Of course you need to hash per receiver or a spammer can just hash it once and spam away.
The receiving client hashes the email and compares the result with the value in the header and discards emails that don't match.
You'll never get industry buy in though - the FAANG companies don't want to pay that cost for their semi-legitimate email. They prefer to keep that cost externalized.
I believe there have been attempts at something like this, but it clearly never went anywhere.
by mastazi on 9/5/22, 2:07 AM
Shame on you, Australian Department of Home Affairs.
And shame on Telstra, which provides the service.
---
Remote-MTA: dns; dibp-ibmail2.msng.telstra.com.au
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 554-mx.msng.telstra.com.au 554 Your access to this mail system has been rejected due to the sending MTA's poor reputation. If you believe that this failure is in error, please contact the intended recipient via alternate means.
by teddyh on 9/4/22, 7:13 PM
by intc on 9/5/22, 2:01 AM
Here's EU's JRC-MECSA report on our service: https://mecsa.jrc.ec.europa.eu/en/finderRequest/b5daceffc76e....
Support for client's own domain is currently under works. Our webmail supports PGP and one can use IMAPS/SMTPS or ActiveSync based native email clients too.
All servers self hosted (we run C1/Gentoo!) in our own computing facility in Finland. =)
by capdeck on 9/4/22, 9:47 PM
by npteljes on 9/4/22, 6:55 PM
by gingerlime on 9/4/22, 6:38 PM
Hate the level of centralization, particularly since there’s still a shit ton of spam still around. Sorry for the rant.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/674558/55...
by jrm4 on 9/4/22, 6:12 PM
Namely that "do it yourself at home" and "massive oligopolist" aren't the only two options. It's like saying "You can only have hamburgers two ways, cook them yourself or McDonalds."
I do the third and it's been great. I let my paid webhost handle it. (hostdime if you're interested, but I'm sure others do it well also)
by massaman_yams on 9/4/22, 11:03 PM
1. Spam filter behavior has changed because spam has increased in volume and sophistication, not because ISPs want to save money, or to eliminate competition. Some techniques that worked well 5 years ago aren't as effective anymore. One of the consequences of this has been a reduction in the value of IP reputation, from a spam signal perspective, particularly for low-volume IPs.
2. IP range reputation does matter. The increase in the value of IP range reputation, as a spam signal, has paralleled the decline in value of low-volume IP reputation. In practice, this means you need to either send enough volume to outweigh the reputation of your IP range (exact quantity varies based on a lot of variables, but as a very rough approximation, 1000 messages a day), or find an IP range with good reputation.
IP range reputation is not easy to assess, sometimes even for email professionals. So you can either gamble with a residential ISP IP, or a VPS IP, or you can find a provider that spends time, effort, and expertise on managing IP range reputation. The practical solution for most senders is the latter. Many of these offer a free tier, and many options are available among providers of all sizes.
3. The filtering behavior reported here is either misunderstood or misrepresented. First, no, no major ISP (Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft/Outlook, icloud) is going to permanently block an IP range; filters are designed to be dynamic. In severe, ongoing, high-volume spam scenarios, you could see a 2-week block, maybe occasionally 30 days. But never "one strike".
Mail deletion without a bounce also cam happen, particularly at Microsoft, but again it's almost never seen for legitimate mail - that response is reserved for long-term, severe spam scenarios, where anyone reasonable would agree that a block is warranted. And, again, this is dynamic.
So it looks like OP is either exaggerating, or has been trying to send from IP ranges with unusually bad spam problems.
by m3nu on 9/4/22, 6:06 PM
Then there is also mxroute.com, which is an indie email provider. He seems to do fine too. Didn't use them yet.
So I think having at least some sending volume is key to running an indie server. You can't do it just for a few mailboxes/users.
I still wouldn't recommend to learn or start with email in 2022. There are better uses of your time.
by lxchase on 9/4/22, 6:13 PM
A person at a company mistakenly created an email list segment (or lack thereof) resulting in an email to the entire email list of hundred of thousands of emails. This combined with inexistent (we were a naive startup without an email specialist role) list hygiene practices meant we were blacklisted by Gmail after some time.
Took a year to get a hold of someone on Gmail's spam team. We found out were on 4+ Gmail blocklists, some of which were ML-based. We couldn't do anything to remove ourselves after we fixed the issues. A $1-2 million revenue channel dried up because we couldn't get out of the Gmail blackhole (short of rebranding completely, rewriting content, and using a different ESP). Fun times.
by asim on 9/5/22, 8:30 AM
by yonixw on 9/4/22, 6:15 PM
Disagree. It was a way too open protocol to begin with. From a time of innocence best suited for places with inherit trust like inside a business. And it's not just spam. Phishing is also a huge issue.
As much as I want to sympathise, Email for the big WWW is unsalvageable IMO. Too many bad actors are out there.
> [Solution:...] * There should be a recourse for legitimate servers
This is the same Big tech story. They want to cut cost, you want a human touch. You can see similar stories here in HN every week. Which is why I think it will never happen.
by toun on 9/4/22, 7:38 PM
by beprogrammed on 9/4/22, 6:46 PM
by okasaki on 9/4/22, 5:59 PM
by derekzhouzhen on 9/4/22, 7:06 PM
by type_Ben_struct on 9/4/22, 6:09 PM
However I do think it’s a case of damned if you do damned if you don’t. As a consumer of big tech email I become equally frustrated when spam makes it past the filter and I expect them to do more.
If it’s easy for the average person to setup a mail sever with high reputation then it’s easy for spammers to do the same. I can’t think of a great way to manage this at scale for the average person using a $5 a month Digital Ocean VPS sending < 10 emails a month.
One thing I have noticed is that there’s still a load of large organisations failing to implement basic deliverability best practices like SPF records. These organisations have themselves to blame.
by the_third_wave on 9/4/22, 6:22 PM
by tsaixingwei on 9/5/22, 3:14 AM
Perhaps some sort of digital stamp (digital signatures similar to stamps on physical envelopes) for each email sent paid for with micropayments in a cryptocurrency like nano (note: I don't own any crypto). Small cost per email like 0.01 cents that is trivial for legitimate senders but not for bulk-sending spammers. SMTP servers should put all incoming unsigned emails into spam folders. This will disincentivize spamming (probably not eliminate it) enough that self-hosting emails might be possible again without having to swim against the tide.
by rkwasny on 9/4/22, 7:45 PM
Imagine someone revokes your access or deletes all your emails because of an error, at the scale of gmail or outlook.com it just happens.
For spam there is one solution:
- implement greylisting. It just solves the problem.
by awinter-py on 9/4/22, 7:07 PM
This could be a few large providers saying 'we control most email traffic, let's control all email traffic'. Or it could be serious players saying 'spam hurts our users, let's stop criminals using a blanket rule'.
More likely it's a schelling point where large players are rent-seeking (crowding out some competition), but only to the extent they can preserve the illusion this is about policing spam.
Suspect we'll start asking platforms to offer something like due process in the law -- administrative checks that increase the cost to administer a system, and reduce the quality to end users, but increase transparency and make it harder for the platform to engage in corruption.
by tony-allan on 9/4/22, 10:47 PM
Are you talking here about incoming emails? I expected that these would be reliably delivered to you and that the problem is only with emails you send to the large providers?
by pif on 9/4/22, 10:15 PM
Using Google as an example, the author has no right to push anything to a gmail inbox. Google has no contract with the author to accept mail from him.
What Google is doing, it's failing its customers, the people who signed on gmail to have an address where other people could send data to.
And now those people are not receiving everything they could, but it's only up to them to decide whether this is actually a problem and whether it's serious enough to contact gmail support.
I do understand the point and the spirit of the author, but he is actually conflating the freedom of speech with the right to be listened to.
by devy on 9/4/22, 10:01 PM
> Over time I realized that residential IP blocks were banned on most servers. > You just cannot create another first-class node of this network. > Email is now an oligopoly, a service gatekept by a few big companies which does not follow the principles of net neutrality.
It's unfortunately true. However, the reason that how we end up like this is more nuanced than just the big players trying to power grab (perhaps) but rather because of the rise of spam/scams/phishing/malware. All big players like Google (Gmail), Microsoft(Outlook/Live.com/Hotmail), Yahoo!, Apple (iCloud) are suffering from those threats, wasted bandwidth and compute on spam detection heuristic AI.
There are industry consortiums like Spamhause and commercial entities like Barracuda to maintain blacklist/whitelist to restrict access of major MTA network interconnect to fight off spams/malwares/phishing/malware delivery from botnets and individuals. And it helps, at the mean time, it consolidated the control of who can send outbound emails.
We are seeing this trend repeatedly in other communication channels like phone calls (due to robocalls, VoIP numbers are being blacklisted by all major players' services) or Text messaging (due to spam texts, major U.S. wireless carriers band together established Campaign Registry to control who can mass send outbound text messages. This is also known as 10DLC registration).
I think the vulnerabilities of previous communication protocols (email, VoIP, SMS/MMS) lie in the fact those protocols are designed with security in mind. Modern community protocols like Push Notification has been designed with security in mind, which make it less susceptible to abuse and spamming. That's probably the way go forward.
by kazinator on 9/4/22, 7:08 PM
A MX records don't have to point to an IP; it can point to a host name.
My MX record is a dynamic DNS host name.
> Big email servers permanently blacklist whole IP blocks and delete their emails without processing or without notice. Some of those blacklists are public, some are none.
OK, but if you're having trouble sending, that's no reason to do anything with your MX record, which is for receive only. Just route outbound SMTP through someone forwarding service.
I've run my mail domain for twelve years. In that time, I've not sent SMTP directly to anyone; always through the SMTP forwarding host run by my ISP.
Well, you know, the mail is going through that ISP anyway! If I could directly connect to port 25 of various hosts around the net, I would still be routing through that ISP's hardware. So the fact that mail is routed at a higher semantic level through their SMTP server, rather than just at the IP level, just almost just a footnote.
by jwildeboer on 9/4/22, 8:47 PM
by tedivm on 9/4/22, 6:05 PM
Besides the problems mentioned in this post the real problem I had was dealing with spam. The open source community around spam has really degraded over time, to the point where most solutions are extremely high maintenance and require regular tweaking. Methods that used to work, like greylisting, cause problems when dealing with GMail because google doesn't play nicely with it. The big spam blacklists have also gotten a bit less trustworthy over the years.
by reuven on 9/4/22, 6:48 PM
I still use my own domain, but I'll let actual delivery and security experts deal with the day-to-day running of things, while I run my business (which definitely isn't that).
It was a bit sad to give up, but the time and frustration it saved have been more than worthwhile.
by electric_mayhem on 9/4/22, 6:12 PM
Not ideal, but it works.
by bob1029 on 9/4/22, 6:13 PM
These days, I operate with the medium-temperature bowl of porridge: AWS WorkMail with custom domains & users. My use case is basically "Replace gmail for personal email". I don't have a lot of patience for running an actual email server, so this is about as custom as I can get.
Running a custom email domain can have other practical implications, such as having to carefully re-iterate spelling when mentioning your email address over the phone to a customer support agent. With a gmail or hotmail account, virtually everyone can type that hostname in without thinking about it. This concern is moderated by being able to select a username with fewer than 5 characters, rather than your full legal name appended with your date of birth.
by Joel_Mckay on 9/5/22, 4:20 AM
Google for example, doesn't even hide the fact you have to request whitelisting using their online business services portal. They don't give a toss what kind of sender authentication/signing hoops you have jumped through already, and user letters may still end up in the spam bin.
Many users have indeed migrated to the web platforms, and don't care about people data-mining their business communications. The real issue is so have many spammers/scams, a side-effect keeping their trade on life support by removing technological administrative barriers for the desperate... and you can't block Google/Outlook/Redmond.
by zh3 on 9/4/22, 6:17 PM
Hosting an email server on a cheap (reputable) cloud server and doing the basics (PTR records, SPF etc) still works well.
by seomint on 9/4/22, 6:27 PM
by sgt on 9/4/22, 6:21 PM
by gerdesj on 9/5/22, 1:09 AM
I run several email domains quite happily in the UK. I know why it works and I don't resort to magical thinking. My ISP is considered a business one and my IPs are static. I've owned both my work and personal ranges for a while.
Feel free to contact: furtle@blueloop.net - I'd love to hear your ideas.
Cheers Jon
by ryan-c on 9/4/22, 8:22 PM
Even after speaking with Microsoft's email admin team on the phone a couple times, I still have issues. It's kind of infuriating.
I have properly configured SPF+DKIM (selector rotated daily)+DMARC, and I've gotten set up with dnswl.org.
by psyfi on 9/4/22, 7:04 PM
I stopped self-hosting because it's too much hassle, but it was any difficult to maintain, (by difficult I mean complex)
It didn't worth the time I spent though, so I quit, but I would do it again if I need to
If I had to maintain a server at home and my ISP blocks it, I would get a VPS and host proxies on the VPS and use VPN tunnel to keep the mails stored locally
But I don't have any reason to do that currently, as well as most people
by deknos on 9/5/22, 7:11 AM
* implement and publish policies which emails you accept (regex/strings on domains, emails, headers, signatures and so on)
* found a association where all use this strict (which shall potentially be stricter than gmail and so on) settings and if gmail does not accept these emails, sue them for discrimination.
by thewebcount on 9/4/22, 10:04 PM
Could we come up with a new protocol (possibly based on SMTP/IMAP/whatever), that would only guarantee to get your email to its recipient if you included some sort of token generated by the recipient and given to you? Something where you could text/message/whatever a unique token to a friend/business/etc. and then they can send you email? And if you email someone, your outgoing email includes the token necessary for them to reply? The contents (including who it’s being sent to) would be encrypted by default rather than being plain text that anyone in between sender and recipient (or at least sender and recipient servers) could read. Is something like that possible?
Obviously at first nobody would have it implemented, so you’d have to get developers interested in writing server and client software, and convince people and companies to use it instead of or in addition to regular email. But I wonder how many people would be interested in such a system and whether it would be workable?
by Daegalus on 9/4/22, 10:56 PM
I signed up for ImprovMX, setup my domains there, and just route my emails to whatever service I want. I use a random gmail account that I use for my login and Google services, but the email itself is never exposed anywhere, I only give out the custom domain one.
ImproveMX handles routing for my whole family. My mom uses Outlook, and it routes there for her. If google, microsoft, or whatever give me trouble or ban me, I just quickly switch the email and nothing lost.
If you pay for their service, since they have a super generous free tier, you also get SMTP servers to use as outbound, which lets me send emails through them and not have the `on behalf of` email thing. Also they do all the work to make sure their IPs aren't blocked and in good standing with MS, Google, etc.
by betwixthewires on 9/4/22, 8:59 PM
I don't like email. I think the problems with it are shortcomings of the protocol. I'd rather not use it. But I do, as a last resort contact method.
For me, people that use email are like people that primarily communicate over SMS. If I need to talk to you and that's all you'll use, I can. But if there's another way to talk to you I'd rather use that. Xmpp, matrix, signal, shit even telegram and discord if I have to, are preferable to SMS or email. But otherwise, yeah I have some email addresses and a phone number if you insist on doing things that way.
by prmoustache on 9/5/22, 10:30 AM
- you might not receive all the emails people sent to you, for the reasons mentionned in this very article
- you will receive much more spam/unwanted email. I quit using a gmail account because I kept reveiving newsletter and notifications from other people who kept mistaking his account with mine. There was probably a one letter difference in their real email address and mine. I surrendered and gave up trying to tell his relative they weren't reaching the right person, only had fun once by powning his NAS with a "cloud function", and gave up after receiving tons of newsletters and other shit.
- you can lose your account any day, for any reason without any possibility to get it back. I've seen it happen to 2 people with hotmail.
by rootusrootus on 9/4/22, 9:57 PM
I don't work there any more, but I'd be surprised if that little ISP hosts their own email servers nowadays. It's so expensive to deal with such issues, it's just not worth it.
by exabrial on 9/4/22, 8:45 PM
by williamtrask on 9/4/22, 8:24 PM
by thayne on 9/5/22, 3:22 AM
1. Any email that isn't signed with DKIM is blocked (having a signature specific to the source email address would be better, but that is probably too much to ask for)
2. If the sender isn't in your contact list, block it, or at least mark it as spam.
3. Have an easy way to add new entries to you contact list, maybe a new url scheme similar to mailto:? So that it reduces the friction of say getting a confirmation email when signing up for something, or making sure you get emails from a new acquaintance. It would probably be good to have a way to add a full domain to the allowlist as well.
But that would make selling/sharing email addresses a lot less valuable, so there might be some resistance to that from marketing and adtech.
by rabite on 9/4/22, 6:18 PM
This is obviously laughably naive and creates infinite sources of spam.
Before doing a proposal on a core Internet technology you should be required to be on the other side for a while. Do anti-spam at a large retail e-mail service provider for a year and then you can understand the problem space.
You might not be responsible for what your neighbor is doing with their server, but the ESP is responsible for filtering it. The idea that they need to treat each and every comcast IP with equal weight is nuts. IP reputation is the single most valuable tool in the industry; the largest statistical predictor of whether or not an email is abusive.
by shirro on 9/5/22, 1:13 AM
A compromise solution is to outsource delivery which is by far the shittiest part of self hosting because of bad business practices and lack of regulation. It is the least interesting bit anyway.
My email server is setup with policies commented out to send outbound emails through another host I maintain if required. When a very large company hosting lots of email for many domains mass ip blacklisted my hosting provider late last year I used this to maintain connectivity while the companies sorted out their dispute.
by janandonly on 9/6/22, 1:15 PM
No, that is not a shitty crypto coin. It's just a computational proof that your computer spend some seconds on hashing, which is fine if you send 1-to-1 emails like real people do, but not if you are a spammer who bought a file with 6 million leaked e-mail addresses.
See Back's 2002 paper "Hashcash - A Denial of Service Counter-Measure".[2]
[1] https://wikiless.org/wiki/Hashcash
[2] http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdfby Kim_Bruning on 9/4/22, 8:07 PM
Somehow it seems like the Overton window has shifted such that people find it acceptable that ordinary individuals can no longer take part in the email infrastructure as equal peers.
by systems_glitch on 9/4/22, 11:59 PM
I moved to Proton Mail as I like their simple interface and support their goals. Pretty good service so far, worth paying for, but I do sort of miss running my own services.
If you run your own mail server in 2022, you are the resistance.
by gwnywg on 9/4/22, 8:15 PM
by ShowalkKama on 9/4/22, 6:41 PM
I cloned a repo, edited two lines in a yaml file, ran docker-compose, logged into a web ui, added my domain, added a couple of dns records (MX, spf, dkim, dmarc) and everything worked (yes, I can deliver emails to gmail and outlook).
I honestly have no idea why so many people say that self hosting emails is hard.
by yonrg on 9/4/22, 6:33 PM
This caused me some headaches and I was thinking this could be the end and I have to use one of the big players. But I did not give up, invested time and it works now again!
by hpcjoe on 9/5/22, 12:18 AM
This said, my concern is that the big players seem like they could, at a whim, drop you as a customer, with no recourse. This is what is giving me pause going to the big providers.
I've been looking at mail distributions like Mail-in-a-box, and modoba as an intermediate, though none of them seem to be great. Basically I don't want to stitch together several different opinionated tools into a working mail system anymore.
by unixhero on 9/4/22, 7:04 PM
I use https://cloudron.io for orchestration, security - to run it on a VPS. Everything just works.
by tayiorrobinson on 9/4/22, 6:40 PM
by naikrovek on 9/4/22, 11:07 PM
these people deny that they are causing a problem, or that they ever caused a problem, because admitting that would mean they are a bad person, and they're not a bad person! they're "just trying to feed [their] kids, man."
making decisions based on money alone is always a bad idea. ALWAYS. I do not care if it is one person and one decision, or if it is a business making a decision on behalf of their stock holders, or anything else.
if money alone is your decision-making criteria, you are making a bad decision, or you are making a decision on bad criteria.
someone always pays for everyone's scramble for money. someone always pays, and it is always an unjust payment.
in this case, spammers have cost us our ability to self-host email, which is a very significant problem, as described by the author of the linked article, with rather severe consequences if you hope to have any freedom on the internet.
so, if you work for a company that will, over time, do just about anything to get people to click on ads, you are slowly destroying the internet as it was intended to be, and was, for 2-4 decades, depending on how you define that.
by aimor on 9/4/22, 6:22 PM
by krater23 on 9/5/22, 12:02 AM
by jwie on 9/4/22, 8:59 PM
The people who run these blacklists are unreasonable. I can understand why, they tend to interact with the bowels of the internet and the heuristic is effective. Usually people who need to talk to them are doing something naughty, so why bother taking a chance?
Guilty until proven innocent would be an improvement.
by bArray on 9/4/22, 8:42 PM
One solution this decentralized server system came up with is the concept of accounts that have some barrier to entry to create (which involves a delay and proving identity). This account has a private key and it uses this to access the servers through any IP. Abuse on this account and any connected accounts of course leads to the key being temporarily revoked. Lots of positive interactions with well established accounts increases your credibility. Lots of reports decreases you credibility.
If you have been sending credible emails with multiple hosts for 10 years, even if you did get flagged, you would be given the benefit of the doubt. Hell, it should be easy to email the host and give them the headers and the reason why the email was flagged.
About the email space now being owned by big tech, it could simply be time for a boycott until they improve their practices. There is far too much centralization on the web now, and we all contribute to it every time we use an external service rather than host our own.
by daitangio on 9/4/22, 7:40 PM
I will try ti resist as much as possible, because email is your primary identity “link” on the Internet, and you deserves to own it if you want.
by sys_64738 on 9/4/22, 8:34 PM
by xeno42 on 9/4/22, 8:38 PM
Outbound mail is relayed via mailroute too, which solves the tainted IP delivery problem.
by znpy on 9/4/22, 8:45 PM
Like, postfix won’t even try to connect to tls-enabled smtp for outgoing email by default, and you have to explicitly point it at the certificate bundle it’s supposed to consider valid.
And you have to tell explicitly to reject incoming plaintext connections from the public internet.
And quite a bit more… Like, why doesn’t postfix have its own freaking spf/dkim implementation BUILT IN?
by jeffbee on 9/4/22, 6:01 PM
by jokethrowaway on 9/4/22, 6:12 PM
I haven't done it since last year though. Has something gone terribly wrong?
I remember debugging issues with email sent via aws ses to Hotmail addresses at $dailyJob but I can't think of a single Microsoft product that works well (windows, teams, azure, now even GitHub is starting to work every other day) so it doesn't surprise me.
by cush on 9/4/22, 8:41 PM
by AlbertCory on 9/4/22, 7:23 PM
However, nowadays I'm bored with stuff like this. PITA. So I totally sympathize with the author.
by ttul on 9/4/22, 9:01 PM
I’d say if you want to continue self-hosting, just let go of the delivery part. Use a service like SendGrid; it probably won’t cost you anything and it’s easy to set up.
by indigochill on 9/5/22, 12:22 PM
But then I looked at Protonmail's cost and it's less than I'm paying for my VPS (which is already cheap for the use I get out of it) so I'm on the fence whether I keep hammering away at that (and then have to wrestle with the big players treating me like a spammer and do my own spam filtering) vs just pay for that convenience. The VPS is staying in any case so it's just a question of whether I pay a little more every month for convenient secure mail.
by jgsaau on 9/5/22, 6:07 AM
by SailingCactus33 on 9/5/22, 3:05 AM
by mcv on 9/5/22, 6:34 AM
Clearly they're using different rules against each other than against small email servers, and I think that's all the evidence you need to get the EU to take action here.
by doubledad222 on 9/5/22, 2:15 AM
by citrin_ru on 9/5/22, 7:36 AM
by peter_retief on 9/4/22, 6:57 PM
by taf2 on 9/4/22, 9:36 PM
by gist on 9/4/22, 7:25 PM
And it happens even with paid services at large companies.
That is not 'just business' and has never been the way business operated pre-internet except in a few super rare (and perhaps rare monopoly) situations.
by eduction on 9/4/22, 7:56 PM
The IP block is managed by the Helm co., they tunnel connections and sell you the (tiny, silent) server and software. Each Helm server generates its own TLS cert, so the tunneling does not violate your privacy (unless it was delivered without TLS, in which case your privacy already vanished upstream).
The only delivery issues I hit are sometimes with Outlook/Microsoft managed domains. It’s been at least a year since I had that issue. When I first bought one someone on gmail had to move a message of mine out of spam, but it’s been fine since. Last I checked their infra is hosted on AWS but apparently they have some screening technique for getting clean IPs.
by secabeen on 9/4/22, 6:28 PM
by avnigo on 9/5/22, 8:20 AM
Handing over control of your online identity like that to a centralized third party when you could be cut off at any point [insert here any recent news about people wrongfully losing access to their Gmail account and not getting it reinstated] seems like the wrong solution to be allowed the privilege of sending email.
I guess the very least we could do to keep some control is to own (read: rent) your email domain you could move elsewhere in case you lose access, but then you gotta make sure you don't also lose access to your email domain.
Is there an actual solution to all of this?
by zxcvbn4038 on 9/5/22, 4:17 AM
Utilizing IPv6 more might help also since at some point it becomes absurd to have quintillions of addresses blocked for all eternity.
There are monopoly and racketeering angles also, since Google and Outlook are suppressing independent mailers in favor of their own paid products. Nobody will make any money except the lawyers but that’s ok as long as the situation improves.
by drchiu on 9/4/22, 6:25 PM
Personally, I prefer defining my own spam list rather having an algo decide what pops into my inbox.
by RockingGoodNite on 9/5/22, 3:30 AM
So I stopped. I analyzed mail for a few weeks to look for patterns in the wild with my server. I came to the conclusion to block all but the top level TLD's. That decision yielded very positive results.
I then wrote a simple SPAM blocking server to allow me to block habitual or suspicious TLD SPAM sending domains, as well as a few custom checks for common sense things.
As a result of those two decisions, I am now at or better at blocking SPAM than I was with Spamassassin and 2 other related tools I just remembered I also stopped using, spamass-milter and postgrey.
by rospaya on 9/4/22, 6:06 PM
by renewiltord on 9/4/22, 6:11 PM
by kmeisthax on 9/4/22, 7:10 PM
"I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday!", as Ted Stevens would say.
Unfortunately the man said this as part of a massive, uninformed speech[0] about why big tech[1] needs less regulation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
[1] Comcast inclusive
by alyandon on 9/4/22, 7:25 PM
by f1recat on 9/4/22, 7:22 PM
by almog on 9/4/22, 10:16 PM
Not sure if by "politicians" he means legislators, but given very few players that control today's email deliverability, while doing very little to provide observability (=feeback loop) to the users who needs it most (that is users who cannot afford to build an expensive pipeline that optimize deliverability), given all that, I think regulation around distributed protocols observability/fairness is not unlike AI explainability regulation, only I expect that with mail it shouldn't be as hard to implement.
by warent on 9/4/22, 6:03 PM
by chasing on 9/4/22, 11:29 PM
And there ain’t nothing I can do but pay.
by martin_a on 9/4/22, 9:09 PM
I don't understand what the author thinks it's so hard here and why he's painting it so black and white. There's lots of more to "my own e-mail" than choosing between some old notebook running and collecting dust in your garage and using GMail.
Some people just want to find a hair in the soup.
by stillbourne on 9/6/22, 4:04 PM
by cerol on 9/4/22, 6:14 PM
by tjbiddle on 9/5/22, 4:01 AM
While I understand what they're getting at here, I disagree. There are certainly other providers you can go with - You just need to pay up.
Happy customer of FastMail here. All of my personal domains, and multiples businesses are tied to it. Wonderful service, no deliverability issues, great features, etc.
So - clearly other companies are able to get it right. Self-hosting is probably difficult, but it's not like you're forced to go to Big Tech.
by damir on 9/4/22, 7:33 PM
by throwawaygram on 9/4/22, 10:18 PM
by no_time on 9/4/22, 9:34 PM
Outlook: OK (had to bother with this one when I started out) Google: OK iCloud: OK
I have a pristine track record and not a single byte of outgoing spam so I cannot attest how easy is it to get back into the game after an incident. I do agree with the larger point being made here. It is clear some kind of anti racketeering legislation would be the only fix. Sadly, currently there is zero will from both the EU and the US to fix any of these blatant anti competitive issue on the internet.
by simonebrunozzi on 9/5/22, 7:40 AM
How? I don't know. But it would be great.
by kuon on 9/4/22, 7:27 PM
by ivanstame on 9/5/22, 12:41 PM
by optimalsolver on 9/4/22, 6:04 PM
by wzwy on 9/5/22, 7:11 AM
What would they do with email?
To be honest, I kinda like seeing a lot of cookie modals out there. Yeah, the experience can be hellish, but it highlights how many sites are actually collecting data from their users.
With that said, I wonder what alternative regulations are feasible if we don’t rely on politician-mandated regulations.
by vzaliva on 9/5/22, 12:20 AM
by greatjack613 on 9/4/22, 6:05 PM
Have not had any spam or blacklisting issues and it was super easy to setup.
by gorgoiler on 9/5/22, 8:18 AM
More transparency (or more likely, less ignorance on my part) here would be helpful.
Can anyone recommend a one stop tool / script for looking oneself up in the reputation services? (And on that note, it is abhorrent that Big Email providers don’t have open reputation databases, or at least ones where I can look myself up.)
by mrb on 9/5/22, 4:15 AM
I would have kept the MX records pointing to my personal server, and I would have changed only my configuration to send outgoing email through a third-party relay (eg. Gandi). This would have solved all the author's problems (deliverability issues) while staying 99% self-hosted.
by sylware on 9/4/22, 7:00 PM
BTW, did you know the smtp protocol works without DNS?
You just need to puth the ipv4 between brackets @[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] and for ipv6 @[ipv6:...].
spam? simplicity and freedom has a price (personnaly, I have have very, very little spam since I am self-hosted), and don't think corpos won't try to force you to use their servers one way or another... Whose coding the virus? It is sane to presume it is the seller of anti-virus software...
by angelmm on 9/5/22, 6:27 AM
However, I ended up moving away. Sadly, dealing with deny-lists and the management overhead was not worth for me. Fortunately, there are alternatives that doesn't require you to go to big providers :)
by jdnordy on 9/5/22, 12:04 AM
This. Just This.
Seriously though, as someone fairly uneducated in the space of how standards, protocols, and regulations get set in place, how can the ship be moved on this issue? Tech companies will likely only move / allocate resources if there is financial incentive. So what do we do?
by mhdwrk on 9/5/22, 12:48 AM
by mleonhard on 9/5/22, 5:25 PM
> - Let's keep antispam measures. ...
> - Change blacklisting protocols so they are not permanent and use an exponential cooldown penalty. ...
> - Blacklists should not include whole IP blocks. ...
> - Stop blackholing. ...
> - There should be a recourse for legitimate servers. ... doing some paperwork or paying a fee to prove I'm legit ...
by baskethead on 9/4/22, 10:23 PM
For every "good" email server owner, there's probably a million bad ones. And the problem of spam is a big one. If you want to send your own email, get used to telling people to check their spam lists and/or add your email account.
by IronWolve on 9/4/22, 9:34 PM
Setup a private listserv or mailman use to be easy, but now you need to have a smtp provider in front, or you will quickly get blacklisted. Even then, get too big, and you will trigger some email email providers.
by brhsagain on 9/5/22, 2:58 AM
by soruly on 9/5/22, 5:33 AM
by johnklos on 9/4/22, 6:46 PM
> You cannot set up a home email server.
This is true enough to not care about edge cases.
> You cannot set it up on a VPS.
This is definitely not true.
> You cannot set it up on your own datacenter.
This is absolutely, unambiguously untrue.
I get that there are many people out there who don't want to administer an email server, or who administer one (or more) and are tired of trying to train users to DTRT and care about security. The truth is that if you have lots of users, it's likely that one will get compromised, and their account will be used to send spam.
Is it the end of the world? Heck, no, unless you let it go on for days. "It's not if, it's when. Say goodbye to your email. Game over. No recourse." That's just plain not the case at all, unless, again, you don't have monitors in place.
A super simple example: a script which counts the number of email sent by any given user in a certain timeframe is really not complicated. I've used something like this and it has caught a mail loop which wouldn't end because the entity causing the looping was rewriting so much that typical anti-loop checks failed.
So a user gets compromised. If this is a real concern (say, for instance, you have a lot of Windows users), your script should send an alert to you when this user's account has sent several hundred messages over the past hour. You disable the user's account, you clean the mail queue, and you deal with the fallout. Sure, that may mean watching your logs for a few days for rejections and visiting other networks' delisting pages, but it happens.
So there's the largest problem with running your own email server handled. Boom. Done. If you've hosted email for years yet can't / won't do this little bit of work, then that's you. The rest of us understand this.
What about deliverability in general? Isn't that the largest problem, you ask? No. No, it isn't at all. You can even run an email server on your home Internet connection, if your ISP allows incoming connections, the same way you can handle any other general deliverability issue: smarthosting.
If you want to claim that there are NO ISPs out there that can reliably send email outside of Yahoo / Outlook / Google / Amazon, then you might say smarthosting isn't a solution. However, you'd be flatly wrong, so wrong you shouldn't be hosting email.
If your home network can't send email (it almost certainly can't), and your VPS can't send email (it'd probably have issues), and your datacenter can't send email (you're clearly doing something wrong, but let's pretend), then you can smarthost through an email provider that has a good reputation. Period.
Anyone who wants to argue that hosting your own server can't be done today because of deliverability ignores this super obvious solution, which negates this entire article.
Let's move past that and look at the suggestions this article makes:
Should we throw in the towel, proverbially speaking? Certainly not. I disagree with this emphatically.
"This doesn't only affect contrarian nerds." No, it doesn't, but discouraging others isn't the solution. Your lack of solutions isn't a good reason for others to throw in the towel. But why are so many "contrarian nerds" so quick to tell others to NOT do something? Do you tell people to not paint or draw, because it's too hard for you? Or to carve, or write fiction, because you're not good at those things?
"You can no longer set up postfix to manage transactional emails for your business. The emails just go to spam or disappear." Nope. You're accepting that as normal and equal. It isn't. This is the same basic idea as "I can't afford to not run Windows, because everyone else runs Windows" - it's a fundamental misunderstanding on your part that leads you to assume you're the victim, and you're powerless. If your email is being silently dropped, then you need to tell the recipients that they need to 1) complain to their provider, and / or 2) find real, deterministic email services. I've told many people that I'm not responsible for overzealous spam filtering, and I provide proof that the email was delivered. It's on them after that. "But I can't afford to do that!" Then smarthost. This isn't difficult.
"One strike and you're out. For the rest of your life." Nope. Demonstrably, nope, unless you're letting spam flow from your servers for days at a time.
Your recommendations:
"Let's keep antispam measures." Sure, but consider the fact that they're part of the problem. Spam filtering shouldn't be arbitrary - for instance, I do ZERO content filtering, unless or until I can prove to myself that there are no false positives. Email with "storage.googleapis.com" URLs? 100% spam. Email from random addresses / networks with Gmail Reply-To? Absolutely 100% spam. Email from servers with a HELO / EHLO name that doesn't exist? Rejected. But keywords? No. That's stupid. I've seen, for instance, too many abuse email addresses that don't accept spam complaints because of content-based, rather than behavior-based, spam filtering. The problem with Gmail is that they do too much content based filtering, with no rules and no logs that we can see.
"Change blacklisting protocols so they are not permanent and use an exponential cooldown penalty." Fair.
"Blacklists should not include whole IP blocks." I disagree. If your network neighbors are shitty, then you should 1) ask for your IPs to be SWIP'd to you, 2) find a better company that punishes spammers / scammers, and/or 3) smarthost.
"Stop blackholing." Yep. But, "No need to bounce every email" - 100% disagree. If you're sending so many messages that you're overwhelmed by returns, then you're doing something horribly wrong. Every email needs a bounce. This is how email works.
"There should be a recourse for legitimate servers." 100% agree. I think someone who has the time and resources should take all the large providers to court to compel them to have methods for correcting interoperability. If Google, for instance, wants to be like a utility, then they should be forced to act like one and they should have real ways to interoperate. As it is right now, it it not possible to reach an actual human at Google about anything via email. Every single message goes nowhere. They shouldn't be allowed to operate like that, or if they want to be arbitrary, they should lose the right to be called RFC compliant email and the use of Gmail accounts shouldn't be usable for anything public. That's another whole battle, though - why should a company get to call themselves an email provider when they don't provide reliable, repeatable service? Sigh.
"Email discrimination is not only unethical; it's a risk for the industry." Agreed. I think there's already legislation proposed, if not already passed, making certain types of communication unblockable. It's shitty legislation, but it's a first step at a precedent we all need - we need to be able to dictate to large corporations the parameters of what they can do and can't do if they want to be considered email.
by fnordpiglet on 9/4/22, 6:12 PM
by oskarc on 9/5/22, 2:12 PM
by sinuhe69 on 9/5/22, 5:40 PM
by phendrenad2 on 9/5/22, 2:32 AM
by recroad on 9/4/22, 9:52 PM
Write about it here https://bitbytebit.substack.com/p/customer-hacquisition
by zoobab on 9/5/22, 8:07 AM
by Ferret7446 on 9/4/22, 10:51 PM
by rubyfan on 9/5/22, 1:00 AM
by TekMol on 9/4/22, 6:29 PM
if (Sender is whitelisted by receiver):
All emails arrive in the inbox
else:
Sender has to send $1 for their email to arrive in the inbox
The $1 will be returned if the receiver repliesby preisschild on 9/5/22, 6:13 AM
by verisimi on 9/5/22, 7:12 AM
The author is dreaming, sadly. Why would the big email providers (corporations) change rules or do anything, when the failing system drives more people (such as the author) into their arms?
by gigatexal on 9/5/22, 8:41 AM
by emiliosic on 9/6/22, 3:21 AM
by fay59 on 9/4/22, 10:35 PM
by jitbit on 9/4/22, 10:38 PM
Well, actually you can. But it's tough : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20553028
by schappim on 9/4/22, 9:21 PM
[1] https://files.littlebird.com.au/Shared-Image-2022-09-05-07-2...
by wholyshit on 9/5/22, 2:35 PM
I also manage since over 20 years my own mail server. Had a few problem but less than expected.
I love the flexibility and low costs besides the time which is needed to understand what is going. But this was a good invest if I look back.
Keep your mailservers running
by RockingGoodNite on 9/5/22, 2:53 AM
by aeharding on 9/4/22, 7:41 PM
by andai on 9/4/22, 7:17 PM
There are still new email providers appearing every few years right? What special incantations are they performing to be allowed in the club? Do they buy large IP ranges? Do they pay protection money to Google et al?
by kaushikc on 9/5/22, 2:39 AM
by rkagerer on 9/4/22, 8:37 PM
by jacooper on 9/4/22, 9:43 PM
But still, I won't switch to big providers, I use Proton Mail personally, and Postale.io for many projects.
There is also mailbox.org and many others, you have a choice to not use the big providers, it totally possible.
by mikece on 9/4/22, 6:51 PM
Wouldn’t RICO statutes apply then?
by annoyingnoob on 9/5/22, 4:31 AM
by noncoml on 9/4/22, 6:19 PM
According to a lot of web apps, my email is not valid and can’t use it.
Also I have been told by a customer support person that my email is not right as it has to end with gmail.com
by WhyNotHugo on 9/5/22, 3:23 PM
A lot of his clients (very large companies) use MS for email, and his emails to them got silently discarded (not rejected as spam, not showing up in spam folder, simply discarded while responding that the email had been accepted). Notably, the invoices he was sending didn't reach the intended inbox, so he eventually had to move on to use another provider for email.
I've heard this story dozens (if not hundreds) of times over the last couple of decades. It gets worse and worse, since huge corporations only whitelist other huge corporations, and can choose to blacklist the rest. The oligopoly has won.
by dsr_ on 9/4/22, 6:24 PM
I frequently end up in GMail's spam folders. No idea why.
I see no more than one piece of 'spam' a week; everything else is caught by a combination of a 15 minute greylist, the zen spamhaus BL, and SpamAssassin evaluating things. There are a bunch of spammers who send from accounts with valid SPF and DKIM, by the way.
Spam is a reasonably solved problem, but SPF and DKIM aren't much help.
(I get lots and lots of business spam, where the sender clearly believes that they have a right to try to sell me crap. The difference is that if I respond to business spam, someone will answer, trying to sell me crap.)
by agentultra on 9/5/22, 12:59 AM
I still self host my email. I ended up on a blacklist last year probably because some IP in my VPS block got marked. It sucked for about a week. But it came back eventually.
by zzo38computer on 9/4/22, 6:33 PM
by singularity2001 on 9/4/22, 10:28 PM
by tomxor on 9/4/22, 6:51 PM
... one of the "big three" being google, this will never happen, there is no recourse in anything, even when you pay them for it.
by amaccuish on 9/5/22, 5:01 AM
by bullen on 9/6/22, 8:10 AM
Preferably with their own implementations, I have implemented all 3.
To host anything beyond those protocols and/or on more powerful hardware is often counter productive.
The problem is getting the ports opened, you need to fight for that right even if it makes spam worse in the short term.
Fight for external IP, ports and static IP in that order.
Edit: Reposting as separate comment because very important!
Edit2: How I wish downvoting required an argument. 500 karma is too low a barrier.
by hot_gril on 9/5/22, 5:36 AM
XMPP has similar flaws except even worse. Too many different feature sets floating around, too many weird/insecure defaults. It also lost the federation game.
Think of HTTPS, a success story of self-hosting. The weird cases are just out of the question. You basically can't use encryption without signing, or old versions of TLS.
by 2Gkashmiri on 9/4/22, 6:21 PM
i am almost 2 years into it now and beyond the first months hiccups, it just works
by rdevsrex on 9/5/22, 12:36 AM
by civilized on 9/4/22, 11:20 PM
by Chalbroth on 9/7/22, 9:27 PM
You should never use a service where you cannot report a problem or where the administrators are out of reach. Of course it includes the "big techs" but they're not alone.
The underlying issue is that most of them delegate their filtering decisions to third parties. And many of them rely on the same centralized IP and domain blacklists.
Because of how the filtering is done, the End User generally never discovers that any filtering is happening. Only the sender may be notified by his mail relay of the delivery failure.
Of course, the blacklisters are not going to put the IP addresses of the big Email Vendors into their lists, if they did, millions of people would be notified of delivery failures with the risk of them discovering who is responsible.
""" Unfortunately, the computing power required to filter millions of emails per minute is huge. That's why the email industry has chosen a shortcut to reduce that cost. """
Even 20 years ago the computing power wasn't a problem. He probably has this impression because he's been using SpamAssassin. The real reason for why they are taking the "shortcut" is carelessness toward their service and users.
The excuse of saying that you should block messages before delivering them because it takes disk space is also heavily promoted by the blacklisters. Indeed, if the message was simply delivered to a Spam folder with the actual reason for which it has been classified as such, users could discover who is responsible for the filtering.
The good news is that there is some success in getting the big email services to remove centralized blacklists.
Another problem is that too many administrators of smaller services are not even aware of their reliance on blacklists. Sometimes this is because they have used an easy installation script for convenience, or because they've copy/pasted a configuration. And of course, there are those who do not understand the ethical implications of doing such a thing or are just foolish.
""" So, starting today, the MX records of my personal domain no longer point to the IP of my personal server. They now point to one of the Big Email Providers. """
This doesn't make any sense. The MX records are for inbound, not outbound, he could have used a different relay for sending mails yet still use his own relay for receiving (perhaps he doesn't know that?). Instead, he switches to a provider that is known for contributing to the problem. This is... disturbing.
by jgsaau on 9/6/22, 1:52 AM
by DarkmSparks on 9/4/22, 7:50 PM
Email was really useful if you wanted to send a message or notification to multiple people at the same time, but that got abused so much literally everyone disabled it, at which point email was no longer useful.
People can still send me emails (e.g. for plane tickets), but the chances of me replying to one are nearly zero. Now I send maybe 4 or 5 emails a year and only to people who wont use literally anything else.
by EGreg on 9/4/22, 8:22 PM
Make a new protocol for this decade, that isn’t email.
HTTP is supported nearly everywhere SMTP is. Just build something over that, and this time around make sure to avoid SPAM bullshit.
People shouldn’t be able to just message you based on your address. They receive a capability to email you. People can be empowered to give out your capabilities. If a particular such branch leads to spam, you simply cut off that branch and boom, no new user can reach you with that capability anymore. Hashes of Public keys can identify users.
by newbieuser on 9/5/22, 6:18 AM
by ironmagma on 9/4/22, 8:59 PM
by eruci on 9/4/22, 10:01 PM
by iamgopal on 9/4/22, 6:09 PM
by jbreckmckye on 9/4/22, 7:00 PM
by jms703 on 9/4/22, 6:40 PM
by amelius on 9/4/22, 9:28 PM
by 6510 on 9/5/22, 1:57 AM
by mrtransient on 9/5/22, 7:22 AM
by soheil on 9/5/22, 12:52 AM
[0] hey.com
by nathias on 9/4/22, 8:36 PM
by rkagerer on 9/4/22, 8:35 PM
This concept may sound familiar to you. It's called a racket.
by fsckboy on 9/5/22, 2:51 AM
high concept: encrypted email with cryptographic postage stamps paid directly to the recipient.
Want me to read your email, pay the postage, and the same vice versa. Who cares what gmail is doing, I don't want them collecting my postage anyway.
this would simultaneously bootstrap a universal micropayment currency
by david927 on 9/4/22, 6:48 PM
by sk55 on 9/4/22, 10:02 PM
by rekrsiv on 9/4/22, 9:01 PM
No, I'm serious, why?
by aorth on 9/5/22, 6:16 AM
by phase5 on 9/5/22, 2:54 AM
by tamsaraas on 9/4/22, 9:40 PM
by AndrewUnmuted on 9/4/22, 6:01 PM
I found this line to be especially intriguing:
> Hellbanning everybody except for other big email providers is lazy and conveniently dishonest. It uses spam as a scapegoat to nerf deliverability and stifle competition.
The big tech firms criticized in this article are guilty of these sorts of transgressions in other arenas, as well. It's always been my contention that the "hellbanning" of user-generated content by big media and big tech alike comes from the same motivations. YouTube and CBS alike want to make niche content difficult to consume in order to stifle any competition that might get vaulted up as a result of that niche audience finding the new distribution endpoints. This comes with the added bonus of reducing cost of goods sold, by reducing the firehose of new content to process. Or, as the article puts it:
> Unfortunately, the computing power required to filter millions of emails per minute is huge. That's why the email industry has chosen a shortcut to reduce that cost. The shortcut is to avoid processing some email altogether. Selected email does not either get bounced nor go to spam. That would need processing, which costs money.
I would be very curious to learn if there are any proposed explanation as to why this phenomenon is so commonly spread throughout the big tech space. Do we get the same kind of behavior out of other enormous multi-national firms like oil producers, ocean freight companies, defense contractors, and chemical suppliers?
by indigodaddy on 9/4/22, 6:04 PM
by Morizero on 9/4/22, 6:11 PM
> At some point your IP range is bound to be banned, either by one asshole IP neighbor sending spam, *one of your users being pwned*,
feels like a hint that
> My current email server IP has been managed by me and used exclusively for personal email with zero spam, zero, for the last ten years.
Might not be entirely accurate.
