12 Oct
2022
12 Oct
'22
11:20 a.m.
Hello,
On Tue, Oct 11, 2022 at 11:21:16PM +0100, Dom Latter via BitFolk Users wrote:
The problem was that the IP address was blackholed as
being in a dodgy block. I thought that this was like
being issued an ASBO because your someone else on the
street threw noisy parties.
But overall the mailops attitude was "your problem,
not ours".
I think that was their attitude but not necessarily because they
agree it should be like that, but maybe because after long
experience they realise it IS like that and it's outside their power
to change it, they're just telling you how it is.
The users of the largest inbox providers aren't really paying for
the service. Apart from the personal information they give up for
marketing purposes. There's little margin for going the extra mile
to separate spam from ham, big hammers are used, and still the users
stick with the service and blame senders for important mails that
don't arrive.
Looking at the issue from another angle, why is it that people who
are so bothered about being able to receive good mail from bad
networks pay little or nothing for the service that delivers this
supposedly important email? Rhetorical question - it's human nature.
It's annoying - a btinternet customer has a
reasonable
expectation that a *desired* email - order confirmation -
should be delivered.
Yet they trust their email to the lowest bidder. BT outsourced their
email to one of the big players to reduce costs. People expect a
barely functional email address with their Internet connectivity and
that is all they get.
I too have some networks blocked in my mail servers because there's
just too much spam from them. Mail from those networks won't be
scored based on content, there won't be any opportunity for a DKIM
match to allowlist the domain, the connection will just get dropped.
The difference is that a legit sender could still contact
postmaster(a)bitfolk.com and I'd work out a way to allow the email.
None of the big email providers have any customer service to do
that.
While people prefer to receive their email at places that choose to
not provide customer service, they have to appreciate that this
doesn't allow any flexibility in niceties like allowing legit email
from bad networks. If they don't like that they should self-host or
go with a provider that is more flexible. But they won't because
that usually costs time and/or money.
For most people email is already dead and is only used to sign up
for accounts on web sites. Eventually maybe even that use case will
be solved and then email is truly over. I say that as someone who
has had an email address since 1992, and still uses the one I've had
since 1998.
What advice was mailop supposed to give you when no one who read
your email was in a position to force HotGoogle to hire hundreds of
people to work as postmasters, remove all their IP-level blocks of
OVHetzner, spend their working weeks adding allowlists for good
senders at those places and start charging £100/year to every free
account to pay for it? When neither the shareholders nor customers
of HotGoogle want that.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting