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The Hostile Email Landscape

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Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#241

Post by _urga »

Outlook.com is possibly the worst offender at present:

1. They set SPF policies of "-all" on customer domains. These customers have no idea about SPF and often use 3rd party software to send account statements that never get delivered. This breaks email for their customers and for everyone else. They should set "~all" by default as Google Apps does.

2. They claim not to, but they definitely block entire IP ranges rather than a single IP address. A noisy neighbour in the same datacenter as you can get you blacklisted. Use http://www.senderbase.org/lookup/ip to monitor your neighbours and report them to your hosting company. If you spot a bad neighbour, you will no doubt see your own IP blacklisted at Outlook.com's https://postmaster.live.com/snds/ipStatus.aspx within a few hours.

3. They are well known for accepting mail and then silently dropping it, without bouncing sender or receiver and without putting it into a spam folder, even when the sender is a longtime sender to that receiver and when the sender is sending personal anticipated email. They should either reject at the SMTP transaction (sending a bounce later is bad practice and leads to backscatter) or else deliver to a spam folder. Silently dropping email breaks email for everyone.

The sad thing is that many businesses are switching to Office 365 and Outlook.com.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#242

Post by chei0aiV »

tacon wrote: post #162
niravshah wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Greylisting still works amazingly well. With a long, long whitelist and greylisting plus DNSBL, I don't even bother running a spam filter, since the little bit of spam and emails from new senders ends up in its own directory as it came from a non-whitelisted sender. Any good tips on this section in particular? If I'm running my own mail server, how would I get started making sure this is in order?

I have been running exim4 for years, but I'm in the process of moving to postfix, as postfix is considerably easier to set up all the DKIM, etc., machinery that is now required. Inbound email comes through procmail and is mainly read in emacs (mh-e), which is kind of old fashioned. I have a small script that makes a new email address within my domain for each new use. I sign up for a lot of mailing lists and groups,…

If you are using emacs, you might want to try the emacs UI for notmuch:

http://notmuchmail.org/

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#244

Post by [deleted] »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #187
lsc wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But, what you really don't seem to be getting is that they do have a responsibility not to harm us. That's why there is a legal cause of action known as "tortious interference". I sincerely don't know how to make that point any clearer. Perhaps researching that term a bit might help. Yes, yes, reading up on that is probably a good idea. I am not a lawyer... but in the case of a mail-filtering company blocking emails…

Their customers are not paying them to harm legitimate senders from whom they wish to receive emails. It's unfathomable that you appear to see no dinstinction there. Neither is it "exactly" nor even remotely the same as ad blockers. > That probably means that "tortious interference" is more complex than you are making it out to be. No, it means that your analogies are invalid. Further, perhaps you should look up the…

[deleted]

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#245

Post by lsc »

berkay wrote: post #192
lsc wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a rather glib and obtuse way to put it. Glib, yes. Obtuse? less so. >I'm an Amazon customer. If Amazon can't reach my gmail address because Google started using some third party filtering service, what exactly would you expect me to do? If your free email address doesn't receive mail you want, I expect you might move to a different mail service. I think that if you want anything but automated support out of…

You may be right in theory but way off in practice. MS for example accepts the emails and dumps them. It does not even make it to users' spam folders. So they don't know and we don't know. We only send emails that customers pay us to receive yet email no longer works. This is not how internet supposed to work. Spam is a major problem and as it is often the case the defensive measures cause just as much, if not more,…

>Spam is a major problem and as it is often the case the defensive measures cause just as much, if not more, problems.

more problems for people who send bulk email, sure...

the senders of bulk email vastly overestimate how much of a problem that is for end users.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#246

Post by gdr »

teddyh wrote: post #84

I sometimes see similar tales of woe, and I can only say that this does not match my experience. I’ve done this many times, you set up the mail server, configure DNS correctly (including reverse lookup), and that’s it. Never had problems being blacklisted or mail getting classified as spam. I suspect that people having trouble are sending a lot of mail , like “newletters”, etc. But I can’t prove this hypothesis.

It's different from one AS to another. I've spent a lot of time maintaining reputation for my IP at a certain major ISP (no bulk email) and I'm still getting blocked from Google and others.

Then I got a VPS at Linode (for some other purpose), installed Postfix and emails were just working - no SPF or even reverse DNS set up.

IP reputation IS a thing.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#247

Post by gdr »

weihaw wrote: post #203

Gmail has Postmaster tools that let domains with moderately large mail flow be able to monitor their spam reputation scores, email authentication e.g DKIM / SPF, DMARC rejection rates, etc. This tool can help address a number issues folks here have mentioned wrt Gmail. In particular please look at the "Delivery Errors Dashboard" description in the help center article. help center post: https://goo.gl/7QHoqc Postmaste…

It's not a solution for low-traffic personal email servers. I've tested 3 domains in Postmaster Tools and for all 3 there's no data (I've added them a month ago or so - there should be data already)

No data to display at this time. Please come back later. Postmaster Tools requires that your domain satisfies certain conditions before data is visible for this chart. Refer to the help page for more details.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#248

Post by andrewrothman »

Email is such a broken system. It's unacceptably hard to get a message from one machine to another and have it not marked as spam.

Furthermore I can't stand when I have to setup all of my accounts across the multitude of devices that I own. Way too many settings to configure regarding ports, domain names, encryption techniques, folder mappings, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I'm super impressed that email has managed to continue to be an essential tool in many people's day to day workflow despite being old enough to be found in a museum. But it's time for a change, and for us to put all we've learned about encryption, data serialization, and user workflow out on the table to design a better future for the universal method of digital asynchronous threaded communication.

And if we've learned anything from Google Wave and friends, these changes have to make sense, and not stray too far from what we're already familiar with and know that works.

Anyone want to weigh in?

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#249

Post by jodyribton »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #214
teddyh wrote: post #84

I sometimes see similar tales of woe, and I can only say that this does not match my experience. I’ve done this many times, you set up the mail server, configure DNS correctly (including reverse lookup), and that’s it. Never had problems being blacklisted or mail getting classified as spam. I suspect that people having trouble are sending a lot of mail , like “newletters”, etc. But I can’t prove this hypothesis.

I think I might be able to offer another explanation. People talk about the reputation of their individual IPs, but networks matter a lot too. DigitalOcean for instance is an occasional source of spam; Linode is very rarely; 1and1 is a HUGE headache; and so on. I have some custom software in place that temporarily drops entire netblocks for abuse, and I did that to keep up with the spam filtering offered by larger se…

I was actually hosting on Linode (UK). My hunch was that they would be one of the more reputable networks; I've run small mail servers on them before (2+ years ago) without any problems.

It's a pity there's no easy way (that I know of) to look up the reputation for an entire network block. I'm glad to hear your experience with Linode matches mine.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#250

Post by jodyribton »

MortenK wrote: post #143

OP, I don't know if you are reading the comments here but in case you do: Don't get discouraged so quickly. The reason this is happening is as the blurb from the MS postmaster help page: Your IP doesn't have a reputation yet. The reason these rules are in place aren't about email monopoly, it's about spam. If anybody could setup a SMTP server and start firing off large amounts of mail, spam would be even more endemic…

Thanks for the encouragement! I might take another shot at it sometime. I had this server running for about 3 months with just my personal mail, sending probably 1 email per day on average. It's possible slightly higher volume would do a better job of "warming up" the IP.

I self-hosted from about 2007-2008 and 2011-2013, and had nowhere near as much trouble with deliverability. It came as a bit of a surprise how much more difficult it is these days.

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