41–50 of 430 posts
Email is a fundamentally broken protocol which has become less and less important, I don't really get the point of running your own server except as a technical exercise. Set up your email wherever is convenient, encrypt stuff that matters, and move as much communication as possible elsewhere.
Email is a fundamentally broken protocol which has become less and less important, I don't really get the point of running your own server except as a technical exercise. Set up your email wherever is convenient, encrypt stuff that matters, and move as much communication as possible elsewhere.
But where is elsewhere?
Network-specific messaging tools are another option. I strongly prefer open protocols.
The concept that anyone anywhere can intrude on anyone anywhere else at no financial or reputational cost is ultimately flawed. It works only so long as those with that access are few in number, generally of mutual interest, and act in a largely principled manner.
As numbers increase, and levels of interest and level of principles fall, the system will collapse.
Usenet was the first such network to fall to this dynamic. Email is well on its way. Telephony is into its first years of general intolerability (any direct-dialed universal access, wired or otherwise). Facebook faces this threat less through its lack of filters than the defection of high-affinity users.
Postal mail has its own issues with quality, but the associated costs do in fact impose a minimum bar to malicious content.
Of course they offered to unblacklist them in exchange for payment, or wait.
Waited 2 weeks and they dropped off. I've yet to hear about anyone using their DNSBL for anything serious in 2020/2021/2022
I only knew about the listings because a monitoring service emailed me about it.
Either we can concede defeat and relay personal correspondence email through a commercial service or we can just accept that some recipients will not receive our emails.
I've adopted the latter stance because I don't operate a business that uses my personal mail server and therefore have the luxury of not caring a whole lot. My stance is that if a recipient is using an email service that blocks me for no good reason, they don't want to receive my email. They can complain to their service provider if they choose to. In a few cases, I've asked them to complain to their service provider and have seen some minor corrective action. But that's pretty rare.
It's description is not subtle:
> This blacklist has been created for HARDLINERS. It can, and probably will cause collateral damage to innocent users when used to block email.
So if the mailsystem you are trying to reach employs it, is either experiencing spam levels that justify it's use - OR they made a mistake in using it, if this is the sole reason you are being banned.
The first order of business is of course to complain to your hosting provider. Nobody wants spammers on their networks - but if they do: then this is kind of exactly the reason for this list. The policy describes in detail what made it possible for this netblock to end up on the list, that should be enough for them to take action either pre-emptively or by notifying their offending customer, and if neccessary kicking them off the network.
The next thing you can do, instead of paying for whitelisting, ist to contact the mailserver-admin at system you are trying to deliver mail to. This can be a bit of a hassle - seeing that your mailserver just got blocked - but it usually works. The same way systems don't want to receive SPAM they also don't want to overblock, after all they want their users to receive emails as well. If you are the mail admin of a sending system and you're reaching out to the receiving system this is usually a pretty good indicator that you don't want to spam them.
I have had success doing this even at some larger ISPs, where you would expect this to be more difficult.
I very much enjoy these blocklists - simple, transparent. Loads better than the kafkaesk black holes that are the major mail providers who barely care, and who do not give you easy recourse if you are mistakenly blocked.
I'm dealing with this right now. Both my personal domain and rsync.net are on a distinct subnet, but that subnet is smaller than a /24 and someone on a different subnet has, apparently, behaved badly. Enter "abusix" ... One of my engineers had an enlightening webchat with one of their engineers where we were shown the "offending" IP and it was explained that they have no ability to distinguish subnets (and no interes…
> We were also informed that our normal, business communications with paying customers should have unsubscribe notices appended to them. Which is to say, you're a paying customer of a service and we send you some kind of alert or critical announcement ... and it should have an unsubscribe link. You absolutely should. The amount of junk I get because someone else signed up for something and fat fingered their email ad…
But it's not a good reason for adding unsubscribe links unilaterally to all email communications.
Remember, unsub links are machine-automatable; Gmail at least offers to follow any embedded unsubscribe links for you if you mark a message as spam. (Which, with hotkeys enabled, is one accidental keypress away.)
So consider the extreme case: what if the user fat-fingers an unsubscribe (without realizing) to their local electric company's e-invoices, which is what they've been relying on to prod them to log onto the site and pay the bill?
If it's clear that "bills you need to react to or your power will be shut off" shouldn't have an unsubscribe link, then clearly there's some sort of line that must be drawn somewhere.
(Note, I'm not arguing against the use of "Manage your Mail Preferences" links in these cases — the kind that act as magic sign-in links and take you directly to a page on which you can un-check a "mail me about X" checkbox. It makes sense to include those. I'm just arguing specifically against unilaterally including "Unsubscribe" links — the kind where following the link unsubscribes you with no further confirmation needed.)
If you start a new mail server in 2022 (or migrate from a previous address), you have to apply to be whitelisted by outlook.com and the many domains owned by Microsoft. They no longer accept mail from servers they haven't seen before. Companies such as google, microsoft, and facebook would rather that email died, and are actively working to destroy it through neglect, so that people will shift their messaging to prop…
Interesting. This tracks with my experiences too, but is there a good source for this that I can reference in the future?
I got out of hosting email last year entirely because of intractable deliverability problems with the big three: Google, Microsoft, and Comcast. Comcast's issues mostly appeared intermittent and the result of incompetence. Google and Microsoft have clearly been competing to see who can kill small email service providers the fastest.
I'm dealing with this right now. Both my personal domain and rsync.net are on a distinct subnet, but that subnet is smaller than a /24 and someone on a different subnet has, apparently, behaved badly. Enter "abusix" ... One of my engineers had an enlightening webchat with one of their engineers where we were shown the "offending" IP and it was explained that they have no ability to distinguish subnets (and no interes…
> We were also informed that our normal, business communications with paying customers should have unsubscribe notices appended to them. You should have an unsubscribe link. You should also have your business address and identify yourself. Even if it's not required by the letter of the law, you should add it. As an example: Amazon automatically opted me into an "alert" when a wishlist I viewed had a new viewer. Since…
Spam blocklists are run by an unaccountable cowboy cult that somehow has managed to consolidate a ton of power simply for the fact that most people who run email inbox services didn't want to deal with the problem of spam, so they were more than willing to just hand over anti-spam "enforcement" to anyone who was allegedly doing "what was best for the internet." There's no check on these people who run these blacklist…
> Or I can leave the current hosting company Yep, that's the one. If your hoster doesn't care about spam spreading from their IP space, you should take your mail server elsewhere. There's literally nothing to think about. And if they do care about this issue, they are likely to be taking steps to remove any of their IP space from the blacklists, without being nudged. PS. I've been running a mail server for close to 2…
>/24 netblock on the second offense. That seems excessive and abusive, I am not aware of any commercial ISP that is giving out /24 anymore. /29 is most common, I had to practically beg to get a /28 so what is the justification for banning an /24???
If they did, what would be Google's justification for blocking senders that send too few emails?