201–210 of 430 posts
SMTP is a failed product.
That being said, I don't know how SMTP hasn't been replaced yet. It shouldn't have lived much longer than the early 2000s, in my opinion.
I fought the battle to keep my SMTP server IP off blacklists, and lost. You can do everything possible, have a perfectly clean IP, have a good amount of outbound email traffic, only send transactional email, etc. Still, there will be edge cases where email does not go through. AT&T email servers would constantly blacklist me and not respond to requests to remove me, gmail/yahoo/outlook would silently put emails in th…
I manage an outbound mail server for a mid-sized company. I happen to also use it for my own personal mail. We have had on and off deliverability issues for years (AT&T and Comcast being the worst). As head of IT it fell to me to post whitelisting requests and try to get mail delivering again. I decided after awhile that this really isn't my job, and made a suggestion to the CEO which he took to heart: There is anoth…
Excellent idea, thank you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
"You should have an unsubscribe link. You should also have your business address and identify yourself." What would that even look like ? You're a paying customer of a service - they charge you every month - and you use that service ~daily ... and then you unsubscribe to emails ... So then what ? We just keep taking your money and when the service fails or there is an outage or critical notification we ... just don't…
What are they supposed to do in response to an outage notification, apart from wait for things to recover on their own?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what's the advice for an avg Joe for getting a reply from ATT, Comcast, etc when they unjustly blacklist you and ignore all correspondence?
1. Host your mx somewhere that isn't on any blacklists. This means a small to medium sized isp, where you can directly contact the people who run the core network operations there, and who truly do care about kicking off abusive other customers very quickly. Ideally I would go with an ISP in your own region and home business area. Best chances of success if it's a hosting ISP where random customers cannot sign up onl…
That's a nice idea. In fact, it's what my businesses have done for years. I have personally met several of the senior staff at the service I use and I know that they are both technically excellent and very serious about preventing abuse on their network.
We haven't been able to deliver mails to customers at certain mail services for years. 100% blackholed every time. And it's the same usual suspects that others have mentioned in this very discussion.
The problem is that the hosting service we use has many customers. Occasionally one of those customers makes a mistake and one of their systems gets compromised for a short time, until they or the hosting service detects the unusual traffic and intervenes. And that's enough to get someone's IP block on a blacklist it will evidently never leave.
This is of course absolutely no different to any hosting service like AWS or Azure, except that no-one is going to blanket block all servers from an organisation of that scale even though the exact same problems happen there too.
We should wake up and raise the standard. We could even make it a public utility, or a utility that contracts to competing companies, or just develop standards for delivery and user rights - nobody can read my mail, nobody can interfere with it, delivery guaranteed within X time, etc. One challenge is to esure that individuals are still able to run their own servers (e.g., develop standards that the FOSS email software developers can meet). But we could have similar laws to regular mail, protecting delivery, confidentiality, and against fraud.
Why do we endure this awful system? Recently I feel like the IT world has shifted from an innovative, creative, we-will-solve-any-problem, build-it-in-our-garage community, to one that is defeatist (nothing we can do), status quo, depends on mega-corps (or VCs) for everything, and which prizes a how-much-can-I-take narcissistic business mentality rather than a creative, change-the-world engineering one.
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He didn’t say threaten them. It’s pretty easy to envision a situation where a lawyer sends a quite friendly and factual email to a company, that is literally identical to the one the IT head would have sent, but because it’s coming from a lawyer the recipient uses completely different internal routing to process the request. So someone actually takes the request seriously. Seems both plausible and a reasonable thing…
In the American legal system, if somebody spends the money to take the time to have their lawyer hand craft and send me a letter about something such as this, I'm going to take it as a threat whether or not it specifically contains one. The implication is that if you do not do whatever is demanded in the letter, the next step will be the client of said lawyer escalating the situation to paying their lawyer to actuall…
Of course there’s a lot of garbage out there too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I manage an outbound mail server for a mid-sized company. I happen to also use it for my own personal mail. We have had on and off deliverability issues for years (AT&T and Comcast being the worst). As head of IT it fell to me to post whitelisting requests and try to get mail delivering again. I decided after awhile that this really isn't my job, and made a suggestion to the CEO which he took to heart: There is anoth…
>Get your legal department involved. We have repeatedly been taken off various public and private blacklists by having lawyers do their job. What's the particular law that makes those curators of blacklists pay attention to your company's lawyers? Do you have example text of those legal requests?
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He didn’t say threaten them. It’s pretty easy to envision a situation where a lawyer sends a quite friendly and factual email to a company, that is literally identical to the one the IT head would have sent, but because it’s coming from a lawyer the recipient uses completely different internal routing to process the request. So someone actually takes the request seriously. Seems both plausible and a reasonable thing…
In the American legal system, if somebody spends the money to take the time to have their lawyer hand craft and send me a letter about something such as this, I'm going to take it as a threat whether or not it specifically contains one. The implication is that if you do not do whatever is demanded in the letter, the next step will be the client of said lawyer escalating the situation to paying their lawyer to actuall…
Your main premise seems to be that the recipient should take all this very personally. But it’s not personal, these are businesses, discussing a business related topic.
The VAST majority of business to business communications that involve attorneys don’t go anywhere near an actual filed lawsuit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would think "Tortious interference" is the most likely legal basis to complain about it. "Tortious interference is a common law tort allowing a claim for damages against a defendant who wrongfully interferes with the plaintiff's contractual or business relationships"
Safe your 500 bucks per hour. A lawyer will not do anything. A blacklist is not directly interfering with your business. They just provide a list that contains IPs, your IP, and say we have seen spam traffic from it in the last x hours. The mail receiver, who trusts and uses the list might be interfering, but it is his right to pick and choose who he is accepting email from. Same right you have to pick and choose who…
In email, we have accepted a status quo of unreliable availability (delivery), a lack of confidentiality, and frequent fraud. The post office is far better, other than the latency of moving paper. We should wake up and raise the standard. We could even make it a public utility, or a utility that contracts to competing companies, or just develop standards for delivery and user rights - nobody can read my mail, nobody…