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Spam blacklisting is out of control

blog.roastidio.us

331–340 of 430 posts

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#331
I think this blog should be retitled to some big US tech firms are out of control.

The US firm providing anti virus/antispam to UK politicians wont even confirm if they have blocked email sent from constituents to UK politicians.

Some websites also block emails from some European email providers, but it always traces back to US tech firms.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#332
post #146

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?

Is it a tort of negligent interference? Libel?

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect. The service you are sending the mail to (example.com in this case) is receiving that mail. They are then delivering it to the user, or not, depending on the agreement they have with the user. If example.com and a user of example.com have agreed that example.com is responsible for providing spam filtering, then they would be remiss in delivering the email to their customer. This is the way that emai…

I'd hardly say this is a feature. It's an artifact of the fact that once upon a time computers were expensive, so many people had to share a server with multiple email accounts, and a netop had to run this server. The fact that Alice is beholden to example.com helps nobody but example.com. In an ideal world, Alice would not have to couple her infrastructure with a blocklist and Alice would have the choice of blocklis…

Spam is inevitable. Opining about ideal worlds is fun, but it's also irrelevant because that world is gone and it will never come back because it can't.

Alice is not beholden to example.com, she can use any hosting provider she wants. Moving providers isn't even that difficult. It's also totally irrelevant, because again spam is inevitable.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#334
post #6

Fortunately for the author, I haven’t noticed any email servers that use the UCEPROTECTL3 RBLs to reject mail—which is to say, I’ve noticed some servers I administer end up on UCEPROTECTL3 incidentally and it has never caused a delivery problem. On the other hand, some VPS providers are still allocating multiple customers to the same IPv6 /64 using SLAAC by default, and this will make it impossible to deliver mail on…

Outlook properties seemingly use uceprotect lists. Outlook support even has a page for getting off their block list, but I could never get a reply. And my hosting provider basically said "we're warning against using our servers for outbound email", which amounts to "we're not gonna do anything about your bad neighbors that landed you on the uceprotect lvl2&3 lists" Been running my own email for 18 years, and outlook…

Outlook definitely engage in aggressive blocking of netranges, but I’m pretty sure they don’t use UCEPROTECT to do this since I’ve seen servers caught in Outlook netrange blocks despite all the public RBLs (including UCEPROTECTL3) showing no problem.

Just to be sure, you are using the Outlook form[0] and not the Office365 form? Have you signed up for SNDS?[1] All these hoops are pretty dumb, and I don’t think they have updated any of these systems since the mid-2000s so they are also pretty terrible to use, but here we are.

My limited personal experience with Outlook’s removal process is that it’s just slow and confusing (sometimes 12 hours for a response, sometimes the response emails are empty). The last time I had to do this, their TLS certificates had expired (and they use HSTS), so I could not even get into SNDS for half the day until someone there finally noticed and deployed new certificates.

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/supportrequestform/8ad563e3-28...

[1] https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#336
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you contact Google and Microsoft regarding deliverability issues?

Microsoft: 1. Set up on https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/ 2. Read everything at https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/pm/ 3. Make sure everything is fixed, then use the link to the form hidden under Troubleshooting > "Sender services, tools, and issue submission" (the link's label is "here") to contact support. Make sure all fields are provided, including a website. It may take a few d…

You failed to mention that if you haven't managed to complete this successfully(google also has a similar form: https://postmaster.google.com), google will just mark it as SPAM, but outlook will *silently* drop your mails.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#337
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes because the government involved in technology always makes things better as I click on “allow cookies” on every damn website.

Punishing anti-competitive measures doesn't have to be always complicated. "Allow cookies" modals are horrible but GDPR gives people in the EU rights to be forgotten and not contacted in the future. Reminding companies about GDPR regulations works very well.

Probably a lot of those "allow cookies" banner are also illegal [0], but you can enable a cookie banner filer in uBlock Origin anyway.

[0]: https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-files-422-formal-gdpr-complaints-ner...

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#338
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: your comment and a bunch of others make me wonder why people seem unable to filter email by sender. That used to be a pretty standard part of having an inbox. Are you using a mail client or service that doesn't have filtering built in? Do you find it difficult to set up a filter rule? Are you unfamiliar with filter rules? Do you use filters but just ideologically object to any unwanted email? I'm ho…

Gmail filters are incapable of marking things as spam. Worse, if something matches a filter rule, it's whitelisted.

Well, that's horrible and explains a lot. Thanks.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#339
post #151

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"

IANAL. But you don't have a contract with the receiver for the receiver to receive your mail. You send mail from an IP on a subnet you control to AT&T. ATT has previously received spam from this subnet (maybe before you acquired the subnet), and they've marked it in a spam list. You're not _paying_ ATT to deliver your mail; that's when you can invoke a lawyer and say that ATT is not doing what you're paying them to d…

You and the receiver are in a business relationship. AT&T, through its “arbitrary” blocklist, is getting in the way. Without further justifications (and “oh it’s the algorithm” is not enough!) they are interfering with your business relationship.

That’s what tortuous interference is, getting in the way of third parties doing business. You could argue about technical details around the server but a judge will properly understand the social constructs at play.

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