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The Perils of an .xyz Domain

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Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#121

Post by ArchOversight »

petercooper wrote: post #118
humanistbot wrote: post #2

> One surprising side effect of having a .xyz domain is that the mere inclusion of .xyz inside of a text message will result in a silent delivery failure for many providers. This is wild to me. Tested it out myself and I couldn't send an SMS with a spot.xyz link to/from Google Voice T-Mobile. And no "failed delivery" notice either, just a silent failure. And yet I still get so many texts that are obviously spam or ph…

Related thing from the past.. Gmail once had a bug(?) where if you sent any email containing a URL with the domain starting "0x", it would go straight to spam. I imagine it was a rule hard coded to block the use of hexadecimal long IP URLs, but it also picked regular domains starting 0x. It was fixed a few years ago.

I own a domain starting with 0x and I spent a lot of time talking to people I knew at Google to get that one fixed because my mail would not be delivered.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#122

Post by skrtskrt »

duskwuff wrote: post #77
krono wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocking of messages/emails and blanket email server/domain/extension blacklisting is the same as a postal service not delivering mail to or from a particular entity/street/town. Doing so silently and without a valid and case-specific reason should not be legally allowed. Edit: Added "street/town" to analogy, and "case-specific" before reason

You'd be getting an unbelievable amount of SMS spam if carriers weren't allowed to block messages. There's a lot of bad actors out there.

Seconded, having worked in this space I can assure everyone that there are multiple orders of magnitude more (attempted) spam SMS than legitimate SMS.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#123

Post by burnished »

sneak wrote: post #82
burnished wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship is part of an agenda. This is not censorship, and you calling that waters the phrase down. If I have a poorly constructed email filter, is that censorship? I wouldn't say so, and this example is more in line with that than with any active censorship. So, in short, no one is afraid to call something censorship, I think they are just waiting for the right time. When it is applicable.

Hiding spam from users is an agenda, so therefore my usage complies with your definition.

Do you think that furthered the conversation, or are you trying to score points? Or perhaps my meaning was unclear?

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#124

Post by mindslight »

blowski wrote: post #72
mindslight wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, No, Yes. "Censorship" comes from the word "censor" - an intermediary who controls speech. Programmers need to stop assuming that every situation is scale- and convenience-invariant.

If the email provider says "Would you like us to add a set of rules people tend to add?", is that censorship? There's a very fuzzy line somewhere, on one side of which a provider is helping users get what they want, and on the other is blocking content they don't want users to receive. I'm exploring where that line is. While you have a right to send emails to me, I have a right to sign up for a service that automatic…

I would say the line has to do with how informed/empowered the user is about the initial content, ongoing changes, and their ability to make their own modifications.

The original comment was about text messages, of which there is certainly not a competitive market (the Ma Bell T-1000 has reassembled itself into only 3 remaining pieces), users were surprised at the behavior, and there doesn't seem to be a straightforward way to opt out of stupid rules like blocking whole TLDs. So it's a far way from being able to say that such blocking represents the will of the user.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#125

Post by drampelt »

Scoundreller wrote: post #70
humanistbot wrote: post #2

> One surprising side effect of having a .xyz domain is that the mere inclusion of .xyz inside of a text message will result in a silent delivery failure for many providers. This is wild to me. Tested it out myself and I couldn't send an SMS with a spot.xyz link to/from Google Voice T-Mobile. And no "failed delivery" notice either, just a silent failure. And yet I still get so many texts that are obviously spam or ph…

If you’re in Canada, and send an SMS containing the string “special message” to or from a Telus customer (or one of their sub-brands), it will be silently dropped. Telus is one of the big3 telecoms here.

I just tried on Koodo which is part of Telus, no issues sending/receiving

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#126

Post by slavik81 »

It is rather disappointing. I run my personal blog and email on .xyz because it's great for graphics puns. Hotmail and gmail will accept my messages, but corporate email servers often seem to blackhole me.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#127

Post by smalley »

Does anybody know if there's a consolidated list of domains and their various blacklist/deliverability issues compiled someplace? I for one would love to know how broad this problem is across the various TLDs for network filtering/email/sms/messaging etc. Seems like it would be a pain to maintain even as a snapshot but I would definitely be interested.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#128

Post by GuB-42 »

kureikain wrote: post #59

Before I get into email business(I run my own email forwarding service[0]), I don't understand why provider block those domains. Then I immediately got it. The amount of spam emails from .xyz .click .faith .top is huge. And with every email comes from them, we have to run spam scanner, which isn't cheap. So we have to score those TLDs more sensitive. https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/ can give some insight abo…

> We should have known better from the beginning as we previously founded Outreach.io, the leading sales engagement platform, making us no strangers to email deliverability. In the early days of Outreach, we had utilized some short .xyz domains to use for shortened links in emails sent on behalf of our customers.

Translation: We used .xyz for spamming, of course .xyz is associated with spam.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#129

Post by kop316 »

pope_meat wrote: post #95
kop316 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...whoa, yeah same here. tried "test spot.xyz" then "test spot.com" T-mobile T-Mobile. "test spot.xyz" did not send. Even weirder, I got a confirmmation that it was delivered. It looks like T-Mobile looks for ".xyz" within the SMS and will silent drop the SMS (though it will claim it is delivered). ".xxyz" works, "..xyz" or ".xyzz" does not. "xyz" works, so does ".xy".

Use signal. If you're encrypting your message, they can't filter your message out.

Respectfully, I do use signal, my family, my boss, most of my friends, etc. do not, they use SMS.

Also, Telegram seems to be much better supported on the Pinephone as of now, so that is what I generally prefer.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#130

Post by greenshackle2 »

tombert wrote: post #62
hcurtiss wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had .email for a while. Many shopping sites wouldn't actually let you use the address, presumably given some filter assuming that "email" was a fake address. Because my name ends with "ss", I switched over to .es, which conveniently is a country TLD (Spain). That's worked very well, though occasionally I'll get spam in Spanish, which cracks me up.

That's a clever workaround, though doesn't the .es TLD requires some kind of tie to Spain? I'm not sure how they could possibly enforce that, but in the purely technical sense, are you technically breaking rules?

No. Not all ccTLD's have restrictions. .es is open to anyone.
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