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The only safe email is text-only email

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Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#81

Post by cyberpunk »

pricechild wrote: post #78
Belphemur wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First step when getting an ip for a server that will be a mail server is to check if the ip is not already blacklisted. You can always get it unlisted. After that don't start to send hundred of email by day. You need to build a reputation for your domain and ip. As the parent comment says, set up directly spf, dkim and dmarc (also arc if you can). Rspamd can help you do that. I've been running a personal mail server…

> You can always get it unlisted. How do you do that? The vast majority of blocklists I've interacted with have been unwilling to deal with questions, instead responding only that if you fix "something" (not always specified) automated measures will remove it from the list eventually. In my experience it has also been extremely difficult to deal with people using blocklists. It's easy to find a bunch of people using…

I worked for two very large ESPs and never really had many problems with blacklists from a deliverability perspective.

Whenever one of our mailer IPs was blacklisted by one of the big targets (hotmail, gmail, etc) it would only be for 24hours after which I'd put it back into the pools (although, at least initially perhaps for our more reputable clients to warm it back up before letting the more dodgy stuff through it again). If you host your own NS's for the sender domains flipping SPF ips/ranges is not too hard (it's all automated for us, anyway).

The big boys work that way at least in my experience. I'm sure sometimes you'd hit a 'somedomain.foo' domain which is using a blocklist style thing that their (usually inexperienced) sysadmins think prevents them from receiving spam; but they're not worth arguing with. If you're doing email at volume shifting sends to another range for that client is usually 'enough' to get them through if they care that much about that one segment to ask you to do it.

If it's not then we'd usually refund instead of trying to negotiate with such admins.

Honestly though, blacklists have never been an issue for me and I've sent a ridiculous amount of email over the last 10 years...

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#82

Post by cyberpunk »

dozzie wrote: post #75
Belphemur wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First step when getting an ip for a server that will be a mail server is to check if the ip is not already blacklisted. You can always get it unlisted. After that don't start to send hundred of email by day. You need to build a reputation for your domain and ip. As the parent comment says, set up directly spf, dkim and dmarc (also arc if you can). Rspamd can help you do that. I've been running a personal mail server…

I've been running a personal mail server for twice as long with simply following those rules and my e-mail is still tagged as spam in Gmail when it's me who initiates contact (once the other party sends me an e-mail, reply or otherwise, I no longer get tagged as spam). As I said, it's totally opaque crapshot.

Are you using DKIM and SPF properly? I've never had any problems with this (although, I'm not mailing from home ISP ranges)

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#83

Post by donohoe »

If you like this approach and are using Mail.app on OSX then I recommend the following:

First...

1. In the menu, go: Mail > Preferences > Viewing.

2. Uncheck "Load remote content in messages".

3. Move to the "Composing" tab.

4. Select "Plain Text" for Message Format.

5. Uncheck "Use the same message format as the original message".

Second...

In Terminal, copy/paste this command to set plain-text preference to true:

  defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool true
Its not perfect, but short of switching to another email client, its a step in the right direction.

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#84

Post by trumpownsyou420 »

userbinator wrote: post #32

I've noticed that "if it's not plaintext, it gets deleted without being read" seems to be a pretty common rule among Germans on the Internet, who also have a tendency to like specifying very exactly what they want of email to them. Here's a few examples: https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/email.en.htm http://problemkaputt.de/email.htm https://www.gaertner.de/~neitzel/email-to-mn.html http://www.karo-electronics.de…

these dudes sound like fun.

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#85

Post by dozzie »

cyberpunk wrote: post #82
dozzie wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been running a personal mail server for twice as long with simply following those rules and my e-mail is still tagged as spam in Gmail when it's me who initiates contact (once the other party sends me an e-mail, reply or otherwise, I no longer get tagged as spam). As I said, it's totally opaque crapshot.

Are you using DKIM and SPF properly? I've never had any problems with this (although, I'm not mailing from home ISP ranges)

Yes.

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#86

Post by cyberpunk »

dozzie wrote: post #85
cyberpunk wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using DKIM and SPF properly? I've never had any problems with this (although, I'm not mailing from home ISP ranges)

Yes.

That's very strange, then.

I'd recommend trying http://dkimvalidator.com/ to make sure everything is perfect; having proper certs on your MXs seems to help too.

I run a pretty large email infra (~500k/minute) and I'd help you out if I can...

If you're still having problems with all that in place then why don't you just change IPs?

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#87

Post by dozzie »

cyberpunk wrote: post #86
dozzie wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes.

That's very strange, then. I'd recommend trying http://dkimvalidator.com/ to make sure everything is perfect; having proper certs on your MXs seems to help too. I run a pretty large email infra (~500k/minute) and I'd help you out if I can... If you're still having problems with all that in place then why don't you just change IPs?

As I said, Gmail is opaque with regard to its spam detection.

As for your help offer, thank you, but I'm good. It's usually other people who want to contact me, I rarely send the first message ever.

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#88

Post by cyberpunk »

dozzie wrote: post #87
cyberpunk wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very strange, then. I'd recommend trying http://dkimvalidator.com/ to make sure everything is perfect; having proper certs on your MXs seems to help too. I run a pretty large email infra (~500k/minute) and I'd help you out if I can... If you're still having problems with all that in place then why don't you just change IPs?

As I said, Gmail is opaque with regard to its spam detection. As for your help offer, thank you, but I'm good. It's usually other people who want to contact me, I rarely send the first message ever.

Hmm well, I've found it to be pretty straightforward, I'm curious why this is happening to you though and there must be a solution...

I mean.. If you get a solid result from dkimvalidator but google is still shitlisting you then I'd definitely consider moving to another host/dc/isp at least.

Depending on your size, it might be best just to make this someone else's problem (if you can) -- like google, o365, etc..

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#89

Post by stephenr »

zwp wrote: post #36
stephenr wrote: post #29

I've always thought native handling of markdown for email would be pretty cool. The MUA could strip out any HTML embedded in the actual markdown, render to HTML locally (for display) and you have nice formatting without the risks or cruft of email HTML. And of course if you choose to view in text only mode, you don't actually lose any semantic meaning.

Huh, looks like text/markdown email is coming slowly: https://stackoverflow.com/a/25812177 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7763 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7764 (March 2016) Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13176743

The RFC's are just about defining the Media Type 'text/markdown' aren't they?

Just because they used to be called MIME types and were designed for email, I wouldn't treat those RFC's as being about email support specifically.

Re: The only safe email is text-only email

#90

Post by dozzie »

cyberpunk wrote: post #88
dozzie wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, Gmail is opaque with regard to its spam detection. As for your help offer, thank you, but I'm good. It's usually other people who want to contact me, I rarely send the first message ever.

Hmm well, I've found it to be pretty straightforward, I'm curious why this is happening to you though and there must be a solution... I mean.. If you get a solid result from dkimvalidator but google is still shitlisting you then I'd definitely consider moving to another host/dc/isp at least. Depending on your size, it might be best just to make this someone else's problem (if you can) -- like google, o365, etc..

I'm definitely not giving to somebody else my /var/log/mail.log, IMAP/Mutt access, sieve rules, nor ad hoc dedicated aliases for every website account I create. And on top of that, I would land on some US-based server for ease of illegal spying and my mail would be harvested for some advertising crap, all to solve something that is not a problem for me. Not happening.
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