[HN Gopher] Outlook/Hotmail is no longer blocking my mail server
___________________________________________________________________
Outlook/Hotmail is no longer blocking my mail server
Author : unclet
Score : 163 points
Date : 2023-12-28 07:06 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (taoshu.in)
(TXT) w3m dump (taoshu.in)
| abberation wrote:
| Wow, Outlook actually tells you they blocked you? My email
| (custom gmail domain btw) just ends up in the Spam folder of
| outlook clients with no notification at all.
| delusional wrote:
| That's a different issue. You're usually not notified of spam
| designations, but bounces (where the mail server completely
| refuses to accept your email) do usually receive a
| notification. If you're designated as both (for example if you
| keep sending email that bounces) you'll get blackholed and wont
| receive any bounce notification either.
| Sayrus wrote:
| When I used to self-host my emails, GMail would "accept"
| mails then drop them. Microsoft was kind enough to tell me
| they dropped them but getting out of the blacklists was a
| pain.
| lucb1e wrote:
| An advantage of landing in spam is that the user still has a
| choice and is in control. Rejecting outright is a "lalalala I
| can't hear youu!!" type of stupid situation that only big
| providers can get away with, without the users realizing
| their bigcorp is the one with delivery issues
| uxp8u61q wrote:
| As a user, I'm thankful I don't need to sift through
| hundreds of spam emails a day to find potential false
| positives. Because that's what you're advocating. You'd
| apparently like everyone to have a terrible email
| experience for the sake of your own personal comfort and
| preference (self hosting your emails).
|
| Besides, for something truly important, the people or
| organisations who need to reach me know how to do so other
| than via email (phone, chat, postal mail...).
| Dalewyn wrote:
| This. Microsoft, Google, et al. aren't doing anything
| worthy of criticism here; it's the spammers who ruin
| email for the rest of us who should be facing the music.
| Avamander wrote:
| Until it's not illegal it's only going to get worse.
| uxp8u61q wrote:
| Spamming _is_ illegal.
| Avamander wrote:
| In a lot of jurisdictions it basically isn't. I'd love to
| see at least a few convictions though, where it is.
| pm215 wrote:
| Conversely, if you as the sender get a bounce at least you
| know something went wrong and can try a different way to
| contact the other person (different email, telephone, text
| message...) Bouncing is the traditional approach, and the
| original ethos was "bounce, or defer, or deliver, but don't
| ever accidentally or deliberately just drop an email on the
| floor".
|
| It depends whether you think of "the user" as the sender or
| the re cover -- as a (human) sender I'd rather get a bounce
| than be silently ignored in a spam folder, but as a
| receiver I prefer the grey-area emails to be accept-but-
| spamfolder, not bounced...
| midasuni wrote:
| I used to set my mail client up to bounce emails detected
| as spam with a fake bounce and a delete.
|
| My mail provider (university) at the time complained to
| me because those bounces themselves bounced.
| jraph wrote:
| I self host. Over the years, I've had both situations with
| outlook. I've tried many things.
|
| As it happens, I noticed my mails have gone through just fine
| in the last months, at least to companies using Microsoft
| services without me doing anything specific, after I threw the
| towel with Outlook. I did switch VPS providers almost a year
| ago, though to a provider that I expect to be more filtered
| (ovh).
| BSDobelix wrote:
| Have you tested with:
|
| https://www.mail-tester.com/
| TomK32 wrote:
| Thanks, I was missing a DKIM on my mailcow setup. 10/10 now
| :-)
| BSDobelix wrote:
| Excellent!! Have a nice day!
| Pathogen-David wrote:
| Another useful tool is https://www.learndmarc.com/ -- I found
| the presentation very helpful when I was finally getting on
| the DMARC train a while back.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| True, MECSA is also interesting:
|
| https://mecsa.jrc.ec.europa.eu/en/
| yonrg wrote:
| They made me configure MTS
| _ache_ wrote:
| Whoa ! Very nice tool.
| Pathogen-David wrote:
| Ooh, thank you for sharing! This has given me a few
| things I should look into improving with my setup.
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| I run a small transactional email provider
| (https://mailpace.com), our IPs are very rarely added to
| blocklists- but we are very strict on what we allow through our
| service, and surprisingly we've had no long term delivery issues
| with any of the big providers.
|
| So thanks to the federated/decentralized design of email, is
| totally possible to be part of the network without any special
| privileges.
|
| We are sending millions of emails every day though, which is
| quite different to sending a couple hundred personal emails a
| week. If you're running this on a cloud host, expect to be
| blocked by default. However if you can find a small vps provider
| you'll have better luck on sending yourself.
| TobyTheDog123 wrote:
| (Unrelated to the OP - but I've been so frustrated by this for
| so long that it's worth the [flagged])
|
| A product like this is exactly what I've been looking for with
| pretty great pricing.
|
| The one thing that this (and most providers) are missing is
| making email easy to test. I'm about to launch a product where
| email is critical, and there's no way to send an example email
| (with a non-test email address) to your service and see that
| you receive it, without it being sent to the To address.
|
| Better yet, the few providers that do support it charge as if
| it were a real email, when none of the delivery costs exist on
| their end (there are infrastructure costs, sure, but there is
| none of the reputation risk nor need for clean IPs, the reason
| people use transactional services like these in the first
| place).
| yonrg wrote:
| Right. When I changed my vps to another hoster, I totally
| forgot how much trouble it was to get a good reputation in the
| beginning.
|
| But it was really not that much work again. Just unfortunate,
| because one big Mail provider just discarded instead of
| rejecting my mails. After this was settled, everything works
| quite nice again. Important to me is keeping spf, dkim, dmarc
| and now also mts up to date. See mail-checker.com e.g.
|
| I still wonder though, why some big mail providers do not do
| dkim/dmarc? I happen to realize this when I started to fight
| spam and gave incoming mails without dkim/dmarc a high spam
| score.
| benmanns wrote:
| Do you mean a different domain? mail-checker.com Looks like a
| parked spam domain.
| neilv wrote:
| I love https://www.mail-tester.com/
|
| One time, mail-tester.com found that my paid personal email
| hoster had moved my SMTP server to a new IP address without
| updating the anti-spam sender mechanisms. (You had _one_
| job, people.) When email is how you keep in touch with a
| lot of friends, and occasionally make new consulting
| contacts, that 's relatively costly.
| jabart wrote:
| We host in a datacenter and sending from their IPv4 or our own
| /24 IPv4 block has no issue. We also have the volume to keep
| things going as well to build up the reputation.
| amar0c wrote:
| Can I use you as relay to my Postfix for 'regular' emails ?
| tschumacher wrote:
| Maybe the big webmail providers are relying more on machine
| learning for filtering spam instead of blocking IP ranges these
| days.
| gumballindie wrote:
| That would be horribly unreliable. I hope they dont rely on
| machine learning for such critical infrastructure.
| mort96 wrote:
| Blocking IP ranges is also horribly unreliable. There is no
| good way to fight spam in a system like e-mail, just varying
| levels of terrible ways.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Running a mail server should be something anyone can do. And
| while this is cool, there are so many other problems to do it.
| It's the price we pay of letting big tech companies control so
| much of the virtual infrastructure: big tech has commoditized the
| internet so much into a platform for consumerism that it becomes
| a valuable target for spam.
|
| In my opinion, the internet would be much better if none of the
| big players ever entered it, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo,
| etc, and it would allow for many more decentralized and valuable
| commons like email.
| mort96 wrote:
| The basic fact of the matter is that >99% of people will never
| be interested in hosting their own e-mail server, and that's
| okay.
|
| This means we need organizations to host e-mail for people. In
| a capitalist system, that means companies, and it leads to
| consolidation and monopolization. So far, governments have been
| seemingly uninterested in going after the large e-mail
| providers for anticompetitive practices; maybe that should
| change. But as long as those anticompetitive practices only
| really affect individual hobbyists who wanna host their own
| e-mail, while business interests are unaffected, I don't see
| this changing.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I don't think it just affects hobbyists. It allows affects
| people who want to use smaller email servers, or even people
| who WOULD use smaller email servers simply because larger
| ones did not exist.
|
| I think the government SHOULD go after consolidation such as
| Google, and that traditional anti-trust law is insufficient
| to combat the dangers of large tech companies.
|
| This is precisely because traditional anti-trust laws only
| look after large PROPORTIONS. In today's modern economy, due
| to its size, we have a danger that we've never seen before:
| large ABSOLUTE size, which was never a problem in history as
| it is today.
|
| Therefore, we need new laws that go after absolute size, as
| well as large proportions (traditional anti-trust).
| yobbo wrote:
| > In a capitalist system, that means companies, and it leads
| to consolidation and monopolization.
|
| No, a "capitalist system" does not lead to consolidation and
| monopolization.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| That is true, but an unbridled capitalistic system that has
| relatively weak controls for protection of the commens DOES
| lead to such things frequently. I am not against
| capitalism, but against the form of capitalism we have
| today, which is focused on arbitrary and endless growth
| with relatively little controls to prevent pathologies like
| Google.
| mort96 wrote:
| Then why does antitrust regulations have to exist?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| [Citation needed]
|
| I am a big fan of free markets, but the trend towards
| consolidation, at least in activities that profit from
| efficiencies of scale, is unmistakable, to the degree that
| it often kills the market unless prevented.
|
| You probably cannot "consolidate" a market of book authors
| and musical bands, because quality of artistic expression
| does not scale with money. But the market of _publishers_
| and _recording companies_ is quite consolidated, because
| money buys more efficiency there.
| haunter wrote:
| > the internet would be much better if none of the big players
| ever entered it, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc,
|
| How this could have been possible? Like there must have been
| some outside regulations in the late 90s/early 2000s. Maybe as
| an effect of the dotcom bubble?
|
| Also it's a good theory but doesn't fit the capitalist picture
| at all.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| There was no option due to lack of upload bandwidth for
| individuals at their home. And CGNAT.
|
| If there had been significant populations with sufficient
| upload capacity, and ipv6, then there could have been a
| market for network devices that operated out of people's
| homes under their own control.
|
| Not that this would have ensured that big players would not
| exist, but it could have technically allowed a solution to be
| innovated.
|
| The other option I can think of is a federal government
| provided email utility using post offices for identity
| verification and stiff penalties for spam/malware, to create
| a "trusted" network, as opposed to using opaque processes
| from Google/Apple/Microsoft/Meta to create a "trusted"
| network.
| midasuni wrote:
| For running mail you don't need upload bandwidth, and in my
| country certainly outside of mobile, CG nat isn't a thing.
| Static IPs tend to cost a pound or two more a month from
| many ISPs but not all.
|
| 20 years ago, and of course before then in the dialup age,
| your ISP operated your mail, so there was plenty of
| competition. Free at the point of use mail which meant you
| weren't locked to a single ISP so there were benefits, but
| the big benefit was the unlimited space that the funding of
| companies like google allowed for, they could muscle in and
| knock out competition.
|
| Eventually isps stopped providing as demand was tiny and
| the cost outweighed it. Same with things like nntp servers.
|
| I pay a couple of quid a month to Zoho to provide my mail,
| off my own domain. Obviously I have static ip4 and 6
| addresses from my ISP, but I'm happy to outsource as long
| as the cost is transparent and I'm not locked in, so I do.
| Part of that is to fund companies which are better armed to
| fight against monopolistic email practices than I am on my
| own.
|
| There are other suppliers I can shift to by moving my MX
| records and updating a couple of TXTs, but there's no need
| to at the moment.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > For running mail you don't need upload bandwidth, and
| in my country certainly outside of mobile, CG nat isn't a
| thing. Static IPs tend to cost a pound or two more a
| month from many ISPs but not all.
|
| The thing is it cannot just be mail thing, to make it
| economically and time wise worth it. I can pay relatively
| little per month and have Apple/Google/Microsoft to take
| care of all of my needs, from email to file syncing to
| photo and phone backups, with the big risk that I can get
| arbitrarily locked out at any given moment.
|
| But to offset this convenience, people would need an all
| in one, easy to setup, plug and play device that does it
| all. Something like a Synology NAS, where all they have
| to do is answer a few prompts about their domain and at
| most, swap in and out HDD when and if the disks or the
| NAS fail.
| thejosh wrote:
| The main benefit of Gmail and other big providers is the anti-
| spam, anti-scam, "Google knows best" approach works really
| well.
|
| When I last helped manage a mail server for a small business
| (late 2000's) SPAM was an absolute mess. You can really see why
| Azure etc has consumed on-premise Exchange.
|
| The massive downside is they are the deciders of who gets
| through their gates, and if you're on their shitlist, goodluck.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| On the other hand, if the main economic mechanisms that help
| the major players did not exist, we might not have so much
| spam in the first place.
| jasode wrote:
| _> , if the main economic mechanisms that help the major
| players did not exist, we might not have so much spam in
| the first place._
|
| Spam was a massive problem long before big tech existed.
|
| - The old USENET network which was/is a federated ecosystem
| of servers run by universities etc was overrun with
| unwanted spam.
|
| - Compuserve dialup network was blocking spam and they were
| also involved in a 1997 court case (1997 is a year before
| big tech like Google Inc existed in 1998.): https://en.wiki
| pedia.org/wiki/CompuServe_Inc._v._Cyber_Promo....
|
| - the infamous "spam solutions" webpage that was a snarky
| attempt at "educating" people about fixing spam was created
| around February 2004 which was 2 months before Gmail
| service was introduced:
| https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
|
| Other "small" areas of the internet are also universally
| hit with spam abuse:
|
| - blogs that allowed "readers' comments and feedback" got
| inundated with spam and the blog owners added CAPTCHAS or
| disabled comments completely.
|
| - small web forums like vBulletin and phpBB forums got hit
| with spam and admins put in "email signup and valid email
| verification link" workflows.
|
| - even the newer modern decentralized communication
| networks like Nostr attract spam: https://old.reddit.com/r/
| nostr/comments/121ytwf/cutting_thro...
|
| The existence of a big player like Gmail that was
| introduced in 2004 is not the reason for "so much spam".
|
| Spam volume is always a problem on any communication
| network where the cost to create new identities is $0 and
| the cost to send messages is near $0.00. An extreme example
| of the opposite situation is Bloomberg Terminals chat
| system not having a spam problem. Why? Because it costs
| $25000 a year subscription to use. Bloomberg did recently
| "unbundle" their chat system for a lower price but the
| point is that the friction for new accounts is still high
| enough to deter spam abuse.
| snotrockets wrote:
| Tell me you weren't running an email server 20 years ago
| without telling me you weren't running an email server 20
| years ago.
| riedel wrote:
| Safety and security is the best argument for monopolization
| and decreased freedom in general. It will always be a
| tradeoff. Fortunately a majority is typically more than happy
| with being fully patronized. The problem really starts if you
| are start being banned from infrastructure: e.g. see banking
| apps and 'safety net'. We are seeing the begining of a really
| dystopian world if regulators do not step in.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| The problem with "more than happy" is that their happiness
| is measured in terms of chosing the local maximum of least
| bad. Moreover, that local maxima slowly changs over time to
| be worse and worse, so that people's happiness becomes a
| temporary sense of relief at having chosen the least bad
| option, which in the course of decades makes for a
| curtailing of freedoms that is far from true contentment.
| thejosh wrote:
| I would also propose ease of use as a solution to our
| problems that the wolf in sheep's clothing took care of for
| us.
|
| We basically handed over how we communicate to make it
| easier (Emails, Team Communication such as Slack/Teams,
| etc), essential internet infrastructure (Cloudflare, Amazon
| etc), banking, etc because it was easier..
|
| My worst nightmare is somehow being locked out of my
| accounts, the only means is either emailing the CEO
| directly, posting on HN until it's _hopefully_ solved or
| just moving to the country, and eat a lot of peaches.
| tschumacher wrote:
| In my experience rspamd has >99% accuracy which is enough for
| my personal email account. I don't doubt that Google does
| better though.
| thejosh wrote:
| Awesome thanks, will check it out!
| inetknght wrote:
| > _The main benefit of Gmail and other big providers is the
| anti-spam, anti-scam, "Google knows best" approach works
| really well._
|
| We've been spammed and scammed into thinking this is true.
| Sadly, Gmail is actually worse than competitors and
| especially worse than running your own email server.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| > big tech has commoditized the internet so much into a
| platform for consumerism that it becomes a valuable target for
| spam.
|
| What? Spam existed long before the big tech was around
| (admittedly the first Spam was probably from DEC, but before
| 'big internet tech' existed anyway) - it grew because of the
| amount of people/consumers on the internet. And credit where
| credits due: getting rid of spam was very time consuming until
| Google came out with one of the first effective filters.
| V__ wrote:
| Is this mira of a U.S. centric problem? I selfhost my mail in
| Germany, have one at a smaller mail provider and never had
| problems.
|
| It is also not uncommon for companies to either have a local
| Exchange Server or use the mail service at their hosting
| provider. If everything is configured correctly, delivery works
| fine.
| psd1 wrote:
| Your experience may not be typical. I ran mail servers before
| office 365 was a thing, and I often had to get off block lists.
| There are stories on HN about it being worse, now that you have
| to request unblocking from MS and Google. Yours is the first
| comment that doesn't complain.
| layer8 wrote:
| Nah, I have the same experience as the GP, and in every HN
| thread about email self-hosting, there are a number of
| comments along the lines of "I've been self-hosting my email
| for 10-20 years and never had any problems". My SME employer
| also self-hosts without issues.
|
| Experiences obviously differ, but it's unclear where the
| differences stem from, apart from long-term IP reputation.
| vel0city wrote:
| > Yours is the first comment that doesn't complain.
|
| It is potentially more of those with problems are more likely
| to speak up than everyone else just posting "works fine for
| me" a thousand times over.
|
| I haven't had much deliverability problems with self-hosted
| things. I set it up right, and I get the emails I expected to
| get. So there's now two of us saying "works fine for me."
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Personal anecdote != universal, global experience.
|
| > have one at a smaller mail provider a)
| [hosted] Mail provider b) Server
| (colo/dedicated/VPS/whatever) provider
|
| Choose one.
|
| > not uncommon for companies to either have a local Exchange
| Server
|
| Yes and it's PITA to pull it out of the lists of some
| shitheads, like SpamHaus.
|
| Source: _guess it_
| Avamander wrote:
| SpamHaus always has really good reasons for doing what
| they're doing. How'd you piss them off?
|
| There are actually horrid lists like BackScatterer and
| UCEProtect that you can't even properly contact. So in
| comparison SH is super pleasant.
| bbarnett wrote:
| UCEProtect isn't legitimate. It's effectively a bribery
| ring. When presented with this data, anyone using it at the
| corporate level has dropped them.
|
| (Bell Canada used them for a while, until I and others
| demonstrated this fact)
|
| So don't worry about them.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > SpamHaus always has really good reasons
|
| Ah, yes, blocking entire /18 and demanding money for the
| delisting.
|
| I guess 'Guilty by association' is a 'good reason'.
| Avamander wrote:
| I haven't ever heard of them asking money for delisting.
| Surprising. Considering their track record it must be
| serious. A bulletproof host range? Traffic from those is
| absolutely guilty by association as the hosts are
| enabling abusive behaviour.
| freetanga wrote:
| I think that governments should offer one free email account per
| citizen for life. Which you could use or not, but is there for
| you as a digital inbox... which are the options?
|
| - Self hosting is a bit elitist - not for the masses.
|
| - A paid-for option (proton, tutta,...) would be cataloged as
| elitist. People perceive email as free.
|
| - A free option provided by a Corporate player will gravitate
| towards monopolies and lack of privacy.
|
| - A free for life government issued, easy to recover digital
| point of contact where all your government interactions are
| pointed towards would be a great step. You could still have a
| separate one if you don't trust big brother, but at least your
| "recovery" address would be secure for life.
| benbristow wrote:
| Ah yes, a government owned email service, what could go wrong?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Nothing? It can exist as a utility alongside other email
| services.
| iAMkenough wrote:
| Nothing can go wrong? In that case, the government should
| create a public social network as a utility alongside other
| social media services too.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Sure, although I think the utility of a communications
| network capable of receiving and sending documents within
| a country is very well proven to be a benefit to society,
| so any comparison to something less battle tested seems
| unnecessary.
|
| It makes no sense that in the physical world, we entrust
| government with identity verification and transmitting
| correspondence, but that trust is somehow lost in the
| digital world.
| iAMkenough wrote:
| I think the utility of a social communications network
| capable of receiving and sending updates within a country
| is a very well proven benefit to society, so any attempt
| to draw a line between email and social updates seems
| unnecessary.
|
| Each US citizen deserves access to a public network to
| express their First Amendment right without moderation.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Each US citizen deserves access to a public network to
| express their First Amendment right without moderation.
|
| Sure, make access to the internet an inalienable right
| also, but web hosting and domains are cheap enough that
| that should suffice. The network is the internet, and if
| people want to visit your website to see what you are
| saying, they can.
| xorcist wrote:
| Several countries have them. Maybe ask them?
|
| The reality is that it is about as exciting as getting your
| paper postal mail delivered in your physical mailbox.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Well, the government owned physical mail service worked
| pretty well for a few centuries, so... Not much?
|
| Now, of course, you shouldn't be organizing a criminal
| conspiracy or in general much anti-government protests over
| the mail or government-downed email. But the majority of
| communication is quite benign, and so having a government
| email for the 80% use case (bills, party invites, holiday
| wishes, etc) would be great. You can use a separate service
| for your more sensitive communication.
| blcknight wrote:
| This would probably work in a lot of European countries or
| places with high levels of government trust. I could see the
| German post office for example offering something like this and
| getting wide acceptance.
|
| You'll have a lot of distrustful Americans commenting how
| terrible this idea is and the government can't be trusted.
| They'd rather get it from a corporation and be subjected to
| unlimited surveillance capitalism and manipulation.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| "Think about the children" is pretty effective in Europe.
| They don't require to violate privacy when they could just
| make a law with popular support. They are pushing for all the
| messaging apps to provide unencrypted data to government.[1]
|
| [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/24/encryption-under-fire-
| in-e...
| hadrien01 wrote:
| The French post office does offer an email service:
| https://www.laposte.net/accueil
| anticensor wrote:
| Can it communicate with outside email? Some countries have
| a similar service that _cannot_ communicate with outside
| email.
| seszett wrote:
| It's just a regular email provider. I'm not sure I would
| trust it to keep working _forever_ , but for the last 15
| years or so it's been fine.
| judge2020 wrote:
| How does anyone have trust in their government besides to
| provide basic services? Every single government is hellbent
| on mass surveillance, and the EU is currently leading the
| way, not the US:
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/11/article-45-will-
| roll-b...
| gtirloni wrote:
| How does anyone have trust in their governments to provide
| even basic services? Not where I live.
|
| Still, I'd prefer to try and fix it (for various levels of
| "fixing") than throw the baby with the bathwater. It's an
| imperfect system but trusting a corporation is no better.
| xorcist wrote:
| Do you not make the distinction between government and
| state in your language?
|
| The government usually provide little service, but the
| state do. The question whether you trust it as a single
| entity is a bit hard to understand. Do you mean trust
| that my father gets his pension? Or that my kids get a
| good education? Or that my neighbor who is a doctor can
| provide decent health care?
|
| I probably trust some of those more and some less,
| depending on the circumstance. But basing trust on
| funding model seems intellectually .. challenging. Would
| I trust a university teacher more if the employer is not
| a state university? Would I trust a policeman more if
| working for a private security company?
|
| Not likely. Trust is based on other factors, including
| reputation and competence.
| Amezarak wrote:
| In American English, government and state (in the sense
| you mean it) are synonyms.
|
| Other countries seem to think of the government as "the
| current ruling party coalition members holding
| ministerial positions", so it would be inappropriate to
| refer to say, the driver's license bureau as "the
| government", but in the US, you'd never limit the sense
| of government in that way - you'd say something like "the
| administration" if you wanted to refer to the federal
| head of state and department heads, but the current
| federal executive, the US Congress, your local driver's
| license bureau, your tax assessor, your state
| environmental agency are all "the government" in the US.
| parasubvert wrote:
| A lot of people really want mass surveillance? Not even
| kidding. Cultures vary.
|
| Trust in government is more common than not throughout the
| world, because the government is us. Americans in
| particular struggle with this concept.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The US is absolutely leading the way, it's just being done
| by companies like Ring.
| 13of40 wrote:
| This is something that comes to mind whenever I hear about
| a local government doing a monoboly-busting effort to
| provide internet connectivity to their city, county, etc. I
| know their heart's probably in the right place, but I don't
| want the government to have a plug in the wall of my home
| that serves all of my communications and media.
| briandear wrote:
| Yeah, the Germans have such a great reputation when it comes
| to trusting government. Many aren't old enough to remember
| the fun of the Stasi and the West German equivalent, the BND.
| And let's not forget the Nazis with their meticulous tracking
| and record keeping.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Actually there has been an attempt of a state mandated E-Mail
| service in Germany called De-Mail.
|
| The idea was to put guarantees like identity, delivery
| receipts and stuff into an email system, so it can be used
| for legally binding communication.
|
| However it failed for various reasons (privacy concerns as it
| purposely had no e2e, usability restrictions, cost, ...)
| chris-orgmenta wrote:
| > - Self hosting is a bit elitist - not for the masses.
|
| Is it? Most people, including nomads & unhoused, seem to have
| smartphones these days (at risk of theft, but arguably easily
| replaceable). And 4/5G/PublicWifi connectivity in urban areas
| is so saturated.
|
| I wonder, is it reasonable for me to want government investment
| and legislation (but no other state interference) into some
| open source server project that we can run on our phones for
| this? (heck, give us mesh network functionality too while
| you're at it).
|
| And am I reasonable in my (left-leaning thought) that, like
| sexual health consumables, mobile phones should be subsidised
| by tax revenue, along with other necessities/'empowering
| tools'?
| harshitaneja wrote:
| As a nomad, and someone who does run a self hosted mail
| server for fun, I don't think that's such a good idea. As
| mentioned, phones can be stolen or broken or just off. Do I
| want to increase dependencies on phone further by it being
| the primary store for all my mails as well? Each platform,
| which is not using TOTP MFA would still depend on email OTPs
| and so with a broken phone one completely loses access. With
| TOTPs atleast I get to save a few recovery codes. The cost of
| losing a phone would mean losing all that data as well. Now,
| one could say we could and should keep backups. Then, comes
| the cost of losing access to new mails while the phone is
| incapicitated. Then, even setting up of email server on a
| phone with dynamic IP is a whole can of worms in itself and
| let's go with the easiest solution of using a VPN. So, now we
| need a VPN, a backup solution and a device to quickly accept
| emails when the primary device is down. Aren't we just
| building remote mail servers now? I do have a cloud instance
| serving my own email but do we expect most users to handle
| the infra? So now for making it easier for everyone and
| amortizing the costs let's start offering a solution where
| multiple people can run email accounts in a single server.
| Now we have gmail and other providers.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| You can't realistically host an email _server_ on your phone,
| which is what is meant. For that to work, your phone would
| need to be able to be woken up (to handle receiving a
| message) by arbitrary parties on the internet at any time,
| which is generally considered undesirable, quite apart from
| the bother caused by your phone ever being offline (sender's
| server will keep retrying every so often for a couple of
| days, sender will generally be notified of this each time--
| and note the problem of the sender's phone-hosted mail server
| being offline too if that's what you were doing).
| nulbyte wrote:
| > You can't realistically host an email server on your
| phone, which is what is meant. For that to work, your phone
| would need to be able to be woken up (to handle receiving a
| message)...
|
| What you have described is normal behavior for a modern
| wireless device.
|
| Temporary interruptions occur regularly, a reason for which
| store and forward designs feature in email servers to this
| day.
|
| The problem to overcome is not temporary disruption but
| addressing.
| arccy wrote:
| woken up to contact one of the big cloud notification
| services, which defeats the point of not using them
| chrismorgan wrote:
| The modern wireless device communicates regularly in this
| way with one trusted, well-known, well-behaving service.
| That's _very_ different from allowing anyone in the world
| to ping your phone and wake it up, at any time.
| tambre wrote:
| Estonia has personalidentificationcode@eesti.ee and
| registrycode@eesti.ee, which you are supposed to set up to
| forward to your actual email aadress. Unfortunately these are
| restricted for use by governmental agencies for important
| official notifications (e.g. you're being conscripted, your
| marital status changed, something has changed in regard to a
| property you own). [0]
|
| You could create a public alias of the form
| firstname.lastname.n@eesti.ee, but creation of those was ended
| in 2018 and they were shutdown in November 2023. [1]
|
| [0] https://www.eesti.ee/en/using-the-state-portal/terms-of-
| noti... [1] https://www.eesti.ee/en/closing-alias/closing-alias
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Unfortunately these are restricted for use by governmental
| agencies for important official notifications (e.g. you're
| being conscripted, your marital status changed, something has
| changed in regard to a property you own).
|
| When your marital status changes, isn't that a notification
| that goes from you to the government, and not the other way
| around?
| emmet wrote:
| Your tax codes aren't going to update the minute you say
| your vows. Someone needs to do that on the other side and
| let you know when it's been processed.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Why? Does anything change after it's been processed? What
| are you going to do differently at that point?
| mgbmtl wrote:
| I guess it depends if the government recognizes the
| marriage date that is declared, or the date that they
| process it (if the marriage was not in front of an
| official).
|
| Divorce date can be pretty random, since it's rarely done
| live by a judge/official.
| regularfry wrote:
| In practical terms the government-issued option would be
| provided by a corporate player. Option 4 _is_ option 3.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| I think there are more effective ways for governments to
| intervene. There are essentially two separate issues:
|
| 1) Permanent allocation of names and numbers
|
| 2) Interoperability standards and rights allowing us to link
| names and numbers to service contracts.
|
| Once these issues are regulated in a consumer/citizen friendly
| way (like they did with phone numbers in the UK), governments
| could provide some sort of default service on top of it, but in
| my view this is not the most important part.
| mulmen wrote:
| The United States already has that. It's called the United
| States Postal Service.
| ajdude wrote:
| I tried searching around to see if USPS offered hosting an
| email address in the same way I can have mail delivered to a
| physical address and I was unable to find it.
|
| Can you provide a link?
| PedroBatista wrote:
| Some have an obligatory and officially free email account for
| you... to receive notifications.. to pay taxes.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| I really don't understand how people think government issues
| services have more privacy, when in reality it is the exact
| opposite. It didn't even take NSA leaks to know that government
| privacy violations are lot more both in terms of quantity and
| the impact. I would never use a government email if it is tied
| my real self.
|
| At least in my country I know for a fact that data which should
| be legally private is used by political party plans and by the
| police.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Most people don't have anything to hide from the government.
| plagiarist wrote:
| After observing how quickly Texas turned women's healthcare
| into criminal activity, I'm inclined to disagree.
| freetanga wrote:
| I don't trust them with privacy. But I don't trust FAANG with
| that either.
|
| But I do freak out about loosing my domain name where my
| email is hosted, or access to an iCloud / gmail account that
| a lot of services are anchored about.
|
| Two months ago LinkedIn did not like me changing my 2FA
| client, and locked me out for a month. I have over 5.000
| contacts and was chasing a few leads to change jobs. I can
| tell you is cold outside. Nobody provides support. I had to
| leverage a friend who knew someone at LinkedIn to sort it
| out. I hear being locked out of Google, MS and Meta is also
| bad.
|
| I have an .ac account for life that is my "last resort"
| recovery, but having a government provided email for secure
| recovery purposes would feel reassuring.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| I agree. You shoukd have unlimited inbound and limited outbound
| emails between citizen accounts and a 10 email limit for
| outside addresses.
|
| This way you can sign up to a third party email service and use
| your permanent and guaranteed government one as a recovery
| address
| Avamander wrote:
| Outbound mail comes with heavy problems with abuse. The
| government can't easily filter it out either (literally "free
| speech").
| Almondsetat wrote:
| "limited" might mean 50-100 emails per day or even less
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Does anyone send 50+ personal emails a day? If it takes 5
| minutes to write each one, that's over 4 hours doing
| nothing but composing emails!?
|
| Maybe if you're sending party invitations or something?
| But that's got to be once or twice a year, surely.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| I didn't say personal, I said between national email
| addresses, which might include your government services
| and institutions
| cogman10 wrote:
| Remember when the US gov did that with a number? The SSN?
|
| I don't know how you can make something like this "easy to
| recover" without introducing giant security problems.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Yeah it was so much better keeping a book of letters from
| creditors that you showed to any future creditor to show
| trustworthy-ness.
|
| Whatever mess you think SSNs have caused by their unintended
| use outweighs the previous system. The simple test for that
| is, why do people use SSNs as it's not legally required for
| anything but USG interactions.
| briandear wrote:
| Because companies require them.
| plagiarist wrote:
| All that test confirms is that when every company requires
| them to do business, one can no longer accomplish anything
| financial without submitting an SSN to a third party. I
| guess one could choose to only ever be self-employed, take
| no loans, and use Mattress Bank.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| The purpose of an LLC/Corporation (the Company) is to
| provide a corporate veil from the managing directors. In
| such situation, an SSN is not required, but most
| businesses will then require the Company's Tax
| Identification Number (TIN) which effectively provides
| the same identification value as an SSN. Going down that
| route, the Company itself can take loans and transact
| with both domestic and international banks.
| MereInterest wrote:
| > The simple test for that is, why do people use SSNs as
| it's not legally required for anything but USG
| interactions.
|
| Because if I want to open a bank account, rent an
| apartment, or get a mortgage, the other party requires me
| to give them my SSN, on the assumption that it is a valid
| unique key for tracking debt payment reliability.
|
| It doesn't matter that the SSN is only legally required for
| interactions with the US government. When housing is a
| human necessity, and all sources of housing require a SSN,
| then using a SSN is not a choice from which one can infer
| preferences.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Companies ask for the SSN because its so much more
| efficient than their previous systems.
|
| They already did debt repayment without SSNs; it's just
| easier with one. The existence of fraud with a SSN
| doesn't mean there wasn't fraud without one; and if there
| was more fraud now then companies would abandon asking
| for SSNs.
|
| You might not like SSNs but their existence has been a
| benefit not a detriment to the USA.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| > I don't know how you can make something like this "easy to
| recover" without introducing giant security problems.
|
| In a similar way for instance that you would recover a lost,
| stolen, or accidentally destroyed US passport (but presumably
| cheaper).
| freetanga wrote:
| I was thinking more along the line of walking to your local
| Goverment office and validate your ID.
|
| Many countries offer digital IDs to interact with them. And
| a (cumbersome vs digital but fast Vs traditional government
| processes) way of unlocking it. It would be just offering a
| email inbox linked to it.
|
| In Spain we have an Inbox from the DMV for fines, one with
| the Tax authority, one with local government... these are
| messaging boards inboxes. The move to a single digital
| inbox could help streamline many government processes.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Yes, I agree. In fact I'm also Spanish and the solution
| felt as obvious as it would be in Spain. The reason I
| suggested the (US) passport analogy was to make it as
| relatable as possible to the American audience of HN :-)
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _Remember when the US gov did that with a number? The SSN?_
|
| The problem is that the SSN is treated as a password when it
| should be treated as username.
|
| Knowing first.last at gmail.com gives you nothing much,
| security-wise. Knowing I'm 123456789 at ssn.usps.com wouldn't
| be that much different, though given the limited search
| space, it would be an easy target for spammers. (Perhaps
| expanding from nine digits to something bigger (16+, see
| perhaps ISO/IEC 7812) would be useful, though there'd have to
| be a lot of work to update systems, even though they're not
| short of numbers.)
| bbarnett wrote:
| _A paid-for option (proton, tutta,...) would be cataloged as
| elitist. People perceive email as free._
|
| The era of Pii as a commodity is coming to a close. The writing
| is on the wall for this.
|
| Once that happens, free email will vanish. Poof. Gone. So will
| many other "free" online things.
|
| This period of most people getting free email is really quite
| short historically. A decade.
|
| (Many people used to get email addresses from their ISP, which
| were part of their paid plan)
|
| I wonder what will happen when gmail goes paid. It's going to
| happen, and I expect so regionally (eg, not the EU zone or some
| such) within 5 years.
|
| A lot of people depend upon said free email, and as much as I
| dislike Google, they have absolutely zero obligation to give
| anything away.
|
| They've spent the last few years moving classes of accounts to
| paid. They've been closing down accounts which seem dormant.
|
| Soon... a year maybe?, I think we'll see some sort of precursor
| change. A reduction of storage for free accounts, or number of
| emails you can send, or something.
| briandear wrote:
| How poor are people that a low cost email service is too
| expensive? $5 a month for Europeans or Americans would be
| nothing. Think how much poor people spend on stamps.
| sp332 wrote:
| Poor enough that they don't have a bank account to pay for
| the email service.
| ejb999 wrote:
| and yet we assume they are wealthy enough to own a mobile
| phone and/or computer/tablet to access that email.
| sp332 wrote:
| Public libraries
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304320 Subsidised
| phones and internet access https://www.fcc.gov/lifeline-
| consumers
| iAMkenough wrote:
| Contrary to popular belief, most homeless people have
| cellphones.
| ejb999 wrote:
| well then however they are affording a mobile phone and
| the monthly service, they can probably figure out how to
| pay $5/month for email if they don't want to use one of
| the free options.
| freetanga wrote:
| In many cases is the expectation of the service being
| free...
|
| If someone told you that checking the weather app is .50
| usd per query, you probably would try to find a different
| alternative, as you expect it to be free.
| vel0city wrote:
| > This period of most people getting free email is really
| quite short historically. A decade.
|
| I do agree from a long perspective free email has been
| somewhat short. But I'm not sure about scoping it to just a
| decade. It was easy to get a Gmail account in 2004, that's
| close to 20 years ago. And Gmail wasn't even the first free
| email host, loads of people used other free email services
| like Yahoo (1997), Hotmail (1996), Lycos (1997), and others.
| 1996-2024 is 28 years, close to three decades.
| judge2020 wrote:
| You'd still need to be able to block these addresses or at
| least have a reputation system for them, otherwise
| telemarketers would just tank their own reputation for some
| sales, or people would pay the homeless to sign up and let them
| send spam via their digital inbox.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Make it cost a few cents to send a mail with it, just like
| stamps of physical mail.
|
| It's mostly intended for receiving anyway.
| airstrike wrote:
| That's the truth, really. Email should cost [$0.02] or some
| similar value. You'd solve spam overnight.
| ubertaco wrote:
| Yeah, just like how physical mail works. Nobody ever has
| to deal with spam in their physical mailbox. (/s)
|
| That just becomes marketing budget for spammers (which is
| to say, those for whom email is a component of a revenue
| stream), and a layer of cost friction for everyone else
| -- meaning that you only really reduce the percentage of
| email that's actually sincere, non-"hustle"-driven
| communication.
| plagiarist wrote:
| I get less junk mail than junk email. The ratio of
| legitimate correspondence to junk seems way better as
| well, or do I have to take the measurement from after the
| spam filter?
| rixthefox wrote:
| I disagree. I don't believe that would solve spam you
| would just force the spammers to use much more aggressive
| tactics. If you introduce a fee to email you're only
| hurting the people who actively communicate back and
| forth via email as a primary method. Mailing lists
| anyone?
|
| Spammers will take your $0.02 fee per email as an
| operational expense. Most spam is not sent by the
| spammers themselves from their own servers but are
| instead relayed through a third party who handles the
| delivery part on their behalf who are paid money to run
| these spam campaigns through their servers instead
| anyways so they are already paying a fee, this is just an
| extra cost on top of what they are already paying to do
| it.
| plagiarist wrote:
| How much is the cost of the third party now compared to
| how much it would be when there is a 2 cent per email
| overhead?
|
| I had a look at legit services, Sender will let me do 30k
| emails at around $15/mo. If I can assume that's
| representative, I only need the profit multiplied by
| probability of a sale to beat $0.0005 to make money. If I
| had to beat $0.02, I would need to increase the odds,
| perhaps by sending only to interested parties. Or somehow
| drastically increase my profit margins by 40x without
| reducing the probability of a sale.
|
| We would simply have far less spam with a per email fee.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > If you introduce a fee to email you're only hurting the
| people who actively communicate back and forth via email
| as a primary method. Mailing lists anyone?
|
| So don't require a stamp for email sent from one of your
| contacts, or from a mailing list you're subscribed to. No
| reason email from everyone in the world needs to be
| treated equally.
| TobyTheDog123 wrote:
| With Twitter being worse than ever while also
| implementing the paid-for blue check, I'm no longer
| convinced that nominal costs solve much of anything.
| Maybe it's a different model (per email vs per account w/
| Twitter), but I feel like scammers/phishers would pay the
| premium.
|
| While extremely idealist and would never happen in
| practice, I think I'd rather see a provider that enforces
| KYC-esque requirements and is a closed iMessage-esque
| system. I took my phone number off my main mobile device
| due to spam (pretty much everyone I know has an iPhone)
| and have not looked back since.
|
| If I want privacy, I'll self-host. If I don't care, I'll
| use the monopoly.
| j-bos wrote:
| I mean, iirc in the USA the postal service is a consitutionally
| mandated service. So this could be (legally) done "overnight"
| simply by defining electronic mail sevice as a form of postal
| service. Plus that would be an email service subject to the
| privacy protections of the USPS.
| briandear wrote:
| USPS "privacy?" Lol.
|
| https://epic.org/postal-service-surveillance-program-
| targete...
| j-bos wrote:
| Agreed. Though to be clear, I meant legal right to privacy,
| not necessarily in practice. The USPS cannot legally open
| mail without a warrant, whereas any LEO can legally just
| ask google for access to your emails and google can legally
| just give it to them.
| rafaelrc wrote:
| > A free option provided by a Corporate player will gravitate
| towards monopolies and lack of privacy.
|
| Just like a "free" government option?
| ajdude wrote:
| A crucial difference being that the government option is
| publicly funded and ideally does not have an incentive to
| sell their users' souls in exchange for shareholder profits.
| briandear wrote:
| I definitely don't like government being involved with that.
| Because it would evolve into "you must use your official
| government provided email address for <whatever>." And once
| that address gets out there, you'll be spammed your entire life
| because companies and governments and credit bureaus and other
| potentially annoying actors would know that's "your" email
| address. Hard pass.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Government is the entity I trust the least with my
| communication. No thanks.
| sheikheddy wrote:
| I work on Microsoft's anti-spam team, AMA!
| currysausage wrote:
| The most pressing question: why does Outlook.com just silently
| discard some emails?
| Avamander wrote:
| Not the person you replied to, but as far as I've heard it's
| done with SmartScreen matches.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| What kind of tiers are there for filtering?
|
| Eg. Known bad domains, known bad IP addresses, incorrectly
| setup DKIM / SPF, no reverse DNS, non-matching reverse DNS, and
| that's before even looking at content to determine whether
| spam.
| Dunedan wrote:
| Why do you put mail servers on your block list which never sent
| spam? And why do you make it nearly impossible to get unlocked
| once on that list?
| csnover wrote:
| I guess my question is can you please fix your braindead
| blacklisting?
|
| Several times per year--I can practically guarantee it'll
| happen sometime in December, and indeed had to deal with this
| just five days ago--I end up with a bunch of users whose email
| notifications stop working because Microsoft have started
| blocking the entire netrange where my server lives. I don't
| have control over other Linode customers, guys! I even wrote
| extra code to stop sending mail to addresses that start
| bouncing specifically to _avoid_ blacklisting, so after MS
| finally processes a blacklist mitigation request, someone also
| has to go in and re-enable those accounts.
|
| SPF, DKIM, DMARC are all configured; I've sent from the same IP
| address for about a decade; I've not once received an email
| abuse report; mail volume is low (most days, volume does not
| reach the minimum threshold for SNDS to report data[0]). I've
| never had any other mail provider blacklist my server. SNDS
| always says everything is OK as I am S3150s. What is even the
| purpose of SNDS at this point when it lies about what is going
| on?
|
| [0] P.S. The janky SNDS calendar widget resets the month to the
| current month every time you click on a date, even if the date
| being viewed is in a previous month. I don't have any hope that
| anyone will ever touch SNDS code again since it was clearly
| designed in the early 2000s and the copyright on the site is
| now ten years old, but this is a pretty silly bug.
| vel0city wrote:
| > I don't have control over other Linode customers, guys!
|
| You do have control over being a Linode customer though. If
| Linode isn't doing enough to prevent abuse, they deserve to
| be blocked.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Asking infrastructure providers to police email content is
| a very invasive thing to want. I don't think I agree with
| that.
|
| Realistically, what can they do here? Make servers
| unaffordable to discourage abuse? Give most servers
| "Internet*" access where some ports are missing?
| vel0city wrote:
| > Give most servers "Internet*" access where some ports
| are missing?
|
| Disallow SMTP traffic unless an account has a certain
| reputation or verified identity related to it?
|
| I mean, they don't have to do that, and I would agree the
| government shouldn't force it to happen. But if someone
| is constantly causing you problems you shouldn't be
| required to deal with their shit. If you don't want to
| behave, expect consequences from everyone else in
| society.
|
| If every time my friends invited me over I brought over
| another random person that smears feces all over the
| walls and pees in the corner I probably won't get invited
| over very often. Linode (and other cheap VPS hosts) are
| that person constantly enabling abusive people and
| subjecting them to others.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Personally inviting someone to your party? Surely the
| analogy to linode is something like an apartment building
| owner. You wouldn't ban your established friend just
| because you keep having problems with nearby tenants.
| snotrockets wrote:
| But that's how the world works right now: every provider
| has acceptable use policy, and not just for emails. Not
| necessarily because they care, but because they are
| beholden to an AUP, from their upstream or peers. Which
| makes it viral: if they won't hold AUP, they'd get cut
| off, and there's very little use in an internet service
| provider without connectivity.
| Biganon wrote:
| How do you sleep at night?
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| Similar question as my sibling comments. I have rented a server
| with a static IP address for over ten years now. Nobody else
| has used this IP during this time. Yet, every few months I have
| to beg Microsoft to unblock the IP. In the beginning I could do
| this on my own, but something changed a few years ago and now I
| have to beg my ISP (netcup) instead to contact Microsoft on
| behalf of me to temporarily whitelist the domain. Then wait
| another 2-3 months and do the same dance again.
|
| Why? Why can Microsoft not learn that an IP has been healthy
| and spam-free for 10+ years and only bother me when there is
| actual spam is being sent?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Why doesn't whitelisting an address ensure one receives
| messages from it, the address has never sent spam, sends at
| most a couple of emails a day. But I couldn't receive emails
| from it, there was no notification or information despite the
| address being on my whitelist?
|
| What's the rationale there?
| issafram wrote:
| TL;DR emailed Microsoft a few times
| brunnock wrote:
| I ran into this issue several years ago. After complaining, MS
| allowed me to send email to MS properties (hotmail, live.com),
| but continued to block my email to their Office 365 clients.
|
| I now use AWS SES to handle mail delivery. It's free for up to
| 200 daily messages which is fine for me.
| Dunedan wrote:
| After many years of regularly getting blocked by Hotmail and
| outlook.com, I just decided to reject every incoming email from
| Hotmail and Outlook with an error message explaining the
| situation. If they don't allow me to respond to emails sent by
| their customers, why would I allow them to send me emails in the
| first place?
| Avamander wrote:
| You sure showed it to them. /s
|
| Did you sign up to their JMRP to figure out what they didn't
| like or how were they blocking you?
| unclet wrote:
| If all indie mail servers blocked by Hotmail block mail from
| the blocker, it will make the big player review their blocking
| policy.
| shaicoleman wrote:
| Outlook/Hotmail blocks DigitalOcean. After half a dozens attempts
| over the years to delist my IP, and following all the best
| practices (dedicated fixed IP, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, FCrDNS, zero
| spam, TLS, etc.) I gave up.
|
| Eventually, most people realize that their Outlook/Hotmail email
| service is defective because they're not receiving emails, and
| they migrate to another email service.
| Avamander wrote:
| > Eventually, most people realize that their Outlook/Hotmail
| email service is defective because they're not receiving
| emails, and the move to something else.
|
| Or people realise that DO's current anti-abuse is very
| insufficient and will move to something else.
| shaicoleman wrote:
| Outlook/Hotmail is the only service that's blocking my
| emails. I've been with DigitalOcean for 10 years. Beforehand
| it was just a matter of filling a form and waiting 24 hours
| to get the IP whitelisted. A few years ago, Microsoft started
| refusing whitelisting IPs.
|
| DigitalOcean on the other hand started blocking SMTP by
| default for new customers since June/2022 [1], and thus
| significantly reduced the amount of spam coming out of their
| network. That said, they're still not doing enough to stop
| spam from their network, and they're still a source of spam
| [2].
|
| I can cryptographically prove the identity of the server (and
| thus its reputation), and there's no justified reason to
| block mails based only on the network's IP address, while
| ignoring all the other factors.
|
| 1. https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/smtp-restricted-by-
| default
|
| 2. https://www.uceprotect.net/en/l3charts.php
| progval wrote:
| Ah, that explains why I stopped receiving so much spam from
| DigitalOcean last year. Thanks
| literalAardvark wrote:
| I block DO even on web servers. Their abuse policy is
| exactly at the quality you'd expect for the price.
|
| My customers can't afford to add a datacenter every time DO
| customers decide to steal our shit.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Outlook/Hotmail blocks DigitalOcean.
|
| Microsoft blocking a mail server and DO being blocked aren't
| necessarily the same thing.
|
| I service a number of MS accounts (hosted domain and
| O/H/live.com) and they block mail from small servers I manage -
| and from (non-major) online services I work with. There are
| forums frequent that send verification mails to MS addys that
| never arrive.
|
| Past that: My last time blocking mail server attacks from DO
| IPs is today. It's always today and has been years and years.
| Not just DO. OVH, Psychz and a at least doz more attack with
| that consistency.
|
| [edit: Post below mentions DO SMTP changes in 2022. DO is still
| attacky but less attacky is possible. Not sure.]
|
| And not that far behind, Amazon. Amazon is a _lot_ harder
| because unlike the above, I regularly get legit traffic from
| them.
| rixthefox wrote:
| > most people realize that their Outlook/Hotmail email service
| is defective
|
| This is exactly what I've begun telling people and warning
| friends and family members about. I run my own email... well I
| run my own ISP at this point and we have our own dedicated
| block of IPv6 addresses but still rely on IPv4 addresses from
| our cloud providers and I've started to grow frustrated by the
| lack of movement by the incumbent email providers that I've
| started just straight up telling people don't expect any email
| delivery from me if you're using any provider that still lacks
| proper IPv6 on their SMTP servers.
|
| It's no longer my problem and I will happily tell people that
| their email provider is defective and that they need to find a
| new host. If that is too much for them, to bad so sad not my
| problem. I did everything I could do. At some point you have to
| stop trying to work around "Big Cloud" and their nonsense.
| vel0city wrote:
| I've had decent deliverability to some of my Outlook addresses
| from my Digital Ocean droplets for about a decade. Low volume
| (a dozen or so a week?), only to a few dozen addresses. I had
| poor deliverability until I updated the Reverse DNS to match my
| sending hostname. Since then, I have not had a single email get
| filtered.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| Or folks will check where their spam comes from. At least 2-3
| years ago digital ocean was a ridiculously major source of
| spam. I've no interest in investigating why, but there is a
| near zero chance they were following anything like "all the
| best practices".
|
| This is from DO's own site based on a quick search:
|
| "I am being BOMBARDED, and I mean BOMBARDED with spam from
| Digital Ocean over 5 spams a day all from the same bunch of
| domains, all hosted on DigitalOcean and coming from your IPs.
|
| In the last 2 weeks I've emailed your abuse mailbox 20+ times
| and filled in the contact abuse form 10+ times.
|
| NOTHING is being done about it. My next plan of action is to
| keep posting here until Digital Ocean takes action.
|
| Do you even have an abuse team? are they doing any work at all?
| I can provide 30 more samples if needed."
|
| Absolutely pathetic - all major providers should blackhole
| email from DO.
|
| Note that this contrasts to AWS. I was on AWS from flat network
| days (where folks were running scans internally etc. AWS
| respond with a ticket usually to abuse reports and then usually
| a bit later a note that things have been taken care of.
|
| How does AWS which is FAR larger in IP address space than DO
| have so much LESS spam coming from their IP address space?
| Perhaps because they pay a tiny bit of attention to the issue.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| I have a personal mail server and I too had no choice but to
| blacklist DO.
|
| They generate a lot of phishing emails (rather than
| conventional spam). I used to diligently report it to their
| abuse contact, but they don't seem to care or do anything about
| it in the slightest.
| dangus wrote:
| This probably isn't directly helpful or relevant advice, but I
| don't see a good reason to spend double on DigitalOcean
| droplets compared to what you get with Hetzner Cloud.
| shaicoleman wrote:
| * Stability: I've had zero issues in the last decade
|
| * Latency: Hetzner's latency is more than double for me
|
| * Switching costs: migrating hosting providers can be time
| consuming
|
| That said, I agree that DigitalOcean isn't good value for
| money anymore.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Oh, are you the creator of Colemak?
| beretguy wrote:
| What if I don't have a blog?
| huhtenberg wrote:
| We go through this every few months. Here's the recipe -
|
| 1. Visit https://olcsupport.office.com/ and submit the complaint.
|
| 2. Wait for the auto-reply, followed by the "Nothing was
| detected" email.
|
| 3. Reply to the latter with "Escalate" in the body.
|
| Within a day, they hammer shit in place and the block is removed.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Do they ever respond? Maybe the block comes and goes, and has
| nothing to do with attempts to contact Microsoft?
| seszett wrote:
| They responded to me when I asked to get unblocked:
|
| _We have implemented mitigation for your IP (51.15.2.26) and
| this process may take 24 - 48 hours to replicate completely
| throughout our system._
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Yep, exactly. That's the follow-up we get for the
| "Escalate" request.
|
| The IP's different tho :)
| jeltz wrote:
| They have always responded to me when I have contacted them.
| I have had to contact them twice.
| RankingMember wrote:
| Really love the modern support experience of no-response,
| trial-and-error, until suddenly, if you're lucky, the void on
| other end magically solves the problem. Confidence-inspiring
| stuff
| kstrauser wrote:
| It occurs to me that I make fun of sovereign citizen types,
| but in tech we have our own set of rituals for getting large
| organizations to do what we want. While those people are
| still boneheads, maybe I should be more empathetic about
| their motivations and why they think that _this time it might
| work_.
| j6zauas4gz wrote:
| People like to make fun of sovereign citizen types who
| think the law is magic spells, and if you only say the
| right words you have to be let off the hook or not pay
| taxes or whatever.
|
| The thing is though that that notion is absolutly right.
| The law _is_ like fucking magic.
|
| what else could explain the fact that misspeaking even one
| word of the incantation will cause the magical shield of +5
| "rights against self incrimination" to fizzle (or perhaps
| missfire and summon a canine companion) when being attacked
| by pigs?
|
| the joke, if folks dont get the reference to an oldish
| story, is that you do actually in real life need to be be
| very specific and clear to cops in order to "invoke" your
| fifth amendment rights.
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-
| crime/wp/2017/11/02...
|
| Which is incredibly stupid, but is just one example of the
| many ways in which law is so weird and unintuitive that its
| super easy for the uneducated to assume there are tons of
| weird eldrich legal phrases that if only spoken in the
| right place and time will conjure legal protection. Of
| course we who know better know that those eldrich legal
| phrases need to be spoken by a trained wizard (lawyer) with
| enough mana (money, time) at their disposal.
| willcipriano wrote:
| When the accepted interpretation of the US constitution
| allows for civil asset forfeiture or indefinite detention
| lawyers have no rights scoffing at magical ideas. The
| whole thing is Harry Potter nonsense.
| ebiester wrote:
| Law is a fundamentally hard problem at scale, especially
| with a federated system that has bug fixed 725 years
| (post-Magna Carta) of edge cases.
|
| If you think the second system effect is bad on a 20 year
| old system, try doing it for centuries of evolutionary
| system that started with 2-3 million users and has been
| forked.
| munk-a wrote:
| I do agree that we are in an unfortunate place where we
| do have spells and incantations that must be recited
| but... that's such BS. This ruling was pure BS and a
| common speaker would clearly understand the intent of the
| defendent's request.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| The US government can just revoke the rights of its own
| citizens if it wants. That's literally what stuff like
| the Patriot act was designed to do. The US government
| gives itself the right to steal from its own citizens via
| "civil forfeiture". The US government spies on its
| citizens 24/7.
|
| The whole point of the right to own and bear arms is to
| guarantee the ability of citizens to defend themselves
| from and even fight the government should it turn into
| some corrupt, tyrannical and ultimately unconstitutional
| police state. The ultimate check and balance is the
| threat of violence.
|
| Without that ability, all this "rights" nonsense is just
| magical thinking. No one has any rights that they cannot
| personally defend. No one enjoys any rights in 2023, they
| enjoy the government's mercy.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _It occurs to me that I make fun of sovereign citizen
| types, but in tech we have our own set of rituals for
| getting large organizations to do what we want._
|
| Sadly a "shibboleet" does not yet exist:
|
| * https://xkcd.com/806/
|
| * https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/806:_Tech_Supp
| ort
| kstrauser wrote:
| I want that so badly.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| >When I try to reply his message in my mail client, it received
| the following error message:
|
| > _Delivery to xxx@outlook.com failed with error: outlook-
| com.olc.protection.outlook.com. said:..._
|
| He got error messages? I get mail silently dropped.
|
| MS drops mail from my reputable mail servers - and from rep svs
| that send mail to MS accts I manage.
| spoiledtechie wrote:
| GMail is the worst for email blocking resolutions. They don't
| have an effective feedback loop built into their system. So when
| a user does block you, no one is told about it, to be fixed.
| Therefore lowering your reputation with them over time.
|
| How can we as ESPs respond to them appropriately with removal of
| these people who don't want our emails anymore, if we don't know
| who the user is?
|
| If there are any GMAIL service team members here, I would LOVE to
| know why a feedback loop was never implemented like the other
| providers.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _How can we as ESPs respond to them appropriately with
| removal of these people who don 't want our emails anymore, if
| we don't know who the user is?_
|
| 1. Don't send spam
|
| 2. ???
|
| 3. Profit!
|
| Literally _all_ email that I've _blocked_ has been from
| companies where I uncheck the box "send spam to me" and the
| company sends it anyway, or where the company thinks "oh this
| guy bought stuff from us, we can now send our
| daily/weekly/fuckly marketing spam!" or "we got your email from
| whatever shady place, and now we're sending you our information
| because you're in our industry" or stupid shit like that.
|
| Gmail does not have a "block everything from this domain
| feature". I would love to block whole domains from my gmail
| account. Alas, I run my own email server to achieve it.
| uxp8u61q wrote:
| Maybe ask yourself why some users end up blocking you
| altogether. Surely you didn't start sending them newsletters or
| the like without being completely certain that they wanted to
| receive them, and you provide a simple, prominent and reliable
| way to unsubscribe if/when they change their mind, right?
| basilgohar wrote:
| There's a block-by-default setup for new email servers. You
| have to go through the reputation-building process which is
| not at all clear nor is it always guaranteed to work.
|
| Yes, it "works" for most people, but it also has the effect
| of entrenching the incumbent large email providers and
| preventing more independent providers from cropping up.
|
| The current method is very lazy and collectively punishes a
| lot of innocent email providers for the crimes of the
| abusers.
| spoiledtechie wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| It destroys competition.
| StayTrue wrote:
| I had this problem for years. I would get the block lifted and it
| would return in short order. I surmise it's because my mail
| server runs on a VPS and other users on my subnet are not well
| behaved (actually I know this for a fact).
|
| I solved the problem by paying for a next hop SMTPS server as an
| upstream smarthost for non-local mails. That means my mails come
| from a subnet that fronts TONS of other servers/domains. That
| makes it a bigger headache for MS to block.
|
| Sad but there you go. I do not use the external service for
| inbound. Inbound mails come direct to my server per the MX.
| jbotz wrote:
| Who do you use for the upstream smarthost?
| StayTrue wrote:
| mailgun.com
| deltarholamda wrote:
| I do the same thing, also with mailgun. It's generally much
| easier to deal with, especially if you have a fairly low volume
| of outgoing emails.
|
| Mailgun has been very good to me, highly recommended.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| > Maybe the fake contact information of my Microsoft Account make
| them worry that I am not a good guy.
| ostensible wrote:
| Why not avoid fighting these windmills by using any of the
| existing commercial mail relays for sending -- like SES or
| mailchimp?
| dclaw wrote:
| We shouldn't have to. These companies are fucking ridiculous
| and blanket ban entire swaths of the internet from sending
| email.
| azinman2 wrote:
| We also shouldn't have to have so much spam, but alas people
| are crappy. So the common routes get targeted. Welcome to the
| modern internet.
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