Email as a whole really is a mess. An outdated protocol with too many bandaids and a fundamentally broken model.
But what can we do?
Email as a whole really is a mess. An outdated protocol with too many bandaids and a fundamentally broken model.
But what can we do?
I've also run servers with applications that send out automatic mails and there, problems were bigger. I think this is because there are a lot of mechanisms such as SPF that miss when an application simply uses sendmail. I've followed the archwiki instructions [1] mostly, a couple of years ago, and it works very reliably.
This won't help protonmail with abusing users but for a private server, it works well. I think a server also builds reputation over time.
But honestly I don't understand why it works entirely. However, I wanted to say that private mailservers are not doomed :)
Registered in most postmaster tools, but at my rate of sending, this is only to have a chance of being herd if problems arise.
There were a few blockages over the years, the last ones came from Microsoft: once in a while they refuse to use A records if MX is not present, or just swallow your mails.
For the important mails to first-time recipients I ask to RSVP, which works out beautifully. People know that email can be unrealiable.
Sometimes I miss being part of a larger network of email providers that share spam signatures, but not enough to start searching.
Jesus Lord. I don't receive that much email in a week, legitimate plus spam combined.
I get what you're saying about independence, but using your own domain and pointing MX to any decent email service gets you 90% there with way less pain IMHO.
It's probably good not to have html / load external media enabled. Makes the address seem inactive because tracking mechanisms won't work (e.g. tracking pixels [1].
The moment I had a real email address end up in the AUTHORS file of nodejs, that address is now a spamhole. Domain is otherwise fine.
Another can be buying a new domain that (perhaps purely coincidentally) that has already made the rounds into spammers dbs.
So yeah, domain owner is a tough one but shouldn’t really receive legitimate inbound contacts as long as you have some other contact method on the/a associated website. Personally I just black hole that one.
This gave large email providers license to nuke everyone but other large providers or impose various performative-dance "standards" like SPF/DKIM which seem to just be footgun factories for non-experts.
The other problem was some very black-and-white models of mailer behaviour. Back when ISPs actually published delivery guidance, it was either "you're an individual sending 10 messages a year" or "You're sending a mailing list of 500,000 per day." The guidance was usually limited to nonsensical for things like transactional email or notifications, and I suspect smaller "regular mail services" hit similar corner-cases.
I have to wonder if these conditions eventually became a perverse incentive: oh, deliverability sucks for your small business? We'll happily host your domain and emails and make sure they get through. It's now in their best business interest to be as balky and hostile as possible.
To me, spam filtering rules should be entirely at the USER level. The provider can offer an array of tools, but they have no business blocking unless there's a distinct "the user checked this specific box and this is why the message was denied" paper trail available.
Maybe I'm an outlier -- I'm far more worried about false positives than false negatives. My work email gets negligible spam, but I've definitely seen the "can't be fully disabled" filters chuck actual time sensitive business-related messages into the spam folder repeatedly, and had to patch together anti-filtering rules for it.
You're definitely right about that. I remember back in the day of Slashdot whenever somebody posted a solution to fixing spam this used to a default reply (1) and it was pretty hard to refute.
Use Fastmail, or anything other than Gmail, basically.
Perhaps true at a technical level, but in a practical sense it's vastly successful. Super-quick communication between a few billion people, where all you need to get in touch with someone is their address.
I had this same idea as you, and I simply don’t see why people would pay to send emails when they’re already nearly free for most personal use cases. Businesses already pay to send email via third parties usually. Wouldn’t fake email signups get spammed to receive the sending fees from compromised email servers?
I could foresee a sending fee in the form of attention, with captchas for email sending, possibly attached to the outgoing email as metadata.
Can be done entirely with stuff available in the fundamentally broken model. I mean, if you want to accept email from just anyone, how can you complain when just anyone sends you email? Not a technical problem, it is a people problem.
staying ahead of each Eternal September means getting up and moving :)
Discord/SMS/WhatApp/Signal... so many competitors trying to ferry our ASCII...
maybe its not the tech that's broken?
Bring a class action antitrust suit to Google?