7 ms·

I've run into similar issues with a similar setup. It's frustrating. You can convince gmail user A to whitelist your messages, and so they'll get through to u

by sjackso 11y ago

I've run into similar issues with a similar setup. It's frustrating. You can convince gmail user A to whitelist your messages, and so they'll get through to user A, but gmail user B probably still won't see messages from you unless you tell him to dig them out of the spam trap. And your messages to A might still be classified as spam if they have attachments or hyperlinks in them. (Even if you've been corresponding with A for several years!) Once upon a time, to send email, you needed to use SMTP. Now, you must use SMTP, from a IP block that isn't categorized as residential, and which has never before had any association with outgoing spam, and you also must implement several ad-hoc identification protocols like SPF and reverse DNS. You should also use a domain name that you've owned for some time and which is not expiring soon. Every system to which you want to send mail will give different weights to all these signals. If they don't like you, their behavior is to report successful delivery and then silently hide messages from their intended recipients. Spam is no fun, but the present situation is pretty weak too.

unclebucknasty 11y ago
The email deliverability issues we have had as a legitimate business are insane. Moving to an ESP years ago has helped, but it's far from perfect. I've wondered how a small business without the tech resources could manage this. For instance, several months back some of our account holders suddenly stopped receiving important account info as well as newsletters from us. Tracked it down to a third party filtering service used by various email providers. Contacted them and they indicated that we were sending to honeypot addresses and/or doing other things that landed us on their list. We refuted all of their assertions (all of our recipients are double out-in, etc.) But , they insisted, as if their processes were infallible and refused to remove us. Here they were, a third party with whom we had no agreement, yet they were interfering with our ability to do business (and profiting from it). We also had paid advertising in the newsletters per agreements with advertisers. Consulted counsel and the next step was to send a cease and desist, followed by an injunction on the grounds of tortious interference. Then, just as suddenly, our emails started going through again. So, all of this, just to send email. Yet, I still have to deal with a ton of spam personally when wading through my quarantine folder for routine false positives. Current processes are harder on the good guys than the spammers.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  > Consulted counsel and the next step was to send a cease and desist, followed by an injunction on the grounds of tortious interference. Then, just as suddenly, our emails started going through again. Dangerous path to go down; because so many spammers throw around legal threats too, doing so can get you on a different set of blacklists.
  - unclebucknasty 11y ago
    At that point, you're boxed in. You're already on a list. Begging and hoping when your revenue and relationships are under attack is not an option. Filing for injunctive relief isn't a threat. It's legal action. Unlike spammers, we could easily demonstrate our legitimacy and best practices, etc. They would be compelled to remove us and not retaliate if they are a legit business and care about the integrity of their service for their own reputation and customers. If, however, that does not describe them, then the outcome would seem to be bleak in any case.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  In fairness, I've worked with a number of generally legitimate shops who've had exceptionally poor email hygiene. Sending messages in the millions to domains which have been inactive and unregistered for over a decade, for example, suggests a certain lack of diligence in bounce-tracking or list-cleaning. The emails had been initially legitimately added, but clients and/or email providers had long since gone out of business. Re-validating email every so often isn't a bad idea. Especially if you're relying on it for other purposes (e.g., account recovery).
  - unclebucknasty 11y ago
    We're clean. For instance, our ESP detects hard bounces and auto removes them from our lists. We also use Webhooks to update internally on unsubscribes, etc. For transactional emails, our ESP auto-adds bounces to an outbound block list, so any future attempts to send fail. We only send those to accounts with recent activity anyway, but either way, one bounce stops future sends.
codexon 11y ago
I setup my own email server about 2 years ago and gmail accepted our emails without issues. But outlook/hotmail blocked us for a long time until the second time I submitted an unblock application. Maybe Google is stricter now. I often get captchas when using google.com now.
nabla9 11y ago
http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html Internet Mail 2000 IM2000 is a project to design a new Internet mail infrastructure around the following concept: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility.
- ams6110 11y ago
  Because spammers can't afford a couple of TB of disk space?
  - tracker1 11y ago
    What do you mean? A single message/template sent to a million people would be a couple KB... only the ongoing operational costs of hosting the server... Beyond that, blacklisting would be more affective if there was a pull based email model.
  - redahs 11y ago
    If storage is the sender's responsibility, then there would most likely be no reason for recipients to ever bother downloading unsolicited messages from addresses originating outside of their web of trust in the first place. You could push spam blocking to the end user and client, and simply let them not download messages originating from unknown origins (similar to phone + Caller ID), without having to worry about dealing with spam in a centralized manner.
    - jodrellblank 11y ago
      If storage is the sender's responsibility, then not only can they potentially get some of your attention, but also your location, what kind of device(s) you use to get email, when you're active, and precisely what kind of content is enticing you to click and what isn't. A very tight feedback loop for generating content that will trick you, and hosting it for just long enough to see if it works.
    - jwatte 11y ago
      The problem is not the few kilobytes of body. The problem is the slot that the notification takes up in my inbox and attention, which IM2000 does nothing to solve.

by sjackso 11y ago

unclebucknasty 11y ago

The email deliverability issues we have had as a legitimate business are insane. Moving to an ESP years ago has helped, but it's far from perfect. I've wondered how a small business without the tech resources could manage this. For instance, several months back some of our account holders suddenly stopped receiving important account info as well as newsletters from us. Tracked it down to a third party filtering service used by various email providers. Contacted them and they indicated that we were sending to honeypot addresses and/or doing other things that landed us on their list. We refuted all of their assertions (all of our recipients are double out-in, etc.) But , they insisted, as if their processes were infallible and refused to remove us. Here they were, a third party with whom we had no agreement, yet they were interfering with our ability to do business (and profiting from it). We also had paid advertising in the newsletters per agreements with advertisers. Consulted counsel and the next step was to send a cease and desist, followed by an injunction on the grounds of tortious interference. Then, just as suddenly, our emails started going through again. So, all of this, just to send email. Yet, I still have to deal with a ton of spam personally when wading through my quarantine folder for routine false positives. Current processes are harder on the good guys than the spammers.

JoshTriplett 11y ago
> Consulted counsel and the next step was to send a cease and desist, followed by an injunction on the grounds of tortious interference. Then, just as suddenly, our emails started going through again. Dangerous path to go down; because so many spammers throw around legal threats too, doing so can get you on a different set of blacklists.
- unclebucknasty 11y ago
  At that point, you're boxed in. You're already on a list. Begging and hoping when your revenue and relationships are under attack is not an option. Filing for injunctive relief isn't a threat. It's legal action. Unlike spammers, we could easily demonstrate our legitimacy and best practices, etc. They would be compelled to remove us and not retaliate if they are a legit business and care about the integrity of their service for their own reputation and customers. If, however, that does not describe them, then the outcome would seem to be bleak in any case.
dredmorbius 11y ago
In fairness, I've worked with a number of generally legitimate shops who've had exceptionally poor email hygiene. Sending messages in the millions to domains which have been inactive and unregistered for over a decade, for example, suggests a certain lack of diligence in bounce-tracking or list-cleaning. The emails had been initially legitimately added, but clients and/or email providers had long since gone out of business. Re-validating email every so often isn't a bad idea. Especially if you're relying on it for other purposes (e.g., account recovery).
- unclebucknasty 11y ago
  We're clean. For instance, our ESP detects hard bounces and auto removes them from our lists. We also use Webhooks to update internally on unsubscribes, etc. For transactional emails, our ESP auto-adds bounces to an outbound block list, so any future attempts to send fail. We only send those to accounts with recent activity anyway, but either way, one bounce stops future sends.

codexon 11y ago

I setup my own email server about 2 years ago and gmail accepted our emails without issues. But outlook/hotmail blocked us for a long time until the second time I submitted an unblock application. Maybe Google is stricter now. I often get captchas when using google.com now.

nabla9 11y ago

http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html Internet Mail 2000 IM2000 is a project to design a new Internet mail infrastructure around the following concept: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility.

ams6110 11y ago
Because spammers can't afford a couple of TB of disk space?
- tracker1 11y ago
  What do you mean? A single message/template sent to a million people would be a couple KB... only the ongoing operational costs of hosting the server... Beyond that, blacklisting would be more affective if there was a pull based email model.
- redahs 11y ago
  If storage is the sender's responsibility, then there would most likely be no reason for recipients to ever bother downloading unsolicited messages from addresses originating outside of their web of trust in the first place. You could push spam blocking to the end user and client, and simply let them not download messages originating from unknown origins (similar to phone + Caller ID), without having to worry about dealing with spam in a centralized manner.
  - jodrellblank 11y ago
    If storage is the sender's responsibility, then not only can they potentially get some of your attention, but also your location, what kind of device(s) you use to get email, when you're active, and precisely what kind of content is enticing you to click and what isn't. A very tight feedback loop for generating content that will trick you, and hosting it for just long enough to see if it works.
  - jwatte 11y ago
    The problem is not the few kilobytes of body. The problem is the slot that the notification takes up in my inbox and attention, which IM2000 does nothing to solve.