4 ms·

Wait what? I thought major players like GMail, Microsoft etc. have some kinda "monopoly" on eMail because they are gatekeeping by using a strict white list.

robjan 6y ago
It's the other way around. In general Gmail, Microsoft etc are whitelisted by other people because they are trusted to deal with spammers using their platforms. Whether they are actually more trustworthy is another matter.
theamk 6y ago
There is no such monopoly - just look at your inbox, and check the headers of the emails you see. (I just did checked a random non-spam mailing, and it was send by cmail9.com - which is pretty suspicious domain if you ask me.. and yet here is it in my inbox) Sending emails is hard because there is no central authority. Instead, each provider checks if the sender does some “best practices”. And the exact details vary - so if you got it working once with gmail, then there is no guarantee it will work next time with live.com. So you got to do them all. For example, I have heard an unconfirmed rumor that one of the major provider started penalizing email sender machines without IPv6 address. If I had to maintain a mail sender, this’d mean have to upgrade my architecture to use IPv6 ASAP, which is non trivial at all. This is why most people outsource email sending.
- sean_pedersen 6y ago
  I did not mean monopoly in the literal sense, just used it to express my feeling that a lot ends up flagged as spam that is not from these major corps servers.
  - theamk 6y ago
    This is just a feeling, Do you know how to read email headers? Are you subscribed to mailing lists? If yes, go to your inbox and check a few messages for the sender. You would be surprised at how many senders are there. For transactional emails / regular mailing lists, I estimate that you just need like 0.25 FTE working on email, maybe even less. While this is not something everyone can do, there are tens of thousands email senders out there.

robjan 6y ago

It's the other way around. In general Gmail, Microsoft etc are whitelisted by other people because they are trusted to deal with spammers using their platforms. Whether they are actually more trustworthy is another matter.

theamk 6y ago

There is no such monopoly - just look at your inbox, and check the headers of the emails you see. (I just did checked a random non-spam mailing, and it was send by cmail9.com - which is pretty suspicious domain if you ask me.. and yet here is it in my inbox) Sending emails is hard because there is no central authority. Instead, each provider checks if the sender does some “best practices”. And the exact details vary - so if you got it working once with gmail, then there is no guarantee it will work next time with live.com. So you got to do them all. For example, I have heard an unconfirmed rumor that one of the major provider started penalizing email sender machines without IPv6 address. If I had to maintain a mail sender, this’d mean have to upgrade my architecture to use IPv6 ASAP, which is non trivial at all. This is why most people outsource email sending.

sean_pedersen 6y ago
I did not mean monopoly in the literal sense, just used it to express my feeling that a lot ends up flagged as spam that is not from these major corps servers.
- theamk 6y ago
  This is just a feeling, Do you know how to read email headers? Are you subscribed to mailing lists? If yes, go to your inbox and check a few messages for the sender. You would be surprised at how many senders are there. For transactional emails / regular mailing lists, I estimate that you just need like 0.25 FTE working on email, maybe even less. While this is not something everyone can do, there are tens of thousands email senders out there.