8 ms·

You are totally missing the simple fact that the number of blessed email providers to choose from is slowly going down. I've seen ISPs with thousands of clients

by mordae 4y ago

You are totally missing the simple fact that the number of blessed email providers to choose from is slowly going down. I've seen ISPs with thousands of clients to give up and move the mailboxes to large players simply because their clients' email was ending up in the spam so often that running the support has gotten too expensive. It's definitely an anticompetitive practice.

dhosek 4y ago
Indeed. I host my domains with dreamhost and it turns out that outgoing mail from their servers will get marked as spam by Google. The exact same mail sent through a gmail address (whether under gmail.com or a custom domain) will be delivered no problem (although after the sudden closing of legacy free email, I found that emails that I had been sending via gmail with my own domain that had been getting blocked by spam filters were being delivered when they came from a gmail.com address).
- grepfru_it 4y ago
  The problem is your outbound mail server does not have a good reputation. You also probably do not have a large enough swath of IP space to prevent bad neighbors from becoming your problem. Lots of tricks to getting your email sent reliably to most mail servers. What got me out of hosting mail was trying to send an email to a potential lead I met at a local meetup. His email was hosted at some very small and relatively unknown university, but my email was flat out rejected. Something about that moment just clicked that it's not worth my time to chase down the admins and resolve the problem. I'll just start shunting my email through O365. I still selfhost everything else I can, but I offload mail management to a provider
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    I'm guessing dreamhost has a decent chunk of IP space...
    - bigiain 4y ago
      All of which they’ve rented out to multiple spammers over the years…
      - dhosek 4y ago
        That does seem to be the problem
  - cameldrv 4y ago
    It's more than that. I'm on a mailing list for a social organization that I've belonged to for 20 years, and has been hosted at the same place for all of that time. I have marked hundreds of the messages not spam, and still Google sends about 80% of them to spam. Google does not care even if you have regular correspondence with an address -- if the server isn't big enough, it's going to spam. The user's wishes or ideas about what is or isn't spam are irrelevant.
    - julianlam 4y ago
      I'm surprised that you didn't just whitelist the email after the repeated ham events...!
- ropable 4y ago
  As a counterpoint, I host a couple of domains with Dreamhost and have had no such issues. They've been serving the email for my main domain for 15 years and AFAIK I've never had any of those emails go directly to spam within Gmail or elsewhere. I do periodic smoke testing by sending test emails to different place, plus I have a reasonable number of external users making use of the domains for email as well. FWIW I moved all my DNS records to Cloudflare, but that was only in last couple of years.
- RockingGoodNite 4y ago
  I can pick any ISP today, including Dreamhost, and have clean email reputation and sending ability with FAANG and Microsoft in less than 30 days.
api 4y ago
It’s just because of spam. All open systems that do not impose a cost to participate are destroyed by spam.
- ratata 4y ago
  True. But they are not calling for a completely open system. I like this proposal from the author. > Change blacklisting protocols so they are not permanent and use an exponential cooldown penalty. After spam is detected from an IP, it should be banned for, say, ten minutes. Then, a day. A week. A month, and so on. This discourages spammers from reusing IPs after the ban is lifted and will allow the IP pool to be cleaned over time by legitimate owners. > There should be a recourse for legitimate servers. I'm not asking for a blank check. I don't mind doing some paperwork or paying a fee to prove I'm legit. Spammers will not do that, and if they do, they will get blacklisted anyways after sending more spam. But Big Tech will not do that because they will gain more from eliminating the competition.
  - tinus_hn 4y ago
    Spam has been been fought for decades, you can rest assured any obvious solution has been tried and either doesn’t have the desired effect or is impossible to implement.
    - cowtools 4y ago
      I think we ought to move email (or some future incarnation of email, like matrix) to a completely whitelist (opt-in to receive messages) basis.
      - pas 4y ago
        signup confirm emails are like that. similarly, any "hello pls add me to your allow-list" emails could be made auto-disappear to the "will be deleted in 30 days" folder in ~10-15 minutes, so even if you get a 100 spam messages per day you only see the last of those, you can easily pick what you are looking for, and don't worry about the rest, they'll just disappear. (and you still have 30 days to look for messages that might be interesting/important/etc.) ... the real missing piece is the feedback mechanism. DMARC is meh. of course large senders have implemented FBL, but they are not available for mere mortals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email)
killjoywashere 4y ago
> It's definitely an anticompetitive practice. Or maybe it's an overly competitive protocol? Like playing Monopoly. Even a neophyte can end sweeping the game despite not understanding any of the underlying mechanics that drive the game's outcome. Those remaining mail providers are also fighting back the insanity. They 'just' won. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
- tomohawk 4y ago
  A normal company could engage in these practices, but it is settled law that a monopolist may not. A monopolist may not use their monopoly in one are to supress activities in another area. You can't put these big tech monopolists into the same bucket as normal companies. They have way too much power, and even when they do not intend to smash things, they end up smashing things.
- prox 4y ago
  I wonder if we can’t build a far simpler postoffice app on http (self hosted domain space) and have a whitelisted encrypted exchange.
  - fuzzzerd 4y ago
    Of course we can, but good luck getting people to use it. They'll keep using what everyone else uses.
  - chrismeller 4y ago
    Substitute “HTTP” with “SMTP” and you already have that today… SMTP in plain text isn’t generally used anymore, it’s always transported over TLS. Of course you can run whitelist-only, but how is that ever going to work? SMTP is text based and we’ll defined, so I would also argue that the transport being “simpler” is nonsense.
    - prox 4y ago
      Whitelist is easier. If I added an mail of a friend in this system, we can communicate. Everything else goes blackhole. Nothing is easy about email! Having worked for years just to get reliable in and outboxes is definitely not trivial. Also SMTP is a system out of your control if you want anything verified and actually delivered.
rnd0 4y ago
>It's definitely an anticompetitive practice. yeah, but in this climate what are you gonna do? It's not like there's any kinda recourse for monopolistic behavior that has any teeth to it.
- akira2501 4y ago
  Sure there is.. unless you mean no recourse in this environment. The natural recourse would be to force Google to divest GMail from it's core business.
  - pishpash 4y ago
    No, the recourse is to force net neutrality. You must process all emails the same way and they must go through the same filters. In fact if spam processing is part of modern email it should be part of the standard and then all mail servers must be forced to conform to the standard.
- noobermin 4y ago
  GDPR worked.
srkaplan 4y ago
I just randomly looked at 8 different emails in my inbox. All of them were from different email providers (except google which was there twice). There's hundreds or thousands of email providers you can chose from. iphmx 1 google 2 kornet 1 linkedin 1 secureserver 1 amazonses 1 self hosted university email 1
- RockingGoodNite 4y ago
  Agreed.
dang 4y ago
> You are totally missing the simple fact that Please make your substantive points without swipes. Your comment would be fine without that bit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by mordae 4y ago

dhosek 4y ago

Indeed. I host my domains with dreamhost and it turns out that outgoing mail from their servers will get marked as spam by Google. The exact same mail sent through a gmail address (whether under gmail.com or a custom domain) will be delivered no problem (although after the sudden closing of legacy free email, I found that emails that I had been sending via gmail with my own domain that had been getting blocked by spam filters were being delivered when they came from a gmail.com address).

grepfru_it 4y ago
The problem is your outbound mail server does not have a good reputation. You also probably do not have a large enough swath of IP space to prevent bad neighbors from becoming your problem. Lots of tricks to getting your email sent reliably to most mail servers. What got me out of hosting mail was trying to send an email to a potential lead I met at a local meetup. His email was hosted at some very small and relatively unknown university, but my email was flat out rejected. Something about that moment just clicked that it's not worth my time to chase down the admins and resolve the problem. I'll just start shunting my email through O365. I still selfhost everything else I can, but I offload mail management to a provider
- aidenn0 4y ago
  I'm guessing dreamhost has a decent chunk of IP space...
  - bigiain 4y ago
    All of which they’ve rented out to multiple spammers over the years…
    - dhosek 4y ago
      That does seem to be the problem
- cameldrv 4y ago
  It's more than that. I'm on a mailing list for a social organization that I've belonged to for 20 years, and has been hosted at the same place for all of that time. I have marked hundreds of the messages not spam, and still Google sends about 80% of them to spam. Google does not care even if you have regular correspondence with an address -- if the server isn't big enough, it's going to spam. The user's wishes or ideas about what is or isn't spam are irrelevant.
  - julianlam 4y ago
    I'm surprised that you didn't just whitelist the email after the repeated ham events...!
ropable 4y ago
As a counterpoint, I host a couple of domains with Dreamhost and have had no such issues. They've been serving the email for my main domain for 15 years and AFAIK I've never had any of those emails go directly to spam within Gmail or elsewhere. I do periodic smoke testing by sending test emails to different place, plus I have a reasonable number of external users making use of the domains for email as well. FWIW I moved all my DNS records to Cloudflare, but that was only in last couple of years.
RockingGoodNite 4y ago
I can pick any ISP today, including Dreamhost, and have clean email reputation and sending ability with FAANG and Microsoft in less than 30 days.

api 4y ago

It’s just because of spam. All open systems that do not impose a cost to participate are destroyed by spam.

ratata 4y ago
True. But they are not calling for a completely open system. I like this proposal from the author. > Change blacklisting protocols so they are not permanent and use an exponential cooldown penalty. After spam is detected from an IP, it should be banned for, say, ten minutes. Then, a day. A week. A month, and so on. This discourages spammers from reusing IPs after the ban is lifted and will allow the IP pool to be cleaned over time by legitimate owners. > There should be a recourse for legitimate servers. I'm not asking for a blank check. I don't mind doing some paperwork or paying a fee to prove I'm legit. Spammers will not do that, and if they do, they will get blacklisted anyways after sending more spam. But Big Tech will not do that because they will gain more from eliminating the competition.
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  Spam has been been fought for decades, you can rest assured any obvious solution has been tried and either doesn’t have the desired effect or is impossible to implement.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    I think we ought to move email (or some future incarnation of email, like matrix) to a completely whitelist (opt-in to receive messages) basis.
    - pas 4y ago
      signup confirm emails are like that. similarly, any "hello pls add me to your allow-list" emails could be made auto-disappear to the "will be deleted in 30 days" folder in ~10-15 minutes, so even if you get a 100 spam messages per day you only see the last of those, you can easily pick what you are looking for, and don't worry about the rest, they'll just disappear. (and you still have 30 days to look for messages that might be interesting/important/etc.) ... the real missing piece is the feedback mechanism. DMARC is meh. of course large senders have implemented FBL, but they are not available for mere mortals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email)

killjoywashere 4y ago

> It's definitely an anticompetitive practice. Or maybe it's an overly competitive protocol? Like playing Monopoly. Even a neophyte can end sweeping the game despite not understanding any of the underlying mechanics that drive the game's outcome. Those remaining mail providers are also fighting back the insanity. They 'just' won. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

tomohawk 4y ago
A normal company could engage in these practices, but it is settled law that a monopolist may not. A monopolist may not use their monopoly in one are to supress activities in another area. You can't put these big tech monopolists into the same bucket as normal companies. They have way too much power, and even when they do not intend to smash things, they end up smashing things.
prox 4y ago
I wonder if we can’t build a far simpler postoffice app on http (self hosted domain space) and have a whitelisted encrypted exchange.
- fuzzzerd 4y ago
  Of course we can, but good luck getting people to use it. They'll keep using what everyone else uses.
- chrismeller 4y ago
  Substitute “HTTP” with “SMTP” and you already have that today… SMTP in plain text isn’t generally used anymore, it’s always transported over TLS. Of course you can run whitelist-only, but how is that ever going to work? SMTP is text based and we’ll defined, so I would also argue that the transport being “simpler” is nonsense.
  - prox 4y ago
    Whitelist is easier. If I added an mail of a friend in this system, we can communicate. Everything else goes blackhole. Nothing is easy about email! Having worked for years just to get reliable in and outboxes is definitely not trivial. Also SMTP is a system out of your control if you want anything verified and actually delivered.

rnd0 4y ago

>It's definitely an anticompetitive practice. yeah, but in this climate what are you gonna do? It's not like there's any kinda recourse for monopolistic behavior that has any teeth to it.

akira2501 4y ago
Sure there is.. unless you mean no recourse in this environment. The natural recourse would be to force Google to divest GMail from it's core business.
- pishpash 4y ago
  No, the recourse is to force net neutrality. You must process all emails the same way and they must go through the same filters. In fact if spam processing is part of modern email it should be part of the standard and then all mail servers must be forced to conform to the standard.
noobermin 4y ago
GDPR worked.

srkaplan 4y ago

I just randomly looked at 8 different emails in my inbox. All of them were from different email providers (except google which was there twice). There's hundreds or thousands of email providers you can chose from. iphmx 1 google 2 kornet 1 linkedin 1 secureserver 1 amazonses 1 self hosted university email 1

RockingGoodNite 4y ago
Agreed.

dang 4y ago

> You are totally missing the simple fact that Please make your substantive points without swipes. Your comment would be fine without that bit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html