Email Blacklists

[HN-Matt]

The real peril comes from third-party email hosting companies. These companies have arbitrary, non-public blacklisting rules. More importantly, they are not merely blacklist maintainers, they are MTA (and in some cases, even MUA) providers who sell their proprietary and/or trade-secret hosted solutions as a package to customers. Years ago, the idea of giving up that much control of what happens to your own email would be considered unbelievable. Today, it's commonplace.

And herein lies the fact that is obvious to most software freedom advocates but indiscernible by most email users. As a Free Software user, with your own MTA on your own machine, your software only functions if everyone else respects your right to run that software yourself. Furthermore, if the people you want to email are fully removed from their hosting service, they won't realize nor understand that their hosting site might block your emails. These companies have their customers fully manipulated to oppose your software freedom. In other words, you can't appeal to those customers (the people you want to email), because you're likely the only person to ever raise this issue with them (i.e., unless they know you very well, they'll assume you're crazy). You're left begging to the provider, whom you have no business relationship with, to convince them that their customers want to hear from you. Your voice rings out indecipherable from the spammers who want the same permission to attack their customers.

[...]

Admittedly, this sounds like a standard Kafkaesque experience with a large company that almost everyone in post-modern society has experienced. However, it's different in one key way: I had to convince Microsoft to allow me to communicate with their customers who are paying Microsoft for proprietary and/or trade-secret software and services, ostensibly to improve efficiency of their communications. Plus, since Microsoft, by the nature of their so-called spam blocking, doesn't inform their customers whom they've blocked, I and my colleagues would have just sounded crazy if we'd asked our contacts to call their provider instead. (I actually considered this, and realized that we might negatively impact relationships with professional contacts.)

These problems do reduce email software freedom by network effects. Most people rely on third-party proprietary email software from Google, Microsoft, Barracuda, or others. Therefore, most people, don't exercise any software freedom regarding email services.

via

See also: https://vpsboard.com/topic/7465-email-spam-decreases-to-less-than-50-of-all-email/

 

[HN-Matt]

An example of what it looks like when Microsoft starts going commando in Kafkaesque la la land:

<[email protected]>: host mx4.hotmail.com[65.54.188.110] said: 550 SC-001
    (BAY004-MC3F32) Unfortunately, messages from XX.XXX.XXX.XX weren't sent.
    Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network
    is on our block list. You can also refer your provider to
    http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors. (in reply to MAIL
    FROM command)

When such messages appear, you'll probably notice that the IP in question isn't on any other blacklists at all.

 

[jarland]

An example of what it looks like when Microsoft starts going commando in Kafkaesque la la land

They'll do this with the cleanest of all IP blocks, IP blocks you can't find a single mark against anywhere on the internet. I'm talking so clean that apews hasn't even listed it.


Then they have their other rejection method, the one that really makes your blood boil. They accept your email without error, one reasonably assumes for delivery, and then it simply disappears. Not filtered to spam, not the result of a customer filter. They will then take you in a circle that has you checking your own DNS, PTR records, etc. When you exhaust their irrelevant troubleshooting, you will either be ignored or they will begin the same troubleshooting steps over again until you grow tired of repeating them. To see a solid example of this, send from a .nl domain to an outlook.com address. I've seen that fail the most consistently.


http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail-osend/email-accepted-by-hotmail-but-not-delivered/83621726-60f8-46ce-9416-daf2385acca3?db=5&auth=1


^ And there's plenty more of those to go around.

 

[Nyr]

To see a solid example of this, send from a .nl domain to an outlook.com address.

I feel your pain, man. Sadly, it's impossible to reliably deliver email to Microsoft if you aren't a big player.


You can have a clean domain, clean IP, comply with all the standards... whatever, they don't care. I'm sorry but I hate them for this (and other things). I've lost countless hours of my life dealing with this crap before I learned that the only way was paying for email delivery.


Sad, but that's the current situation with them and I doubt I'll improve.

 

[HN-Matt]

Yeah, it's a complete joke. Time to update the 'ol ToS.


{VPS Provider} will not do business with or provide support to anyone using Microsoft as an intermediary for their email communications.


No need to worry about losing business either. As a contingency plan, create an email account on a server that has not been incoherently blocked by Microsoft and email the client you're trying to reach from it, linking them to the updated proviso in your ToS. It'll prompt them to abandon their current Microsoft manhole and begin communicating with you from a new email account. Since your mail server is not blocked anywhere else on the internet, this will work 100% of the time.

If that's 'too much of a hassle' for them, then it's probably a blessing in disguise that you've lost their business.

 

[HN-Matt]

Sadly, it's impossible to reliably deliver email to Microsoft if you aren't a big player.

On the other hand, a lot of big players have abandoned Microsoft (as is evidenced when no one else joins in with their pigheaded blocking tactics) and communicate through channels that avoid them entirely, so the problem never arises to begin with.

 

[jarland]

I absolutely support the idea that we need to try to shift common opinion on this. When an email gets blocked the first thing you do is go to your host and assume that they are not effectively policing their network. With companies like Verizon and Microsoft, this is simply not the case. They can and will block you for as little as a personal grudge held by some faceless employee at their company, toward you or maybe even just the previous IP block owner, and they will all stand behind that decision with no options for counter argument or compromise.


As a customer receiving a blocked message from one of these companies, the absolutely ideal situation would be you reaching out to your recipient via other means of communication and telling them that their mail service is blocking legitimate email. The other alternative, you simply halt further communication with that recipient until they get a working email service.


It is not the fault of the person sending the letter if the recipient has a lock on their mailbox, or if they outsource control of their mailbox to a company who prefers them not to receive letters. We must be active in spreading the word that "Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list" does not mean what Microsoft wants you to think it means.


Yet still, at the end of the day, you face customer complaints and cancellations based on something that is 100% in the hands of another company and that, my friend, is why I need a little something extra in my Red Bull sometimes.

 

[HN-Matt]

They can and will block you for as little as a personal grudge held by some faceless employee at their company, toward you or maybe even just the previous IP block owner, and they will all stand behind that decision with no options for counter argument or compromise.

Seems it can go beyond 'personal grudge' with Microsoft depending on the context (i.e. ideological, soft interdiction, spooks in adult diapers eating tapioca pudding whilst on the verge of diarrhoea, etc.).
 

As a customer receiving a blocked message from one of these companies, the absolutely ideal situation would be you reaching out to your recipient via other means of communication and telling them that their mail service is blocking legitimate email. The other alternative, you simply halt further communication with that recipient until they get a working email service.

But yeah, that's the sad thing about it. The block may be some Kafkaesque grudge against a certain mail server, but not against Microsoft's own client, yet they sacrifice their own client's ability to communicate in the process, essentially making an idiot of themselves as no one else comes to take their side and can sense the asininity of the blocking motive from both 'now' and light years away.

So playing a meddling Big Brother role with their own clients, choosing who they get to communicate with, alone in their blocking tactics. Their client has chosen to communicate with a certain server, but they say "no" and strive stupidly to keep the misguided rationale hidden. Who in their right mind would want to put up with it?

 

[SkyNetHosting]

this might be off topic but for us the cost of (admin costs) with dealing with traditional mail servers and blacklists is not worth the time and costs,we find it cheaper to use a 3rd party mail provider such as Mailchannels / Mailchimp etc.  This can cut down your abuse departments expenses by at least 50-75%.   

 

[mpkossen]

I feel your pain, man. Sadly, it's impossible to reliably deliver email to Microsoft if you aren't a big player.


You can have a clean domain, clean IP, comply with all the standards... whatever, they don't care. I'm sorry but I hate them for this (and other things). I've lost countless hours of my life dealing with this crap before I learned that the only way was paying for email delivery.


Sad, but that's the current situation with them and I doubt I'll improve.

Try communicating about a job application with someone that uses Office 365 and you using your custom domain name for email. Everything 100% clean, even according to Microsoft, but mail gets marked as SPAM anyway because "the domain has not yet been able to build a proper reputation". WTF!


Only discovered that after hours of research.