Re: Solution to "pathetic email complaints"
On Tue 20 Aug 2019 at 11:24:42 -0400, Michael Stone wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 05:57:40PM +0300, Reco wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 10:48:44AM -0400, Michael Stone wrote:
> > > On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 07:31:57AM -0400, Henning Follmann wrote:
> > > > If you setup your DNS properly create SPF an DKIM almost all
> > > > providers will accept your email IF (and that's a very big if)
> > > > you do not spam.
> > >
> > > That's a nice idea, but simply not true. You'll be ok right up until
> > > you aren't, and as a small site you have no recourse to find out what
> > > the problem is.
> >
> > Such statement is incomplete without some examples.
> > Judging from your long history of contribution at Debian project,
> > surely you have some that can be shared with the list.
>
> It's really hard to share specific examples without naming domains, so no.
> In general terms, It's almost unheard of to get any kind of response from
> the RFC-standard postmaster@ address these days. Most of the time, the best
> you can hope for is a bounce (rather than your message silently going into
> the recipient's spam box). If you're lucky the bounce will say something
> like "sender on blacklist X". If blacklist X is reasonably well known you
> can probably verify that the sender is on blacklist X. If you ask blacklist
> X why the sender is on the blacklist you'll get no response. Maybe something
> misattributed a spoofed email (relatively few sites actually care about SPF
> etc so spoofs are still extremely common), maybe someone hit the spam button
> accidently, maybe somebody doesn't like your ISP, maybe they don't like your
> country, who knows? At that point you descend into a shady world of
> extortion schemes, and need to make decisions about whether to pay third
> parties to "certify" your domain to a blacklist. In the old days losing an
> email was considered unacceptible; these days, there is so much junk that
> false positives are expected and routine. Yeah, I've been doing this for a
> long time--more than 20 years of dealing with email servers--but I don't
> really think email in its traditional form will exist much longer. Heck,
> there are even debian contributors whose personal email domains bounce
> emails from other debian contributors. Who knows if they're even aware of
> that?
The existence of an Internet swamped with spam has led to spam fighters
policing it and users demanding a means not to receive it. Between the
two, sending email directly has become more and more difficult. Spam
hasn't disappeared or been reduced, but the spam fighters have impacted
on the basic concept of email communication and are achieving what the
spammers haven't achieved - making email communication fraught and
unreliable.
--
Brian.
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