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Comment by mission_failed | Hacker News Reader

Except Google and Microsoft have screwed up email so that self hosting is a never-ending game of 'who will they block today?'

You can't run a business where the 2 companies that control the vast majority of email can block you for no reason, and absolutely no visibility that something is wrong until a customer directly contacts you that they are not receiving email (and how would they even know in most cases unless they knew a message should have come through?)

Google was blocking signup emails to me from the 2nd largest telecommunications company in Australia at the time, and I ended up having to use my work address.

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This is overly simplistic. Frequently you get blocked because your IP block legitimately has a lot of people with poor computer hygiene who are a source of large amounts of spam which puts your IP on a reputation blocklist.

There are legitimate and valid reasons for Google or Microsoft to be taking the actions that they do because email is an extremely hostile environment. Blaming them for that environment is silly. You may be a good actor but you are in a sea of really bad actors and it's non-trivial to figure out that you aren't one of those bad actors.

It goes beyond self hosting and IP blocks, because even if you use a large email provider other than Google or Microsoft, Google will quite happily block you too.

So far as I can surmise: I got a ban from Google, that lasted a month because I sent a mail to a contact that contained the text of an advert I wished to complain about. During that time I could send mail to my own Google account but to nobody else's.

If Google or Microsoft want to be blameless, they will have to do a lot better than send this with no means to object:

"Our system has detected that this 550-5.7.1 message is likely suspicious due to the very low reputation of the 550-5.7.1 sending domain. To best protect our users from spam, the message has 550-5.7.1 been blocked. Please visit 550 5.7.1 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/188131"

Email should be decentralised in future, as federated answering machines with pre-exchanged and allowlisted addresses.

The concept has become totally unworkable for unsolicited mails.

I'm not sure it's feasible to do better than that. They clearly call out the reason there. The domain has a poor reputation. The sheer amount of manual labor to field questions for every good actor who unfortunately is caught in the blast radius of other bad actors is an unworkable business model.

This isn't Googles fault. It's baked into how email works when combined with Eternal September. Blaming them is like blaming the Weather Channel for bad weather. They are just the messenger. Google has it's fair share of suspect activities but this isn't one them.

The domain is a major email provider, protonmail. They can read the contents and they already have the option to put it in a spam folder if it so heinous. They could very easily elaborate whether it is the domain, my address or the content of a previous message that has resulted in the block, but no.

They could simply do that instead of subtly encouraging me to use their email service, it is entirely their fault.

I self host email and really only have this issue with hotmail users.

IMO: email forms should reject addresses from hotmail domains since the mail probably won't get delivered anyway.

If you have the right kind of business, you can tell your customers that it's Google and Microsoft's fault (“they want to keep people on Gmail so they keep blocking everyone else”) and suggest using another email address “while you get it sorted” – they might just do that.

Of course, that is risking significant amounts of money out of your own pocket just for a stupid nerd turf war…https://xkcd.com/743/

Tried that before, doesn't matter. Customers say "my address works for everyone but you, it must be your problem. I'm not getting another address just for this, I'll use <competitor that works>."

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