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Comment by sbuk | Hacker News Reader

Google and Gmail account for a very small amount of the global mail-flow and have even less of an impact on standards. In fact they only appear as a contributor/author on RFC8617 (ARC).

No standard says, or even suggest, that “residential ips are not valid.” However, reputation is an important par of mail security. Most, if not all residential IPs won’t be sending enough mail to even register a reputation (look up your own on https://talosintelligence.com/). This is the main challenge for self-hosters. That and a significant majority of residential ISPs block SMTP traffic, for very obvious reasons. This isn’t some Google/Microsoft conspiracy. SMTP is fundamentally a plain text format that has been abused for the last 30 or so years - 30, because that’s when MIME became a thing.

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The Gmail web client is the 2nd largest email client, at about 30% market share. The number of people who use gmail but use an email client instead of the web client is going to be much, much higher. (Especially when you include people whose clients automatically block the tracking pixels used to generate these statistics, which is sadly few of the clients).

The vast majority of email routes through a few major email service providers, with gmail the largest, but MS (via O365 hosting) and Yahoo are also likely double-digit market share.

How much traffic does that generate? On average, there are ~300 billion messages sent daily - the majority coming from automated services and/or bulk messaging providers. Sure, Gmail and Google Workspaces have a lot of "market share", but that is meaningless in the context of worldwide mail-flow.

In this case, the context of worldwide mail flow may be a meaningless statistic. Sending messages to real individuals for purposes of commerce is going to be much more important to a companies profit, than say a script sending out a message saying "This task completed successfully" to an email address.

Thank you for the link. I checked my duckdns.org subdomain and found that I am on a blocklist and my reputation is poor. I don’t even run SMTP. Comcast Xfinity, if that matters.

Fwd/Rev DNS Match Yes Last Day Vol. 0.0 Last Month Vol. 0.0 Block Lists 1 BLOCKED IN: pbl.spamhaus.org Email Rep. Poor

I get weekly phishing SMSes from duckdns.org domains, probably why it’s on such a list

google block residential ips. even with a specific message. not based on reputation, based on ip block. I am well aware that smtp have been abused for decades now, I run my own mail server and have no problem sending to google outlook etc. my point was only regarding blocking residential ip. google definitely does that (on top of many isp's) and it is not part of how the smtp protocol works. no conspiracy here.

Yes, because of low/no reputation. It's a feature, not a bug.

no, because they belong to a residential ip block. it is easy to test... and the error message is without ambiguity.

just testing now, not every residential ip it seems (I moved country and now my email go through without the message : ...belongs to a residential ip...)

I would also challenge the "Google and Gmail account for a very small amount of the global mail-flow". 100% of the companies I worked at use office365 and Gsuite.

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