Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

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Spam has been a thing forever. Literally forever. Yet people have been dealing with spam far better than the big boys, and doing so for decades.

Want to talk about anti-competitive? Gmail will accept mails, provide a 250 SMTP response, then drop the email internally.

That's not right. At all. You can reject the email easily during SMTP exchange, and people have been doing that literally for 20+ years.

No valid excuse here. None. Zero.

And if your 250 OK accept then drop the message, and provide no way to notify, or discuss, or find out why, you make it impossible for a remote admin to fix the problem.

This is 100% on purpose. Yahoo, outlook/hotmail, gmail, collude to resolve issues like this, while blocking all others to resolve issues their own purposefully broken policies cause.

If you see Alphabet with a policy, or action, you can be 100% sure it is aligned to increase market dominance.

Agreed. It's the increasing difficulty in getting things delivered to the big providers making it harder rather than spam.

At this rate, eventually we'll have a handful of mail senders (Mailchimp, Sendgrid), and a handful of mail receivers (Google, MS).

I'd imagine they do this to not tip off spammers when a message goes through. It's the same idea behind returning a 404 when trying to access a resource you don't have permission to, or not telling users if an account actually exists under an email when doing a password reset.

It's simplistic for a spammer to tell if mail is getting delivered to end point. EG, just have a gmail account, and spam that account. Simple. Done.

Breaking reliable mail delivery for everyone, is inline with "there's no excuse, ever". It's inline with "making it worse", not better.

If you 250 accept, you deliver the email. Worst case, it ends up in a spam folder. You do not drop it on the floor. Ever. No excuse, no reason is valid here.

And I certainly won't accept "But it's so hard!", considering how easy it is to handle email, including SPAM, for everyone... until Google purposefully breaks it.

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