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Comment by snitch182 | Hacker News Reader

My private email server gets completly blocked on regular bases. They are blocking the whole ip-range of my provider. You get no response from them whatsoever. You have to fill out a form und wait a couple of days. You can however sign up for a 200$ whitelist... from a different company owned by guess who.

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I worked for a company that sent travel deals newsletters everyday. Deliverability to (then) Hotmail was abysmal.

We then got the recommendation of a company (cannot remember their name) that could analyse our IPs and give recommendations. Naturally, the recommendations were the ones that you could find everywhere so they were not useful, but the company did have access to MSFT's score of our IPs, so we could know when we were close to being blacklisted and could take action/ramp down/etc. How did they have access to those internal IP scores? I don't know, but it seems totally fishy :).

For sure we spent 5k+ USD yearly in this service (which is a huge amount of money in a 3rd. world country), and "somehow" after paying our deliverability did improve, despite doing the same things as before, as the recommendations were not ingenious.

So yeah, e-mail deliverability is a mafia, for sure.

Was it "Return Path"? If so, yes, they are just a racket. They ostensibly provide consulting services on this stuff, but in reality they have a (exclusive?) deal with Microsoft to change scores and allowlist, so you just pay them and they get your email through. Pricing is based on volume of email, I think we were paying $10k/yr for our emails to get to Microsoft hosted addresses.

I cannot 100% confirm it but "Return Path" (now Validity) definitely rings a loud bell :), and the figure is also in the ballpark -- we definitely started to send less e-mails just to be able to afford/test them.

I felt outraged at the moment because it was clearly a "pay-to-play" scheme, but ~8 years ago the number of Hotmail/Outlook addresses in my country was definitely substantial. Probably it still is.

sounds like you paid to have their spam filter look the other way for your ips

  How did they have access to those internal IP scores?

When I was doing DMARC stuff professionally, plenty of big names were willing to send DMARC reports our way. Microsoft was the only company to give us full text.

Well, you can (and should!) set up your DMARC preferences through your DNS records and enable a mailbox to receive those reports, which you can then use to verify if you have any/some problems with particular providers. This is totally free and standard.

But the score I am speaking of was something different: it was the reputation assigned by Microsoft (i.e., something internal) to the IPs from which we sent e-mails. This score was used to determine how many e-mails sent from those IPs would pass/fail MSFT's filters. And to have access to the score and improve it, we had to pay a 3rd. party :).

in outlook's admin console, there are a few tools related to antispam, including a way to view stats about why or why not a specific email got sent to spam. IIRC it exposes the sender's reputation score among other things.

>enable a mailbox to receive those reports

Thanks for mentioning this. Have set DMARC preferences in DNS for ages but never configured a mailbox to receive the reports. Will try it out.

Right. We were a third party to all of that, so I meant full text messages for Microsoft's customers. Even Facebook didn't do that.

Same experience. Thankfully I am in a position where I can just tell Microsoft mail users use a different provider or pound sand.

What whitelist are you referring to?

> They are blocking the whole ip-range of my provider.

That's not necessarily unreasonable, depending on which provider that is.

Sites like Wikipedia also block entire ranges to prevent spam. Unfortunately sometimes people do get caught up in that (as I did last year).

Even if you get them to create an exception for your IP, personal experience shows that this lasts for 2 months tops, then you're blocked again. I gave up, getting my personal mail server to communicate with Outlook is not worth it.

Didn’t the Wikipedia one just block anonymous contributions from some ip range? As in, you could still sign up, login and contribute?

No; was blocked even when logged in. Had to create a ticket to unblock (IP range had been re-assigned, which is why I got blocked after I moved).

What third party?

I would assume any provider that allows you to send email also allows a great deal of spam, so this might not be unwarranted. My provider is also frequently blacklisted, I just don't use it to send mail anymore.

What the original poster describes is anti-competitive behavior, for this reason alone the idea of blocking the whole IP range of a competing email service provider is very bad. Personally, I wouldn't use an email provider that blocks spam server-side without an option to turn this off because these filters often block legitimate mails and can cause all kinds of annoying problems.

Kind of, but parent poster was talking about his own small server, which is likely hosted on a residential IP pool that's pretty much guaranteed to be blocked all the time.

All mail providers mass block IPs, because the spam from some ISPs is literally too much to even filter.

I run a few high volume (very legitimate) servers and it's been a huge pain in the butt to keep them off of blacklists, but at the same time we've also had spammer problems and I totally get it.

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