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Comment by abberation | Hacker News Reader

Wow, Outlook actually tells you they blocked you? My email (custom gmail domain btw) just ends up in the Spam folder of outlook clients with no notification at all.

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That's a different issue. You're usually not notified of spam designations, but bounces (where the mail server completely refuses to accept your email) do usually receive a notification. If you're designated as both (for example if you keep sending email that bounces) you'll get blackholed and wont receive any bounce notification either.

When I used to self-host my emails, GMail would "accept" mails then drop them. Microsoft was kind enough to tell me they dropped them but getting out of the blacklists was a pain.

An advantage of landing in spam is that the user still has a choice and is in control. Rejecting outright is a "lalalala I can't hear youu!!" type of stupid situation that only big providers can get away with, without the users realizing their bigcorp is the one with delivery issues

As a user, I'm thankful I don't need to sift through hundreds of spam emails a day to find potential false positives. Because that's what you're advocating. You'd apparently like everyone to have a terrible email experience for the sake of your own personal comfort and preference (self hosting your emails).

Besides, for something truly important, the people or organisations who need to reach me know how to do so other than via email (phone, chat, postal mail...).

This. Microsoft, Google, et al. aren't doing anything worthy of criticism here; it's the spammers who ruin email for the rest of us who should be facing the music.

Until it's not illegal it's only going to get worse.

Spamming is illegal.

In a lot of jurisdictions it basically isn't. I'd love to see at least a few convictions though, where it is.

Conversely, if you as the sender get a bounce at least you know something went wrong and can try a different way to contact the other person (different email, telephone, text message...) Bouncing is the traditional approach, and the original ethos was "bounce, or defer, or deliver, but don't ever accidentally or deliberately just drop an email on the floor".

It depends whether you think of "the user" as the sender or the re cover -- as a (human) sender I'd rather get a bounce than be silently ignored in a spam folder, but as a receiver I prefer the grey-area emails to be accept-but-spamfolder, not bounced...

I used to set my mail client up to bounce emails detected as spam with a fake bounce and a delete.

My mail provider (university) at the time complained to me because those bounces themselves bounced.

Have you tested with:

https://www.mail-tester.com/

Thanks, I was missing a DKIM on my mailcow setup. 10/10 now :-)

Excellent!! Have a nice day!

Another useful tool is https://www.learndmarc.com/ -- I found the presentation very helpful when I was finally getting on the DMARC train a while back.

True, MECSA is also interesting:

https://mecsa.jrc.ec.europa.eu/en/

They made me configure MTS

Whoa ! Very nice tool.

Ooh, thank you for sharing! This has given me a few things I should look into improving with my setup.

I self host. Over the years, I've had both situations with outlook. I've tried many things.

As it happens, I noticed my mails have gone through just fine in the last months, at least to companies using Microsoft services without me doing anything specific, after I threw the towel with Outlook. I did switch VPS providers almost a year ago, though to a provider that I expect to be more filtered (ovh).

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