An eye opener for me was when my site got blacklisted as a spammer because I was sending bounce messages for every email I refused to accept (due to spam).
False positives happen more often then you'd think when you're receiving legitimate emails in English, from international non-native speakers, discussing legitimate wire-transfers (because when you send your kid to another country for school, you might want to send them money). I still think that it's super important to know when your email gets dropped on the floor. On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 2:30 PM Brian <a...@cityscape.co.uk> wrote: > On Tue 20 Aug 2019 at 11:24:42 -0400, Michael Stone wrote: > > > On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 05:57:40PM +0300, Reco wrote: > > > On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 10:48:44AM -0400, Michael Stone wrote: > > > > On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 07:31:57AM -0400, Henning Follmann wrote: > > > > > If you setup your DNS properly create SPF an DKIM almost all > > > > > providers will accept your email IF (and that's a very big if) > > > > > you do not spam. > > > > > > > > That's a nice idea, but simply not true. You'll be ok right up until > > > > you aren't, and as a small site you have no recourse to find out what > > > > the problem is. > > > > > > Such statement is incomplete without some examples. > > > Judging from your long history of contribution at Debian project, > > > surely you have some that can be shared with the list. > > > > It's really hard to share specific examples without naming domains, so > no. > > In general terms, It's almost unheard of to get any kind of response from > > the RFC-standard postmaster@ address these days. Most of the time, the > best > > you can hope for is a bounce (rather than your message silently going > into > > the recipient's spam box). If you're lucky the bounce will say something > > like "sender on blacklist X". If blacklist X is reasonably well known you > > can probably verify that the sender is on blacklist X. If you ask > blacklist > > X why the sender is on the blacklist you'll get no response. Maybe > something > > misattributed a spoofed email (relatively few sites actually care about > SPF > > etc so spoofs are still extremely common), maybe someone hit the spam > button > > accidently, maybe somebody doesn't like your ISP, maybe they don't like > your > > country, who knows? At that point you descend into a shady world of > > extortion schemes, and need to make decisions about whether to pay third > > parties to "certify" your domain to a blacklist. In the old days losing > an > > email was considered unacceptible; these days, there is so much junk that > > false positives are expected and routine. Yeah, I've been doing this for > a > > long time--more than 20 years of dealing with email servers--but I don't > > really think email in its traditional form will exist much longer. Heck, > > there are even debian contributors whose personal email domains bounce > > emails from other debian contributors. Who knows if they're even aware of > > that? > > The existence of an Internet swamped with spam has led to spam fighters > policing it and users demanding a means not to receive it. Between the > two, sending email directly has become more and more difficult. Spam > hasn't disappeared or been reduced, but the spam fighters have impacted > on the basic concept of email communication and are achieving what the > spammers haven't achieved - making email communication fraught and > unreliable. > > -- > Brian. > > >
