On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 08:39:43PM +0300, Reco wrote:
On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 01:22:27PM -0400, Michael Stone wrote:
On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 07:14:01PM +0300, Reco wrote:
> So it boils down to "MTA needs care on a regular basis" and "some
> blacklist can add your MTA for no good reason". First one is universal
> (applies to any Internet-facing service), second one can be beat with a
> creative use of hosting. Also, https://mxtoolbox.com. A non-free
> service, but a useful one.
Way to oversimplify, and "creative use of hosting" basically means
"hope and pray". It's also not actually true that there's hosting
magic which makes you immune to blacklist stupidity unless your
hosting is gmail or something equally too large to block.
Unless a blacklist adds victims by AS number, a change of MTA's IP
(hence the hosting) and an appropriate DNS reconfiguration is
sufficient to sidestep it.
And cause different issues, because you're no longer on an IP with an
established history. You're also assuming that they're blocking by IP
rather than domain, which is quite bold assumption since the blacklist
is a black box and domain based blacklists most certainly exist. That
said, I have in the past configured specific domains to recieve email
from specific IPs because they arbitrarily stopped accepting mail from
other IPs.
Of course, one can get an already blacklisted IP, so a certain amount of
"hope and pray" applies here.
Or, you're trying to send to someone who's blacklisting broad ranges of
IPs or ASs and you're just wasting your time changing IPs. Nothing like
find that out after going down that road.
In my experience with the younger generation, they already don't
consider email a primary means of communication except within a closed
environment like a school.
That's something I agree with. Still, I propose to wait until
post-Generation Z gets their first job.
Why? Current young working age people are alredy far less invested in
email than their older peers. This isn't changing as they continue to
work. If anything, they're pushing companies away from using email as a
primary means of internal communication.
In business the trend is increasingly toward outsourcing email to a
large cloud provider (e.g., MS/outlook) so a future in which
businesses mainly communicate between a small number of very large
providers is not all that remote.
The trend is here, sure, as long as you consider small business.
Large one - not so much.
Maybe not ten years ago, but CIOs need to now have a good answer to why
*not* outsource email. For the most part, large businesses that aren't
IT providers don't particularly want to manage email servers. It might
be hard for them to change their existing infrastructure, but in my
experience it's something they're definitely looking at.
So which is it? A small email domain isn't a big deal to manage or it is?
I saw no unsolvable problems in doing it so far, hence my interest to
your statements. And yes, I do not consider myself an expert in all
things related to SNMP, MTAs and the like.
I never said the problems were unsolvable. (For the most part. I have
seen horror stories where the best solution was to abandon a domain.) I
do propose that the effort involved is so large that for most people it
isn't worth it. As the number of people who care to try continues to
shrink, the motivation for the large providers to bother worrying about
small providers shrinks even faster. At some point the percentage of
non-spam email originating from providers with less than a million users
will be so small that the benefits in just cutting it off will outweigh
the cost of doing so. We're already well past the point where sending
from a gmail account is an accepted diagnostic step--which makes it hard
to explain to an ordinary person why it wouldn't be the default.
