On Fri, 2021-06-04 at 11:16 +0200, Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop wrote: > Sometimes, just out of curiosity, I'm checking MX-es for eg. Internet > shops in which I shop or other entities I communicate with. Most of > them have e-mail hosted by their hosting companies (at least MX > points to the hosting ISP server), as part of the hosting package > probably. > > So I guess there are still many that are neither Microsoft nor > Google.
I am sure you are guessing right. Do you also check their SPF records? Here in Canada, internet shops are being taken over by Shopify. I am not saying that big service providers like Microsoft, Google, Shopify, etc. are inherently bad. Economies of scale predict that such large outfits can be very competitive. What I am saying is that where network effects are important, or as in the case of internet email, critical, these large outfits have an incentive to use their scale for anti-competitive behavior, such as arbitrarily rejecting mail from competitor's services. Nothing prevents you or me from developing an online retail solution and compete with Shopify. But if we try to operate a mail server and can't deliver emails to a large number of potential recipients, no one will contract our services and we will be prevented from making a run on Gmail/Outlook. I am not saying Microsoft is doing that -- there is ample evidence that its filtering service is going ballistic against mail coming from its own cloud. I am saying that the unintended consequences of Microsoft's filtering are difficult to distinguish from intended anti-competitive behavior. What is more important is that intentional or not, this behavior is detrimental to internet email and has to stop before internet email becomes even more irrelevant. How many shops and other services have you visited that have downgraded email from absolutely necessary to secondary, e.g. by replacing email with phone/SMS for login and messaging? -- Yuval Levy, JD, MBA, CFA Ontario-licensed lawyer _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
