On Sun, Jul 7, 2024 at 7:54 AM Alessandro Vesely via mailop < mailop@mailop.org> wrote:
> It seems to me that large operators don't care a tinker's cuss about > blocking > small operators. If I'm unable to send to Outlook users, it is my fault > by > definition, certainly not Outlook's. > > In my opinion this is where the industry could use some oversight. As you say there is nothing to stop a large operator from blocking a small operator simply because they can. And then from an end-user's point of view, it's obviously because of an issue with the small operator because the large operator certainly can't be wrong. (I refer to these operators as "too big to fail", much like the banking systems). I understand a mail server administrator being reluctant to disclose why a particular IP or email was blocked. But if there was a trusted third party oversight involved where the large operator had to disclose why a small operator was being blocked, that might stop some of this. The oversight could determine whether the justification for blocking another mail server was valid and explain this to the small operator. Of course, any time you add oversight you always get corruption - so I'm speaking merely in a vacuum. Outside of that, a trusted third party could publish a routinely updated list scoring how difficult or easy it is to get through to a real mail server administrators for a lot of these too big to fail email service providers - of which AT&T would seem to be rated fairly low right now - in which these small operators could point to when their customers are complaining about being blocked by one of these large providers and see the difficulties with which they are to work with. There comes a point where dirty laundry has to be aired out publicly. While my specific beef right now is with AT&T, they're not the old culprit. But the fact that their rejection message says "For assistance forward this error to abuse_...@abuse-att.net" when it's very clear that abuse_...@abuse-att.net is rarely if ever checked or managed, that's something the public needs to be aware of. If AT&T is going to block IPs - for no apparent reason, and provide no means of having the issue addressed, then the public needs to know that if you intend to write to an @att.net email address it very well may never get delivered. If you're an @att.net email account user, maybe you need to think twice before using that email account in any official capacity. > Some restrict the audience of possible complainants to the first RIR's > delegates. That way a small operator can try to convince its ISP to > either > deal with such questions, or do a RIR registration in its name, neither of > which is an available option to small customers. > > This is also true. And this relates to my question earlier: Are we all on this mailing list to learn? I get where certain mail server administrators only want to discuss issues with the direct owner of an IP address. But I can tell you, from a small operator's perspective, that's not how a lot of this works any more. Maybe it worked that way at one point in the past, but the times have changed now. The industry that I work in - the shared hosting industry - where we get our servers from, and their related IP addresses have no involvement at all with the management of that server or its mail server operation. Now it may be that the administrator that is supposed to be managing that server has no clue what they are doing or how to manage abuse - I'm not going to say that that doesn't happen. But for me, and I suspect several other small operators, I like to think that we manage the system fairly well and have a lot of monitors in place to detect outbound spamming or abuse. Is there room for improvement? There always is. But I think we keep it down to a minimum the best we can. But we're the ones that manage what goes out from these servers. The owner of the specific IP doesn't necessarily have the same sense of urgency when an IP block is made. All of our servers have FCrDNS. And any time I send an inquiry related to one of our IP addresses being blocked, I always send out that mail from postmaster@<<rDNS of IP>> so that replying to that message will show ownership of the reverse DNS of that blocked IP address. This would serve to prove that I can make configuration changes for the operation of the mail server sending out mail from that IP address. While I respect that this may not necessarily illustrate that you should always go a level or two under the owner of an IP address (the first RIR delegates) I do hope that it illustrates that being a level or two under the RIR for an IP doesn't necessarily mean that they carry no weight. If you receive spam or abuse from an IP address, by all means contact the IP address owner/first delegate under RIR - I'm not against that. But if someone inquires about a block and they are not the IP address owner or first RIR delegate, it may not be right to just outright dismiss that inquiry because of that.
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