We operate an MSP business for tens of thousands of customers and have our own ASN, but gmail outright refuses all our corporate email. Why? We do not know and gmail refuses to tell us. Their postmaster tools lie, are incomplete, display no data, display errors or contain no useful information.
There is no human postmaster to contact, all our attempts have been ignored successfully. It’s downright silly but we have to send our corporate mail via a paid third party relay to be delivered to gmail.
These gmail postmaster tools seems to exist to make antitrust cases difficult, not to enable other MSPs to deal with deliverability issues.
At the same time gmail is emerging as the number one source of spam for our customers. If our spam fighting is too tight we falsely flag important mail as spam, and this is absolutely unacceptable to customers. As a consequence we have to relax our spam classification for gmail senders, which manifests itself in false negatives from the perspective of our customer.
But to the customers this reflects on us, not on gmail.
It’s just gmails best interests to make other MSPs miserable to operate. It drives our users to them.
You can run your own mail server and name server on top. The network of mail is very much federated.
In mail we have so many freedoms. We have become so locked into technology that we have to introduce a term like “federation” to signify the interoperability and freedom of a single component. Mail is federation layered upon federation.
The fact that you can just use a mailings list address as a member of another mailing list gives you even more federation possibilities. All with the simplest of all message exchange protocols.
> You can run your own mail server and name server on top. The network of mail is very much federated.
While I do completely agree with that in theory (and I also love mail) I think it does not stand the reality test because of email deliveravility which tends to be a nightmare.
How do you solve this? Do you use a third party SMTP?
I ran multiple mail servers for years until about 10 years ago (moved out of the industry). The deliverability problem, as far as I know, hasn't really changed that much in the last decade. The key was to configure DKIM, SPF, only use secure protocols and monitor the various black/block-lists to make sure you aren't on them for very long. In my experience, if you end up on a few bad lists, and don't react quickly, the reputation of your domain goes down rapidly and it's harder to get off said lists.
You also want some spam filtering, which, these days, is apparently much more powerful with local LLMs. I used to just use various bayesian classification tools, but I've heard that the current state of affairs is better. Having said that, when you've trained the tool, it does a pretty good job.
It's not "plug-and-play", but it's not that hard. Once you've got it up and running the maintenance load goes to almost zero.
> It's not "plug-and-play", but it's not that hard. Once you've got it up and running the maintenance load goes to almost zero.
This is where I disagree. In my opinion it might not be that hard but the maintenance is really not zero as you just described how you need a reputable IP as a prerequisite and constant monitoring of block lists.
Just having DKIM, SPF and DMARC really was not enough last time I checked for getting delivered to let's say outlook.
I just realised, and this could be red herring, that almost all of the domains I've administered were based in Australia. I suppose it's possible that the IP ranges I'm dealing with have a better reputation than those from other countries. I have administered a few domains from US companies and IPs, but they've often been based in known data centres which may help their cause. I can't really talk to the reliability of hosting a mail server on a consumer / small business IP in the US / Europe/ Asia. It's possible that all known, common IPs in these areas have a natural disadvantage when it comes to reputation. I suppose try running a tunnel from your server to a small VPS in a knwon data centre? Not ideal, but it may help.
It would be annoying if entire US/European/Asian ISP IP ranges were immediately blocked. We should have moved on from that for many reasons unrelated to email.
The monitoring of block lists is much more important than people assume. I haven't looked into it in detail, but it always seemed like the reputation was based on a ratio of number of messages to known bad messages. If you have a moderately busy server, and you manage to keep off the block lists (or at least pro-actively remove yourself from them) then the reputaion gets higher and higher, and the maintenance goes down.
If you're a domain that only receives occasional messages, and you end up on Spamhaus and co, you're gonna have a problem. It seems that reputation at small scale is viral. You need actively good reputation and response time. But, honestly, it seemed that it didn't take more than about 3 months per domain I administered until they were just accepted by the net as valid, good actors.
It's not about receiving. Receiving is the easy part. It is about the delivery of your own mail.
> you stop giving money to your mail host and get a different one.
I was entertaining the "host your own mail server" thought, I agree that if you don't host it yourself then you can change your provider if it fails you.
Who needs the transmission more - the sender, or the recipient?
Much of the time, when it's for signup verification, especially for a free service, they just write "don't use @live.microsoft.com" underneath the email address box. The user wants to be signed up for the service more than the service provider wants a new user, at least by enough to use an alternate email address. Enough cases like this, and the user quits @live.microsoft.com.
Sure but then your mail gets dropped on the other end: The main issue I had the last time I tried running my own setup for mails was basically getting an email to an outlook or live.microsoft address. My mails were dropped for no reason, effectively not landing in my friends mailboxes and without any error on my side to know that my mail was getting rejected.
This is when I decided to stop trying getting through with this and came back to paying a provider.
The fact that it is a nightmare is a bit of a myth. Granted, not everybody can do it, but that's not necessary.
And then there are many mail providers other than Gmail. It's just that nobody cares and probably the fact that a ton of (most?) people were forced to create a Gmail account by Google.
> The fact that it is a nightmare is a bit of a myth. Granted, not everybody can do it, but that's not necessary.
I agree to some extent. But it is more involved than deploying a Discourse instance in my opinion.
> And then there are many mail providers other than Gmail. It's just that nobody cares and probably the fact that a ton of (most?) people were forced to create a Gmail account by Google.
100% agree. This is the tradeoff I went for. I would love for it to be easier to self host but you can definitely use another provider.
And it is also rarely if ever measured in petabytes. Commercially percentile based (in terms of speed) billing is the norm, but that only applies to businesses that act as downstream customers of ISPs
Apple has global IX presences and generally maintains open peering policies, which means it only costs a few bucks monthly to maintain any given PNI (e.g. 10Gbit), and they are also available on those open routing server ports. IX presence is dirt cheap.
You can use your own router in Germany, this is enforced by the regulation agency BNetzA. Your ISP must provide you with sufficient information to set it up.
I think it's fair to say the vast majority of users won't be able to pull that off. I doubt even half of them know what a router is, let alone that there are differences between models.
For those who know they can use their own modems, sufficient information must be available, but only a sliver of the people with AVM modems will have that kind of knowledge.
There is the class that fails at reading and adhering to IKEA instructions, yeah.
But this is something that ask the non-obvious things will get explained to you if you walk into a MediaMarkt to where modern routers are and queue in line for the area's sales person to get to you and tell you what to buy, and how to get your hands on the relevant access credentials/how to get the new one to connect to the ISP.
You're forgetting that most installs of non-ISP-provided moderns for residential Internet are set up by the tech person of the household who quite possibly never heard of what a NAS is and why they may want one.
Often the only paper manual thing in the box is literally the quick start guide that a motivated person who has what could be called "common sense" on treatment of/interaction with computing equipment. You know, the person who knows to check the plugs because they don't consider themselves above it but do know that it's one of if not the first thing they are asked if they can support.
As a point of interest, there is a class of patterns called Standard Essential Patents (SEP), which the patent holder is required to sell licenses under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) conditions when an implementation of that patented idea is required to comply with certain standards.
What is even more interesting: At a given power rating, coal plants produce up to 3 times more radioactivity than nuclear power plants directly in leftover ash because coal contains large numbers of radioactive isotopes. It might not seem like much, but when you consider that a 1TWe coal plant burns 3.2Mt of coal a year compared to 27t of uranium for an equivalent nuclear power plant, this might become more apparent.
Most of that waste is captured in ash via particle filters and has to be treated like any highly toxic and radioactive waste, but as far as I know this waste it not destined for secured long term nuclear disposal where it would be kept safe from interacting with the environment. We don’t seem to have a problem with that…
Further, some low percentage (literature tends to point at .5%) of it is in gaseous form or cannot be filtered, so it gets vented into the atmosphere. That’s assuming modern and intact particle filters. And we aren’t even talking about CO2 here.
It’s somewhat absurd we have to have discussions about nuclear power plant waste in this reality.
Nuclear power plants produce many many orders of magnitude more radioactivity than coal power plants for a given amount of energy produced. You are probably misinterpreting the famous 1978 study [1] where the radioactive emissions of nuclear and coal power plants were estimated to be roughly the same. This does not include the solid and liquid nuclear waste, only the radioactive gases that are inadvertently leaked from nuclear reactors. Coal ash is barely radioactive at all, and the radioactivity is completely negligible compared to the chemical toxicity.
Elm semantics were originally loosely based on functional reactive programming in the sense of Conal Elliot, as per the thesis of its author.
Redux on the other hand is just imperative programming folks rediscovering that a state transition can be described as a pure function S -> S, with all the benefits that come along with it. This is as old as lambda calculus itself. Words like reducer are just red herrings.
The primary problem is language/library designers/users believing there must be one true canonical meaning of the word „length“ like you just did, and that „length“ would be the best name for the given interface.
In database or more subtly various filesystems code the notion of bytes or codepoints might be more relevant.
By the way, what about ASCII control characters? Does carriage return have some intrinsic or clearly well defined notion of „length“ to you?
What about digraphs like ij in Dutch? Are they a singular grapheme cluster? Is this locale dependent? Do you have all scripts and cultures in mind?
And some clients expect that whitespace is not included in string length. "I asked to put 50 letters in this box, why can I only put 42?" would not be an unexpected complaint when working with clients. Even if you manage to convey that spaces are something funny called "characters", they might not understand that newlines are characters as well. Or emojis.
Credit card numbers come to mind, printed in letters they are often grouped into four number block separated by whitespace, e.g. "5432 7890 6543 4365" and now try to copy-paste this into a form field of "length" 16.
Ok, that's more of a usability issue and many front end developers seem to be rather disconnected from the real world. Phone number entry is an even worse case, but I digress ...
These gmail postmaster tools seems to exist to make antitrust cases difficult, not to enable other MSPs to deal with deliverability issues.
At the same time gmail is emerging as the number one source of spam for our customers. If our spam fighting is too tight we falsely flag important mail as spam, and this is absolutely unacceptable to customers. As a consequence we have to relax our spam classification for gmail senders, which manifests itself in false negatives from the perspective of our customer.
But to the customers this reflects on us, not on gmail.
It’s just gmails best interests to make other MSPs miserable to operate. It drives our users to them.