Hi,
Grant Taylor via mailop wrote on 21.10.22 at 07:09:
I believe there have been multiple others beside myself that think that
T-Online should NOT be shunned in MTA /default/ configurations.
I am neither a package maintainer nor a mail server developer, so my
voice likely is just a very small one - but last year I've been gone
through a lot of the pain with setting up a new mail server on a new IP
address and getting blocks left and right - I learned things the hard
way, and yes, I was quite upset. I do this as a volunteer project, it
cost me lots of time, pain and headache, and was a frustrating experience.
Let me agree that blocking a provider by default does not seem wise.
Your end-users don't care, for them it just "does not work". They are
not interested in "politics", and if their e-mail doesn't work, they
just go with a different service. People are lazy and people want
practical solutions.
Second, where to start and where to end? There seem to be quite a few
mail operators who block, let's say, a bit arbitrary. Blocking all of
them makes things worse, and then the fear of e-mail getting into the
hand of a few single big players becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Nobody wants to be on a mail server that can only connect to very few
selected sites, whatever the reason, and how good the motivations might be.
Third, I guess the deployment cycles are rather long - so what you add
to a package right now will very likely not end up on a majority of
machines for months, years, whatever. And who knows if distributions
will incorporate anything of that, so it seems a lot of work with very
little predictable result.
Some perceive the behaviour as aggressive maybe, but reacting the same
way rarely yields to good results - well, at least I try to be an
optimist in life. ;-)
I don't have much insight into all those working groups and how the mail
operators talk to each other, I am just a small operator for a rather
specific use case here, so I can only assume the amount of pain and
frustration bigger operators must go through.
However, in general, I think the first step to actually help people is
to document things. Learning all these things can become quite tedious
and exhausting, with multiple sources - explaining best practice can
help many people a lot. Of course, not everyone is skilled to run a mail
server, but then we all started small I guess, so helping those who get
onto such role with proper and good documentation to avoid the most
obvious pitfalls is a first step. If there is documentation available,
at least the problems don't come as a surprise, whether one likes the
policy or not.
Long-term, I do get quite worried about all the growing obstacles and
enforced rules by mail operators that make it harder to deliver your
mail and make self-hosting more and more problematic. That is
frustrating nad makes me sad. However, and that is purely my personal
experience, Telekom is amongst the nicest and easiest one to deal with...
Florian
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