Hi,
Kai 'wusel' Siering via mailop wrote on 21.10.22 at 18:28:
To stay ontopic here, the question is: _why_ were you getting "blocks
left and right"? And what were they?
Was it a "fresh & clean" IPv4 address or one that had been abused in the
past? What did the RBL checking tools tell you about that IP?
as I am just a small operator, my chance of getting a fresh and clean
IPv4 address is rather low. Of course, I checked against known
blocklists, asked for removal there, and that worked quite well.
However, some operators are a bit more complicated, sometimes it's also
hard to discover that you are blocked - e.g. with Telekom there is no
RBL to query, you need to do this manually, but I made a similar
experience with other operators.
Did the IP belong to an ISP that people that have to deal with remote
abuse do wrinkle their nose at?
That's something hard for me to judge - I am quite happy with my
provider, I don't know how the interaction with them is for others. But
then, several providers have mixed reviews, from excellent to really
bad, so probably that choice isn't so easy either.
And, most importantly: did you have to contact any postmaster to get
that IPv4 address, with matching PTR and A records, proper SPF and DKIM
entries, whitelisted to access their MXes at all?
Sometimes I did have to get even further to get unblocked, yes. And I
know I'm not the only one with that problem when it comes to certain
operators.
Postmasters are people, too. They as well don't want such a shit show.
_They_ didn't do anything wrong to deserve that treatment.
I agree with that, but I'm still not convinced a default block will
change anything on that. Having different points of view is fine, in the
end it's not me deciding upstream changes anyways. ;-)
There is one known public mail service that blocks universally, not just
arbitrarily. Given that, default MTA configuration should be "don't talk
to them as the won't let you talk back". Saves peoples time and nerves,
therefore a very pragmatic, and very practical solution.
If your customers *request* to talk to t-online.de users, you still can
negotiate with tosa@rx and then reflect that in your MTA configuration.
If you are a mail operator here in Germany, the likelihood of someone
writing to a t-online.de account is rather high. So it's just a matter
of time, and then when it's an important message, this might add even
further delay. Again, I'm not defending any policy here, I just try to
be pragmatic for my users.
Well, mostly no-one using a @t-online.de mailbox knows about their
provider's block-by-default policy. And no customer ever notices, as
I guess they would just not care. They "want it to work". The politics
behind that doesn't matter to them, they rather go for a different mail
operator, I guess. And I fear such blocks will just draw people even
further into the hands of the big operators, where there are "no problems".
I doubt that it would take GMX more that one single mail to tosa@rx if
they change IPs in their sending pool. Question is if they even would
notify t-online.de upfront anyway. Would Google, Microsoft? "T what?"
I actually expect that t-online.de proactively monitors known webpages
or DNS records of the big players — what they do not want, are major
tabloids doing headlines like "T-Online messes up it's mail service".
I guess that indeed amongst the big operators there are quite some
specifics, that are much more of a challenge to the small operator.
Florian
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