> On Apr 7, 2023, at 9:26 PM, Jarland Donnell via mailop <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
> 
> To be clear they have an amazing abuse team, easily the first people I would 
> hit up if I were hiring in that area. Just top notch admins.
> 
> Blocking SMTP by default makes sense, but settling on the best way to handle 
> opening it (automated? manual review?) is a discussion that is very easy to 
> get stuck in. I don't know where they're at on that discussion by now, but 
> when I left it was something I would have referred to as "on the table." That 
> to say most of the stakeholders would entertain the discussion.
> 
> There's likely an attached fear that appearing even remotely hostile to 
> customers could quickly drive them to a competitor in a pretty competitive 
> market. You have to think that as much as people like you and I would 
> appreciate them doing it, their customers would likely only be speaking up 
> about it to say the opposite. You might decrease abuse complaints but you 
> might also decrease NPS scores, and the people sending abuse complaints are 
> usually not your customers (so pleasing them doesn't = $). You might think 
> that reducing IP blacklisting could reduce customer complaints and bad NPS 
> scores. I don't think reality actually plays out that way because Gmail 
> doesn't use external blacklists (that I'm aware of), and Microsoft will 
> unblock individual IPs upon request (sometimes after some back and forth), 
> and that accounts for almost all of what people want anyway. And even that 
> would only matter to customers that run mail servers anyway.
> 
I have no doubt that DO has an excellent abuse team but it’s hard to dam a 
class 5 rapids. Would it be as time consuming and expensive to manually take a 
look before approving 25? Yes, it would annoy some users but reasonable people 
could understand a well written explanation.

On the cost side, I know a number of people who have a negative view of DO. I 
won’t mention the not so polite nickname they use. It’s a shame. Those people 
have nothing good to say about DO and that can’t be great for the brand.  I 
loved DO and DO is still good. Every person and every organization has flaws to 
work on as perfection is impossible. If DO got a handle on that one thing 
which, if substantially improved, would only increase my respect for DO.

As you said mom the current path is upward sloping expenses undermining your 
price competitiveness.  I don’t think you’d lose many legit customers over a 
hoop to jump through for 25. You might gain some good but previously hesitant 
customers. 

Again, DO is awesome. One big problem isn’t so bad.

Neil
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