It's working. We've seen dramatic shifts in inbound spam that attempts
to compensate for it. We proactively mapped the valid senders in
networks that send more spam than ham. We're rapidly processing
whitelist reauests from customers to fill in the gaps, and those
requests have slowed to a crawl. We rejected over 80 million spam email
this year using this strategy.
On 2025-12-14 04:37, Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop wrote:
Dnia 13.12.2025 o godz. 20:27:00 Jarland Donnell via mailop pisze:
Obviously, we can't block Gmail. Can't be done. We can filter by
content, but that is getting harder and harder to do with anything
short of burning LLM tokens to get a "human-like" read on every
email, they'll change content around in virtually infinite ways to
get around content filters. So instead my goal is to make sending
spam from networks that aren't Google or Microsoft so incredibly
difficult that spammers realize there's really only one way to reach
my customers with their spam: Send from Google or Microsoft.
I'm doing this by only allowing mail from whitelisted IPs from every
network out there that sends more spam than ham. That means Hetzner,
it means parts of OVH, virtually every cloud provider out there.
If I can force increased outbound spam from Google and Microsoft,
everyone collectively is going to be circling them with pitchforks
to make spam THEIR problem to solve.
I'm not sure if this post is serious or just a joke, but if this is
serious,
it's not gonna work.
Assume everybody starts to do excessive blocking like you suggest here.
Inevitably, this will not affect only spam, but also legitimate mail.
Guess
where all the users who could not reach their recipients would move in
the
end? Yes... to Google, as the provider everyone knows about and the
only one
who is definitely not blocked. And nobody will care about spam as long
as
their mail gets through.
Actually, I sometimes have the impression that nobody except anti-spam
community seems to care about spam. People just happily accept it and
ignore ;) - or even worse, they sometimes actually find it useful and
buy
the products/services advertised by spammers.
What makes me think so? The fact that so many people are surfing the
Web
without adblockers, despite them being easily available. If they don't
care
about intrusive ads that disturb you all the time when viewing
websites,
they probably won't care about spam in their mailbox as well.
Also, less and less people are using email for actual person-to-person
communication, which is the thing people like me care most about when
it
comes to email. Nowadays the huge majority of legitimate email traffic
(spam
excluded) seems to be just transactional emails from various services:
order
confirmations, package tracking details, bank account statements,
notifications about court cases, electricity and telephone bills,
password
reset links... and so on. For actual personal communication, people
have
long ago switched to various instant messengers (which sadly are
incompatible with each other, and form closed ecosystems around the
particular provider, totally contrary to email). The fight is lost :(
Fun(?) fact: there is a free email provider in my country (and still a
quite
popular one) that, as a part of their terms of service, spams the users
of
their free mailboxes by literally DOZENS of advertisement emails. There
can
be 15-20 of them per day. For someone who uses email occasionally (and
this
is probably majority of users of that platform) it is hard to find
those few
actual emails you have received among this spam (well, technically it's
not
spam, because you agreed to receive it when signing for the free
mailbox,
but would you call this practice by any other word than spam? I would
not).
And people are still using those accounts. So do they care about spam?
I
don't think so.
Similarly people don't care about excessive blocking. They are just
used to
the fact that "sometimes email just doesn't get through" and accept it
as a
normal and obvious thing(?!). That's also one of the reasons why they
are
switching to messengers, because they seem to be more reliable for
them. So
if they won't be able to send an email, they will look for another way
of
contacting the recipient (via messenger or even social media maybe).
That's
another reason why your plan won't work.
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