On Monday, September 12, 2022 at 16:25:12 -0400, John Hawkinson wrote:
Mihai Lazarescu <mtl...@gmail.com> wrote on Mon, 12 Sep 2022 at 15:07:37 EDT in
<yx+dedsraermd...@lazarescu.org>:
> It took some work to set it up, but that's it. Surely not a mass solution,
yet feasible and stable.
...
> Only Microsoft (outlook.com, hotmail.com) seem to filter the whole IP block,
but I am too lazy to ask the provider to fix or change provider altogether.
This is hard to take seriously. Precise numbers are hard come to by, but I
think Microsoft is the number 2 hosting provider, globally, after Google/Gmail,
and has a substantial market share. Deciding that it's OK to not worry about
them suggests a very different attitude toward email reliability and
interoperability than most people would choose.
I never claimed that my specific case is universal:
1. I only have one contact on Hotmail and then I can use Google
SMTP. I had my domain registered for use on Google Workspace
(or whatever was the name earlier) long before I switched
to the homegrown. And I still keep Google as safeguard if
something-tragic-happens with my servers. For work contacts on
Microsoft servers I use the work email (also on Microsoft).
2. The IP-block-on-antispam-lists is just an issue of the
current provider (a convenient $12/y, checked it in the
meantime). No issues before this provider. Nevertheless, this
should be checked, and/or seek contractual guarantees, and/or
be prepared to switch on short notice. Or use reputable email
hosting providers, as someone mentioned earlier.
That being said, I found at work that Microsoft uses a very
crude spam filtering (kind of 1980s database-driven). E.g.,
it indiscriminately junks all messages from almost any mailing
list I join. Moreover, if I un-junk the messages, Outlook
behind the scenes whitelists the *sender address*, not the
list address/ID. Thus:
- I've got myself a never ending job to move legit messages out
of the spam folder for every new sender seen on lists
- I end up with a huge whitelist of people I don't personally know
- if I go and clear the Outlook-built whitelist, the spam filter
behavior resets: all messages from the lists are junked, etc.
(hence my strong feeling that it's db.whitelist-driven).
Besides, at the switch to Microsoft systems the sysadmins
strongly advised to carefully check the junk folder for important
messages. And I also found that Microsoft junked its own
automated notifications, e.g., for OneDrive shares. Go figure…
In 2022 I find astonishing how much of Microsoft's antispam seems
to rely on lists (addresses, IP blocks…). Leading to annoying
false positives, with rates well higher than Google's.
Microsoft's antispam filters may very well include some well
hidden adaptive smartness, though. ;-)
Best,
Mihai
