I think the author of the article makes a few mistakes in his diagnostic.

You should never use a service where you cannot report a problem or where the administrators are out of reach. Of course it includes the "big techs" but they're not alone.

The underlying issue is that most of them delegate their filtering decisions to third parties. And many of them rely on the same centralized IP and domain blacklists.

Because of how the filtering is done, the End User generally never discovers that any filtering is happening. Only the sender may be notified by his mail relay of the delivery failure.

Of course, the blacklisters are not going to put the IP addresses of the big Email Vendors into their lists, if they did, millions of people would be notified of delivery failures with the risk of them discovering who is responsible.

""" Unfortunately, the computing power required to filter millions of emails per minute is huge. That's why the email industry has chosen a shortcut to reduce that cost. """

Even 20 years ago the computing power wasn't a problem. He probably has this impression because he's been using SpamAssassin. The real reason for why they are taking the "shortcut" is carelessness toward their service and users.

The excuse of saying that you should block messages before delivering them because it takes disk space is also heavily promoted by the blacklisters. Indeed, if the message was simply delivered to a Spam folder with the actual reason for which it has been classified as such, users could discover who is responsible for the filtering.

The good news is that there is some success in getting the big email services to remove centralized blacklists.

Another problem is that too many administrators of smaller services are not even aware of their reliance on blacklists. Sometimes this is because they have used an easy installation script for convenience, or because they've copy/pasted a configuration. And of course, there are those who do not understand the ethical implications of doing such a thing or are just foolish.

""" So, starting today, the MX records of my personal domain no longer point to the IP of my personal server. They now point to one of the Big Email Providers. """

This doesn't make any sense. The MX records are for inbound, not outbound, he could have used a different relay for sending mails yet still use his own relay for receiving (perhaps he doesn't know that?). Instead, he switches to a provider that is known for contributing to the problem. This is... disturbing.

user:	Chalbroth
created:	April 7, 2022
karma:	6