Interesting history and analysis of SMTP’s history. How can we prevent fedi and other open protocols from suffering the same fates?

  • makeasnek@lemmy.mlOP
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    2 months ago

    Sure, you can run one, good luck getting even a halfway decent delivery rate to mailboxes at any major mail provider. Even if they never receive a spam message from your server, your server is an “unknown” which counts against you. And if one person in your small company of 10 or 100 or even 1000 people gets their e-mail hacked and sends spam? Prepare for the rest of them to get punished for it. Running an SMTP server is a nightmare which is why, over time, more and more of the economy has just shifted their SMTP servers to organizations who professionally run SMTP servers instead of having their own.

    • the_crotch@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      Set up dkim/SPF properly, make sure the ip you plan to use is clean before you start, sign up for MXtoolbox blacklist alerts and if you get on a blacklist (doesn’t happen often if you do a bare minimum of proactive security), you request removal. It’s really not hard.

    • digdilem@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      You’re spot on, and even smaller ISPs routinely get blocked by larger hosters (anyone who doubts this, please look around for the many stories along the lines of “gmail silently drops my email”)

      Residential IP blocks are scored much higher and given a negative trust from the start - not surprising since that’s where much of the world’s spam comes from through compromised computers, routers etc.