[tdrdt]

"Except of course that it isn't an artisanal choice, a very practical one that is made increasingly impossible by the few very large email providers that are left. It should be as simple as hosting a web server."

I don't get this one. How do large email providers make it difficult to host your own email?

I host my own email. It was a pain to setup so I try not to touch it since it is running fine. Setting up email on your own server is just complicated unless you install server management software. I am not sure big email providers are to blame for this.

[jacquesm]

> How do large email providers make it difficult to host your own email?

By randomly marking your email as spam without any recourse. This may be because they blacklist your provider en bloc, your IP address or some subnet, because they feel like it, it's Tuesday or because their spam filters suck.

But it happens and it happens often enough that running a business in that way will cost you money, sometimes lots of it.

[rsync]

"By randomly marking your email as spam without any recourse."

Correct.

I'd like to describe how badly this is implemented:

I run my own mail server and I have a 15+ year history of emailing (mywife)@gmail.com.

On a regular basis (mywife)@gmail.com will email me, and I will respond to her email and my response will go to her junk/spam folder.

And there is no alert, no bounce, no notification.

Let's unpack this:

Google (gmail) knows that these two email addresses converse back and forth, regularly, with a 15+ year history. Google knows that their own user initiated this conversation. Google knows my email is a response to their users email. Google knows my address has never been marked as spam/junk.

So, what kind of unimaginably bad heuristics would have to be in employ to allow this to happen ?

To be honest, this wouldn't bother me that much - I don't think google owes me anything and my wife doesn't pay for their service. What makes me so, so angry is that they behave this way without any notification or bounce email.

That's just shitty.

[jacquesm]

Same here. And I can't even forward mail from one inbox to another because it invariably gets marked as spam. Two mailboxes, same browser, same IP.

[smt88]

> unimaginably bad heuristics

This is every Google product in a nutshell for me. Their "algorithms" are absurdly bad in every category.

[Retric]

Business use of email tends to look a lot like spam and people mark it as such. An appointment reminder or notification that something just shipped is generally fine. Send out mass notification of your holiday sales and that’s going into someone’s spam folder.

[monsieurbanana]

> generally fine

So you're saying that anything can get you blacklisted if you're unlucky enough? I think that's the point of the people you're arguing with.

At this point we just need to figure exactly how unlucky.

[Retric]

Not so much a question of luck, sending out sipping notifications that for example include advertising is risky. Sending a high volume of appointment reminders for the same appointment is similarly problematic.

[jacquesm]

I've never done any of that.

[Retric]

I don’t mean that’s the only way to trip up, there are a lot of unspoken self hosing email rules. Don’t use public data centers, don’t send news letters etc.

[feanaro]

See the Digital Markets Act in the EU. It could be a way to force large corporations to cooperate.

[emteycz]

While completely abandoning hope for the small players in the process.

[feanaro]

Could you expand? Abandoning hope in what way?

[Nasrudith]

You are still hosting it fine. They just decide that you or your messages are suspect.

Also one thing - if people actually want your email they will contact you if they don't get an expected email. If they don't want your messages it is spam.

[hamilyon2]

Even if your ip address/domain is not in the blacklist right now, it only takes a few people marking your correspondence as spam for it to be blacklisted. Since everyone is on these big free providers, nobody will ever see a single email from you any more. With less centrally controlled email, that would not be possible. I think that is the problem everyone is talking about.

[grishka]

People generally know to check their spam folder if they're waiting for an email but it doesn't arrive.

[kiwijamo]

I generally don't check my personal spam folder. I've honestly not seen any false positives with Fastmail. But I certainly do have to check every now and then for my work O365 account which is pretty bad at marking legitimate mail as spam. YMMV of course.

[vetinari]

> How do large email providers make it difficult to host your own email?

By not delivering mail sent by your mailserver to mailboxes hosted by them. There's not much use for an own server, if your mail won't be received by most users on gmail or hotmail.

[Kwpolska]

The problem with e-mail, and with other forms of communication, is that two parties (or their service providers) need to co-operate. You can run your own e-mail server just fine, but Google, Microsoft and friends might consider you to be a spammer or silently block your e-mail just because.

[indigochill]

What if email was based on a whitelist instead of a blacklist? So you'd only receive email from addresses of people you've already established contact with some other way (maybe using conventional email)? This eliminates spam and if the big providers supported this, it could also enable them to stop blackholing innocent servers (though whether they care is another question).

[teekert]

You'll get it when Microsoft decides you are a spammer for no other reason then sending email from port 25 from your house. Or when you can't seem to sign up for a service... until you use your old Gmail address.

[matt_heimer]

Yeah, there was (is?) a period of time where viruses were used to send spam so if you got infected you'd suddenly be sending out a lot of SMTP traffic from a residential IP address. The entire industry adopted the practice of not trusting residential ips. Then the spammers shifted to cheap VPS providers and ip and netblock black lists became more common.