[massaman_yams]

I am not a Google employee, but I do work with email anti-spam at scale. There's a lot to critique here but it boils down to three points:

1. Spam filter behavior has changed because spam has increased in volume and sophistication, not because ISPs want to save money, or to eliminate competition. Some techniques that worked well 5 years ago aren't as effective anymore. One of the consequences of this has been a reduction in the value of IP reputation, from a spam signal perspective, particularly for low-volume IPs.

2. IP range reputation does matter. The increase in the value of IP range reputation, as a spam signal, has paralleled the decline in value of low-volume IP reputation. In practice, this means you need to either send enough volume to outweigh the reputation of your IP range (exact quantity varies based on a lot of variables, but as a very rough approximation, 1000 messages a day), or find an IP range with good reputation.

IP range reputation is not easy to assess, sometimes even for email professionals. So you can either gamble with a residential ISP IP, or a VPS IP, or you can find a provider that spends time, effort, and expertise on managing IP range reputation. The practical solution for most senders is the latter. Many of these offer a free tier, and many options are available among providers of all sizes.

3. The filtering behavior reported here is either misunderstood or misrepresented. First, no, no major ISP (Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft/Outlook, icloud) is going to permanently block an IP range; filters are designed to be dynamic. In severe, ongoing, high-volume spam scenarios, you could see a 2-week block, maybe occasionally 30 days. But never "one strike".

Mail deletion without a bounce also cam happen, particularly at Microsoft, but again it's almost never seen for legitimate mail - that response is reserved for long-term, severe spam scenarios, where anyone reasonable would agree that a block is warranted. And, again, this is dynamic.

So it looks like OP is either exaggerating, or has been trying to send from IP ranges with unusually bad spam problems.

[TheRealDunkirk]

> The filtering behavior reported here is either misunderstood or misrepresented. First, no, no major ISP (Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft/Outlook, icloud) is going to permanently block an IP range; filters are designed to be dynamic. In severe, ongoing, high-volume spam scenarios, you could see a 2-week block, maybe occasionally 30 days. But never "one strike".

You say you're knowledgable, but I also ran my own email server for a couple of decades, and gave up for precisely this reason. Maybe this is even true, but when you're trying to get mail sent, YOU NEED THE MAIL SENT, and you can hardly wait 2 weeks or a month. Besides, your email server is going to give up and report it as undeliverable by that time. So you have to do the legwork to get off the block regardless of how long the "bigs" have the timeout set to. And that's happens so often, and is so onerous, it's not worth the hassle any more. Like many others here, I could have written this article.

[massaman_yams]

The overwhelming majority of legitimate mail will never see anything remotely near a 14-day block. Again, it's reserved for severe, ongoing, high-volume spam scenarios; ISPs use other methods like short-term deferrals for more common/less severe problems.

If you find yourself in an IP range involved in a severe, ongoing, high-volume spam scenario that's affecting your delivery, then it means your provider is not managing IP range reputation, or not doing it very well, and you should vote with your dollars and move somewhere else.

As a rule of thumb, email-specific service providers tend to do a better job of managing IP range reputation than more general purpose providers like VPSes.

[berkes]

The overwhelming majority of my legitimate mail has seen consistent and irrecoverable 14 day blocks for the last decade+. One on an IP that only did my email for over 6 years. Yet the oligopoly started to block blocks of IPs, including my IP, without recourse.

If you say this problem doesn't exist, you are either not familiar with the problem, misunderstanding it, or simply lying. I hope it is just miscommunication.

Like many here, I gave up self hosting email. To the point that I buy an SMTP service from one of the oligopoly. The incoming mail is handled fine by my server still.

[massaman_yams]

Exceptions to the rule do happen; I'm sorry your experience was the exception. Dealing with that kind of thing can be quite a pain if you're not experienced with it.

But again: "If you find yourself in an IP range involved in a severe, ongoing, high-volume spam scenario that's affecting your delivery, then it means your provider is not managing IP range reputation, or not doing it very well, and you should vote with your dollars and move somewhere else."

[berkes]

Did that. Three times. It's whackamole.

You know why? Because any IP-adress that I can afford, is going to be blackholed.

You make it sound like the blame lies with the Linodes, Digital oceans or even the Hezners or ISPs. This is not their fault. The blame lies, entirely, with Microsoft and Google (And to lesser extend Yahoo) using a cannon to shoot a mosquito.

Again: My IP (the address, not the range) was fine. It had been fine for many years. Why then, must Google and/or Microsoft, randomly, block this address? Why can't they make exceptions for reputable addresses within a range of bad ones? (I know why: they are lazy and use the easy path: just block everything and accept some "collateral damage", especially when that "collateral damage" cements their oligopoli a bit more, and when avoiding that collateral damage not only costs more work, but enables competition to exist (and grow))

[DangitBobby]

> IP range reputation is not easy to assess, sometimes even for email professionals.

The article is about a man who has been sending emails from the same address for the last couple of decades, and it has always been in his control. Is it difficult to assess the reputation of his address? You seem to be deflecting some blame onto the victim of the shortcomings of your system.

[massaman_yams]

This is not my system, to be clear, but you might be surprised how little 20 years of data matters to filter accuracy, empirically speaking; recent sending behavior carries orders of magnitude more weight.

[RockingGoodNite]

Agreed, well written counterpoints.