[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))