This means independent mail providers are getting the cold shoulder, and running your emails independently is facing mounting challenges.
Email is a distributed service – that means anyone can set up node on the network, and use that node to send emails to their friends, family, and business contacts.
While that is still the case, self-hosted email is facing mounting pressures. If you’ve noticed big providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft have started putting additional scrutiny on your emails, or perhaps outright blocking your emails outright, you’re not alone.
The big providers control a massive percentage of email traffic on the web – some sources say up to 90%. This means that their email servers receive hundreds of thousands of emails per day (maybe more!), and each of those emails takes computing resources to process. It makes sense that with such a volume of email these providers will employ state-of-the art spam filters in order to reduce this computing overhead. We wish this was the case, however the reality is that these providers are erroneously discarding or rejecting emails outright.
We have no quarrel with spam filtering, and we recognize that there are bad actors out there who do send a massive amount of spam. Spam is a huge problem, to the tune of 160 Billion spam emails per year. Common sense spam filtering is a necessity – not only for computing power but also for our own sanity.
Instead of taking on spam on a case-by-case basis, or checking blacklists for offending mailers, or using any number of methods to check for ‘spammyness’, these large providers are blocking entire IP blocks. A lot of legitimate mail servers who are following best practices can get caught up in these large blocks of banned IPS for literally no reason at all aside from sharing a similar IP.
The large monopolies maintain their own internal blacklists, these can be public, but often are not. There are many tools online to check if your mail server’s IP has been flagged for sending spam, and you would expect that if your mail server is not listed on these blacklists that you’d be able to send emails to these providers. That is often not the case.
For example Microsoft’s SNDS (Smart Network Data Services) reports a mail servers reputation in the Microsoft network. It tracks and reports spam incidents for independent mail server admins to address. In many cases I’ve had clients unable to send email to the Microsoft network claiming the IP has a poor reputation, all the while SNDS claims the IP is healthy.
Many of the monopolies offer perfunctory delisting services. From experience it can take days to receive a response, days to be taken seriously, and further days for any action to be taken. All the while a clients email is undeliverable.
In some cases these monopolies just ‘accept’ emails and immediately destroy them. From the senders perspective the email went through, the mail server successfully sends an email to its recipient – we see no bouncebacks or errors – and we think everything is peachy. It is not. It is common for providers to ‘blackhole’ these emails and purposely accept them, but never deliver them to the recipients inbox or spam folder.
These are necessary improvements to authenticate your emails and do have a positive effect on deliverability. Because these items are within our control they are often the first thing we check when diagnosing deliverability issues. And, unfortunately, when it comes to the monopoly, they do not guarantee deliverability.
I think it’s a bit of both. These monopolies certainly could do a better job dealing with spam, like using a scalpel instead of a chainsaw, improving their reporting, being more transparent and being more responsive. However that costs money. And there is no pressure to do any of that anyways: Independent or self hosted mail traffic is such a small percentage of email traffic, and it’s made up of thousands of disjointed smaller providers, that they can easily be ignored.
Add to this the fact that these monopolies do benefit from the landscape they have created. I’ve been forced to start recommending the old adage: ‘If you can’t beat them, join them’, and I myself have moved my emails over to Google Workspace and I now pay their monthly fee for the privilege of my emails going into someone’s inbox. Something I should be able to do (by being a good email citizen) anyways.
