People here are speaking about how gmail will "effectively spambox your mails by default". That's not been my experience (from setting up multiple small customers). Anyway, at least I've never heard of gmail just eating your e-mails. They either get rejected or accepted and put somewhere (maybe the spam folder, but at least somewhere).
Office365 / hosted Exchange / Outlook Protection or whatever is it called these days... they should be routed to /dev/null by everyone.
They just won't track your reputation unless you send them more than 100 mails per day. Does this sound bad? There's more: if they don't have reputation info from you (because they refuse to track it due to the low volume), your mails will go to spam inboxes even when their filters indicate that the message is not spam.
And there's more! Don't dare to ever get a bad reputation (i.e.: a user managing to get hacked and their account used to send a couple hundred spam e-mails before triggering your countermeasures). If this happens you are 100% fucked. Now they will DROP your e-mails. Hear, hear: their servers will accept your mails and just DELETE them. No spam folder, nothing.
You will try every possible thing: set up everything for their feedback loop, sign up in their "Smart Network Data Services" to track your reputation (it will be empty except for that day)... and finally contacting them at their sender support.
Do you want to know what they will reply? That you should be patient and let your reputation build up over time. What a joke! How on earth can your reputation improve when users cannot mark your mails as "not spam" because they (outlook, not the users) are simply DELETING them without a trace?
Oh, there's a way out of all this though: obtain a "Return Path Certification" [1]. That is, pay them an absurd amount of money and your mails are guaranteed to get to the users' inbox unless you are clearly spamming (all of the above assumed you are NOT).
Up to this final point you could think they just do their best and all that I've explained is collateral damage. That last "pay and we let you off the hook" is what clearly signals to me that this is an elaborate scheme to get small players to either pay them anyway or just give up and use a big-provider service.
> People here are speaking about how gmail will "effectively spambox your mails by default". That's not been my experience
It is mine. I used to have to take a proactive approach to email - send an email, and if I don't hear back in a timely manner, I check their MX records. If it's Google, I'd contact them out of band - yep... spamholed.
These days, if it's important I'll contact out of band. If not, meh... I'm not going to bother just because of Google Knows Best. I'm over pandering to Google.
> a user managing to get hacked and their account used to send a couple hundred spam e-mails
For this reason one of the necessities of survival as an email sender is to classify your own outbound messages, to see if recipients might think they are spammy. If they just look spammy but you still want to send them, you need sacrificial IP addresses on separate netblocks that are dedicated to spam, so the reputation of your main IPs isn't polluted.
If there's any possibility that any of your users could get their account hijacked, or there could be malware on any device permitted to send messages, you need outbound classification.
Antitrust, too. Making a market impossible to enter for new entrants is a blatant abuse of market power, and EU antitrust law would probably care about it.
I run VoIP PBXes and they occasionally need to send an email, usually for voicemail to email but occasionally for other alerts.
By default they just send straight to the internet, sending from pbx@pbx.domain.name, forward and reverse DNS mapping back to their own addresses, etc. but no other setup.
This works perfectly fine with Gmail and Gsuite accounts, but Office 365 occasionally decides it hates one of our servers. Even if the client has the sending address whitelisted, it still just gets hard blocked for no apparent reason.
Gmail, I can fire up a telnet session right now and send myself an email from my home IP address just typing raw SMTP commands in to a console. It's going to work, and unless I'm spoofing a real email address it's not even going to end up in spam.
> Oh, there's a way out of all this though: obtain a "Return Path Certification" [1]. That is, pay them an absurd amount of money and your mails are guaranteed to get to the users' inbox unless you are clearly spamming (all of the above assumed you are NOT).
Bonus: They straight up declined my business because it was too marketing-y for them.
What was too marketing for them? A 100% opt-in list that reminded customers when a product was in stock. Fully made in-house, with captcha, privacy policies, opt-out, and with the user typing their email and name, the complete works for a one-time reminder email.
People here are speaking about how gmail will "effectively spambox your mails by default". That's not been my experience (from setting up multiple small customers). Anyway, at least I've never heard of gmail just eating your e-mails. They either get rejected or accepted and put somewhere (maybe the spam folder, but at least somewhere).
Office365 / hosted Exchange / Outlook Protection or whatever is it called these days... they should be routed to /dev/null by everyone.
They just won't track your reputation unless you send them more than 100 mails per day. Does this sound bad? There's more: if they don't have reputation info from you (because they refuse to track it due to the low volume), your mails will go to spam inboxes even when their filters indicate that the message is not spam.
And there's more! Don't dare to ever get a bad reputation (i.e.: a user managing to get hacked and their account used to send a couple hundred spam e-mails before triggering your countermeasures). If this happens you are 100% fucked. Now they will DROP your e-mails. Hear, hear: their servers will accept your mails and just DELETE them. No spam folder, nothing.
You will try every possible thing: set up everything for their feedback loop, sign up in their "Smart Network Data Services" to track your reputation (it will be empty except for that day)... and finally contacting them at their sender support.
Do you want to know what they will reply? That you should be patient and let your reputation build up over time. What a joke! How on earth can your reputation improve when users cannot mark your mails as "not spam" because they (outlook, not the users) are simply DELETING them without a trace?
Oh, there's a way out of all this though: obtain a "Return Path Certification" [1]. That is, pay them an absurd amount of money and your mails are guaranteed to get to the users' inbox unless you are clearly spamming (all of the above assumed you are NOT).
Up to this final point you could think they just do their best and all that I've explained is collateral damage. That last "pay and we let you off the hook" is what clearly signals to me that this is an elaborate scheme to get small players to either pay them anyway or just give up and use a big-provider service.
[1] https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/pm/services...