Totally OT comment: Re: Somewhat OT: Mail Relay Services

[Matthew Seaman]

Having worked for an e-mail service provider in the past, I can state 
that it isn't GMail, Outlook or any of the other big cloud providers 
intentionally killing off personal e-mail servers.  Well, other than by 
competition: providing an easy-to-use mail service with little 
administrative burden.

It's the continuing arms race between the Spam senders and the Spam 
filtering.  Reputation scoring based on sender IP is one of the best 
tools in the box for filtering spam, but the spammers are continually 
developing ways to avoid it by distributing their output over whole 
network ranges, and by setting up throw-away spam sources on  any and 
all hosting services they can blag their way into.  That's why your VPC 
hosting your e-mail server will quite likely get shot down as collateral 
damage.

The best way to avoid this is to use an address range that you can be 
confident no one will be able to set up a spam source on.  So, a 
dedicated e-mail relaying service would qualify.  Or, if you can swing 
it, get yourself a fixed IP range and run an e-mail system out of your 
own premises. (Which is what I do.)

	Cheers,

	Matthew

On 28/02/2021 18:29, Valeri Galtsev wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Feb 28, 2021, at 12:01 PM, Tim Daneliuk <tundra at tundraware.com> wrote:
>>
>> For many years, I've run a mail system built on FreeBSD for my own small business.
>> It's been as flawless as any mail server ever can be, requiring only periodic
>> maintenance and updates.
>>
>> The primary server runs in a 3rd party cloud environment.  We are starting to
>> see parts of their network blacklisted by the various UCE blackholing services.
>> Unfortunately, they don't just blackhole a single IP, but an entire subnet at
>> a time, which catches us in the mix.
>>
>> The big mail hubs like outlook.com no longer have a mechanism for removing the block
>> for a single ip and kick you back to your ISP or hosting provider for resolution.
> 
> Totally OT comment:
> 
> For quite some time already I have a feeling that big boys - gmail/google; microsoft/outlook/office365/hotmail; yahoo… - effectively jacked “small time” sysadmins out of providing email service. Tim’s description shows one mechanism of it.
> 
> Valeri
> 
>> So ... we are contemplating using a smart host to do all our outbound email for us
>> via relays from our own mail servers.  Presumably, such a smart host would be better
>> equipped to deal with bad blacklisting and delivery issues.
>>
>> So ... does anyone have experience or recommendations as to who would be a good
>> provider for a low volume, small business mail relay?
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