oroginal article : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30222736
I fought the battle to keep my SMTP server IP off blacklists, and lost.You can do everything possible, have a perfectly clean IP, have a good amount of outbound email traffic, only send transactional email, etc. Still, there will be edge cases where email does not go through. AT&T email servers would constantly blacklist me and not respond to requests to remove me, gmail/yahoo/outlook would silently put emails in the spam folder, and companies using email firewall products would blacklist me, with an IT Dept too inept to fix it.The solution was to pay a small fee and proxy all outbound email through a transactional SMTP sender, like Postmark or Mailgun. It’s easy to do, with one line of code in Postfix. You can be selective, and only proxy emails sent to certain troublesome domains. If you try an email provider and it’s not working out, it’s one line of code to change to another provider.This allows me to still manage nearly all aspects of hosting my email server and control my email data, while not dealing with deliverability issues. I use Postmark and I have not dealt with a deliverability issue in two years. |
| noduerme on Feb 5, 2022 | parent | next [–] I manage an outbound mail server for a mid-sized company. I happen to also use it for my own personal mail.We have had on and off deliverability issues for years (AT&T and Comcast being the worst).As head of IT it fell to me to post whitelisting requests and try to get mail delivering again. I decided after awhile that this really isn’t my job, and made a suggestion to the CEO which he took to heart:There is another solution besides changing IPs, using a paid sender, or filling out whitelist requests into the void: Get your legal department involved. We have repeatedly been taken off various public and private blacklists by having lawyers do their job. Once we went this path, it was like magic. Same day responses from those companies, and we haven’t been on any blacklists for a couple of years. |
| jasode on Feb 5, 2022 | root | parent | next [–] >Get your legal department involved. We have repeatedly been taken off various public and private blacklists by having lawyers do their job. What’s the particular law that makes those curators of blacklists pay attention to your company’s lawyers? Do you have example text of those legal requests? |
| ThrustVectoring on Feb 6, 2022 | root | parent | next [–] It’s not a law, it’s who handles the request. There’s two types of employees in any company with very different KPIs. The first has their performance measured in number of tickets closed. The second has their performance measured in number of incidents allowed. Support tickets get handled by the first type of employee, anything that’s plausibly a legal threat gets handled by the second.The easiest way to close a ticket is a quick wontfix. The easiest way to avoid a possible six-figure minimum legal issue is to spend 15 minutes figuring out what they want and giving it to them. The law is almost entirely irrelevant; the cost-benefit analysis doesn’t change enough when comparing a frivolous vs meritorious lawsuit. |
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