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Why are we so willingly ceding one of the few widely used free and open protocols to a handful of $mega-billion providers?

Experience shows that the walls will get taller and the moats will get deeper.

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Because the noise is so loud now that people are basically just coping with the stresses of work life by taking the easy path in the home life.
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Because the protocol is flawed at its foundation - there is no good way to make sure that the person sending you something is a person and sending content you'd want to interact with. If the big providers weren't doing this stuff, we'd whine about the enormous amount of spam.

The solution is allow only communications that are demonstrably not spam and not unwanted.

There have been lots of proposals to this effect but maybe you have to put up two cents in a crypto wallet, which the other person can claim if the mail is unwanted. If someone takes your two cents, you remove them from your lists ASAP. The receiver doesn't benefit meaningfully from the 2c so they are unlikely to claim it. The sender is only damaged if a lot of different people claim the 2 cents. Maybe a few domains are default whitelisted even if they don't put up 2 cents, to protect against entities that are important but would be frequently spite-claimed (IRS, courts, and other similar). If you use a provider that doesn't whitelist, fine, but you're going to miss those emails.

Maybe the top 'spite claim' users are published and it becomes difficult to get people to agree to put up money to talk to you.

This reduces spam to the level of junk mail, which is still not totally trivial but is orders of magnitude more manageable.

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Spam is a super solved problem though and I'd rather have false negative spam than email oligarchy.
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Nearly all the spam I get has an email address from those providers.

Seems they are the disease not the cure

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Mine isn't from those email hosts, but it from google cloud or Azure typically (not AWS for whatever reason). Related, the gmail spam filter is terrible.
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>Related, the gmail spam filter is terrible.

It seems insane that gmail doesnt provide a way to automatically send a mail (eg based on domain, keywords, etc) to spam. I know theres block sender but for example aliexpress uses a different name for every email so that's useless.

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I think you misunderstand the disease.

What this is called is survivorship bias. The question I would ask is how much mail are you not seeing at all because it's dropped at the edge first thing because it's IP block listed?

Next, how much spam are you seeing from them because they and Google are the largest providers on Earth? Kind of like selecting a random person from the population in the US and going "look, it's a white guy". Yea, that's how statistics works.

Lastly, because the are good at blocking spam at the edge, then that's the last bastion of attack for spammers to put their efforts in if they want any return at all.

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> frequently spite-claimed (IRS, courts, and other similar)

These entities communicate via plain old mail, that costs more than 2 cents already.

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Sounds more like using outlook.com is a mistake. I've been running my own mail server for over 20 years and outlook.com is literally the only domain I have had problems with, and this is the only reason that I now send via Scaleway's free transactional email service.

The people working on outlook.com are just talentless amateurs - the rest knows how to do it right. It's a shame it's so widely used.

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I don't disagree, but what are your options when a giant portion of the population uses O365 and outlook.com? How are you going to get them to stop using it, so that legit emails from user-owned servers are not silently rejected?

Most of them wouldn't even care probably...

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I use a sending service. I would prefer not having to, but at least all inbound email goes directly to my server.
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Alt take: Using a Microsoft-hosted email service is a big mistake in 2026...
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That may be so, but you can't control what mail service your recipients use. So whether or not it's a bad idea, it can be your problem. That said I don't agree with OP that self-hosting mail is a bad idea.
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Yes you can.

User signs up, uses @outlook. Your app declines it and explains that they block with no way to remedy, and explain they are a bad vendor.

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Deeply unserious take.
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As unserious as you claim, we had this exact problem.

Emails would be accepted by Outlook.com, but would never deliver. We had SPF/DKIM/DMARC and full reporting. They RBL'ed us with no remedy.

We told the customer to not use outlook.com BECAUSE we told them we could not guarantee any delivery of messages.

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You can take my email server from my cold, dead hands.
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Proudly self-hosting since 2001. My mail server is in my basement. Do not know what you are talking about.
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How often would you be able to detect acceptance-but-non-delivery of your emails to office.com-hosted emails?
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Always? If emails are not answered you'll usually notice unless you're a Spammer
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MS live/hotmail/outlook would silently drop - although not for this DMARC, that gets a straight bounce.
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Why?

At the most you need to use an external service for delivery (usually because you have problems with MS) but you can still run your own server with no difficulties once you do that.

That said, DMARC is required by a lot of people now, so I do not think this particular issue is a problem.

I have been self hosting my my personal email (and for family). Few problems so far other than delivery to MS and I have recently moved a domain I use for work email over.

Oddly enough the MS problems come from hotmail, but not other services. If that is a problem, then pay a bit to have email delivered.

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It's not enough. I have a domain that I had a very long time but it is on an undesirable tld. I got it long before it was problematic. Outlook always puts my mail in the SPAM folder even though I have done everything I could. I even deliver through a trusted provider. Not on any spam list. DMARC, DKIM, SPF all set up. No dice.
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I've never had a problem not having dmarc. DMARC doesn't really mean anything. The security comes from DKIM (or SPF, but that's garbage)
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This is what google and microsoft want the make you think for obvious reasons.

Fortunate for those running their own servers is that they actually still get all the cool emails from people not complying.

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