[plug] TPG group no longer providing email

[Onno Benschop]

Several of my clients required the ability to send email to their
customers. These emails were for things like electronic tickets, contract
updates, registration emails, deadline notifications and other
transactional emails. A client would give explicit consent to receive such
emails.

Initially we used our own email servers, then we migrated to Google Mail,
then we migrated to rotating Google Mail accounts, then we migrated to
MailChimp, then we migrated to Campaign Monitor.

Each of these migrations was triggered by the bulk blocking of their
legitimate email streams. The larger an organisation, like the WA Education
Department, iiNet, or any number of "smaller" ISPs, the more likely that
these emails were blocked by SPAM detection systems.

No amount of discussion with the IT teams in those organisations would
restore access, iiNet going so far as to direct us to IronPort (their -
then, not sure if it's still the same - SPAM blocking tool), who,
unsurprisingly would direct us straight back to iiNet.

The outcome is that email and SPAM detection is severely broken, and the
proliferation of machine generated "human-like" text is only going to make
this worse.

The block list systems that exist today are completely overwhelmed by email
abuse, so small email providers have little or no chance or insight into
why or even if their email is blocked.

Right now I'm using Google Workspace email to send this. Since first
starting in around 2009, this has proven to be the most reliable way of
getting email to the correct destination, but it doesn't support bulk
email, so it's not useful for transactional system emails, but for
one-on-one communication I've yet to find anything better.

That's not for the want of trying or looking either.

I think we need to solve a more fundamental problem before this is ever
even attempted to be fixed and that is "authentication". Right now we have
several DNS based "solutions", but there is no mechanism to penalise SPAM
email, since starting an "authentic" domain is so cheap as to be invisible
as a barrier to entry. That's not to say that I think a solution is to make
the internet inaccessible, I just think that what we're doing today was
fine in the 1970's, but it's not realistic today.

I think that rather than looking for an email solution, it would be more
beneficial to use groups like PLUG to discuss how we might solve this type
of problem, which you might have noticed has spread into phone and SMS
spam, neither of which are being addressed in any meaningful way either.

o

On Mon, 7 Aug 2023 at 09:54, Chris McCormick <chris at mccormick.cx> wrote:

> Hi Robin,
>
>
> On 7/8/23 9:50 am, Robin Perkins wrote:
> > when he signed up for anything - e.g. boost juice he could give them a
> unique email address to use e.g. boost at mydomain.com that redirected to
> his main account - that way when he got spam form that email account - he
> knew exactly who sold/leaked and could block.
> >
> > Would be nice if someone offered this as a low maintenance service? Does
> anybody do anything like this?
>
> With most email providers they support adding a plus sign ("+") after
> the username and then an arbitrary string, and it will go to the same
> mailbox. So for example he could use: username+boost at domain.com and then
> filter for that specific address in his username at domain.com email box. I
> know that Gmail addresses support this and many other providers do too.
> It's also something you can enable in Postfix mail server with
> "recipient_delimiter = +" in your config.
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Chris.
>
> --
> https://mccormick.cx/
> _______________________________________________
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> http://lists.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug
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>


-- 
Onno Benschop

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