True. But they are not calling for a completely open system. I like this proposal from the author.

> Change blacklisting protocols so they are not permanent and use an exponential cooldown penalty. After spam is detected from an IP, it should be banned for, say, ten minutes. Then, a day. A week. A month, and so on. This discourages spammers from reusing IPs after the ban is lifted and will allow the IP pool to be cleaned over time by legitimate owners.

> There should be a recourse for legitimate servers. I'm not asking for a blank check. I don't mind doing some paperwork or paying a fee to prove I'm legit. Spammers will not do that, and if they do, they will get blacklisted anyways after sending more spam.

But Big Tech will not do that because they will gain more from eliminating the competition.

Spam has been a thing forever. Literally forever. Yet people have been dealing with spam far better than the big boys, and doing so for decades.

Want to talk about anti-competitive? Gmail will accept mails, provide a 250 SMTP response, then drop the email internally.

That's not right. At all. You can reject the email easily during SMTP exchange, and people have been doing that literally for 20+ years.

No valid excuse here. None. Zero.

And if your 250 OK accept then drop the message, and provide no way to notify, or discuss, or find out why, you make it impossible for a remote admin to fix the problem.

This is 100% on purpose. Yahoo, outlook/hotmail, gmail, collude to resolve issues like this, while blocking all others to resolve issues their own purposefully broken policies cause.

If you see Alphabet with a policy, or action, you can be 100% sure it is aligned to increase market dominance.

Incorrect.

The problem is your outbound mail server does not have a good reputation. You also probably do not have a large enough swath of IP space to prevent bad neighbors from becoming your problem. Lots of tricks to getting your email sent reliably to most mail servers. What got me out of hosting mail was trying to send an email to a potential lead I met at a local meetup. His email was hosted at some very small and relatively unknown university, but my email was flat out rejected. Something about that moment just clicked that it's not worth my time to chase down the admins and resolve the problem. I'll just start shunting my email through O365. I still selfhost everything else I can, but I offload mail management to a provider

As a counterpoint, I host a couple of domains with Dreamhost and have had no such issues. They've been serving the email for my main domain for 15 years and AFAIK I've never had any of those emails go directly to spam within Gmail or elsewhere. I do periodic smoke testing by sending test emails to different place, plus I have a reasonable number of external users making use of the domains for email as well. FWIW I moved all my DNS records to Cloudflare, but that was only in last couple of years.

I can pick any ISP today, including Dreamhost, and have clean email reputation and sending ability with FAANG and Microsoft in less than 30 days.

A normal company could engage in these practices, but it is settled law that a monopolist may not. A monopolist may not use their monopoly in one are to supress activities in another area.

You can't put these big tech monopolists into the same bucket as normal companies. They have way too much power, and even when they do not intend to smash things, they end up smashing things.

I wonder if we can’t build a far simpler postoffice app on http (self hosted domain space) and have a whitelisted encrypted exchange.

Sure there is.. unless you mean no recourse in this environment. The natural recourse would be to force Google to divest GMail from it's core business.

GDPR worked.

Agreed.