On Wed, Sep 02, 2020 at 07:09:50AM +0200, Thierry de Coulon wrote:

Not always that easy. I have a domain, but my "private" mail often gets considered as spam (mostly from monopolies like Google or Microsoft).

That word, "monopoly", I don't think it means what you think it means.

https://www.litmus.com/blog/infographic-the-2019-email-client-market-share/

No email provider has even close to a monopoly. Gmail has just over a quarter; If you combine Apple's desktop and mobile, they have almost 45% market share; and Microsoft has barely over 12% market share.

It's not 1998 any more, Microsoft is not the Big Bad that they used to be, and Apple is not the plucky underdog. I find it ironic and a bit disturbing that you don't mention the company that comes closest to controlling half of all email share, Apple, but do kick the dead horse of Microsoft's non-existent email monopoly.

(One might make a case for MS still having a near monopoly on the desktop OS, but that is less and less relevant today as more and more computing is done outside of the desktop.)

I run an annoucement-only non-commercial mailing list that sends out a fanzine email to about 800 addresses once a month, and in my experience, the Big Bad in email is Yahoo and its partners Verizon and AOL. They are *incredibly* difficult to get email to if you are sending from a home server, even if you use an ISP as intermediary.

Hotmail is a distant second: they tend to put temporary blocks on IP address ranges due to abuse from any one address in the range, so can stop accepting mail from an entire ISP for days at a time.

(Ironically, I've never had that same bounce from an outlook.com address, only hotmail.com. I guess they're still running on different systems with different tactics for dealing with spam.)

But I've never had problems with delivery to Gmail, not in my private mail or in my mailing list.

In my experience, to maximise your chances of being able to get email successfully delivered:

* A static IP address for your domain is better than a dynamic IP address.

* Set outgoing mail to go via your ISP's outgoing mail server, not directly from your machine. In postfix, that's "relayhost = <server>".

* If you don't have an SPF record for your domain, get one immediately, otherwise using your ISP could hurt more than it helps.

* If you can work out how to set up DKIM, do so. (I haven't done so yet, so this is more theoretical than my personal experience.)

* Throttle your sending! Nobody publishes the rate that will trigger their "this is spam" filter, so set it as low as you can possibly bear. (This obviously doesn't apply to mails you are writing and sending by hand, unless you queue them up and send out 100 at once.)

* Regularly clean out your receivers and remove addresses that bounce.

* Don't spam!!! (Goes without saying really :-)

And take a deep breath, because no matter what you do, you are at the mercy of:

- spammers that ruin the reputation of entire IP ranges;

- techies who bloke entire IP ranges;

- people who get their computers infected with malware;

- people who buy internet-enabled crap that invariably will become infected with malware;

- well-meaning but clueless management bots at Yahoo and other mail suppliers;

- real-time blacklists that have a zero-tolerance towards even the faintest hint of spam and will throw you on the list for even the tiniest offense, including sending from the wrong IP address;

- ISPs that don't understand their own mail system (I once had to explain to my ISP's **second level support** that their outgoing mail servers are not the same as the server they use for incoming mail);

- dumb keyword filters;

- not-so-dumb filters that learn spam as they go, epecially when people prefer to err on the side of throwing away legitimate mail rather than getting a single spam;

- and clueless and/or malicious end-users who click "This is spam" rather than take a minute to unsubscribe from mailing lists they no longer care about.

If Outlook is throwing out your mail, try setting up an SPF record.

On Wed, Sep 02, 2020 at 05:32:00PM -0700, Mike Bird wrote:

On Wed September 2 2020 16:58:18 Steven D'Aprano wrote:

...

That word, "monopoly", I don't think it means what you think it means.

https://www.litmus.com/blog/infographic-the-2019-email-client-market-share/

While agreeing with your definition of monopoly I was initially at a loss to explain how Apple has 27.6+8.5+7.5=43.6% email client market share with only 13% of the smartphone market and 9.4% of the desktop market.

Litmus measures emails actually received and read, not devices sold.

Global marketshare for iphones is probably around 25%, based on web analytics:

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide

which measures internet usage, not unique visitors or sales. That's not far from the Litmus data that suggests 28% of email readers are on iphones.

Based on current sales, iphones are probably around 17% or so. But why are you referencing devices sold rather than emails sent when we're talking about email?

There are hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of mostly low-cost Android devices used by people who have never sent or received an email in their life. Since we're talking about email providers, do you think those Androids are relevent?

Litmus' methodology is not unbiased, it's probably heavily skewed to the sort of marketing bot that would use Litmus' services. But unless we had an all-powerful world government with the power to force everyone to be tracked in every email they send and receive, any sample or survey of email is going to have some biases.

And different methodologies will measure different things, with different biases.

Then I see that Litmus is analyzing which clients opened their spyware emails rather than a scientific survey of the industry.

What's your definition of "a scientific survey"?

How would you do such a scientific survey?

In any case, we're quibbling over relatively minor points here. None of the tech giants Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo etc control the industry or have a monopoly. But they do have an unhealthy influence due to their enormous sizes and ubiquity.

- Apple spends more efforts trying to protect their users' privacy than anyone else, even to the point of defying the FBI and US Government, but they engage in predatory practices against independent developers and run sweat shops where conditions are so bad the factories install anti-suicide netting to stop the workers jumping to their deaths.

- Google spends more efforts trying to break people's privacy than anyone else, with the possible exception of Facebook, but balances that with at least some checks and balances.

- And Facebook is probably the closest thing to unalloyed evil in the tech world today, unless you count Amazon as a tech company.

(I hear that Amazon just bought out Hell and sacked the Devil for being too soft.)

On Thursday 03 September 2020 01.58:18 Steven D'Aprano wrote:

I find it ironic and a bit disturbing that you don't mention the company that comes closest to controlling half of all email share, Apple, but do kick the dead horse of Microsoft's non-existent email monopoly.

I wrote "like...". I did not try to list them all. I was never forced to communicate with an Apple mail server (or if so did not notice it). I am forced to use an office.365 server, and 90% of the people I work with use Microsoft Office and not some Apple Office (although the students use Pages on their iPads).

(One might make a case for MS still having a near monopoly on the desktop OS, but that is less and less relevant today as more and more computing is done outside of the desktop.)

I doubt that many mail servers are run form mobile devices, and obviously not all mail servers are Linux based.

As to mail clients, I am certainly old fashioned, but my life is on the desktop. Laptops and even more phones are used only when unavoidable. And I own no Tablet and never could find a use for it.

So take my writing as a personnal opinion rather than some case study :)

Thierry

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