On 29 Jun 2020, at 14:11, Scott Mutter via mailop wrote:
Microsoft has not provided any evidence that anything bad has ever
come
from this IP address. (Which the pros/cons of disclosing this have
already
been discussed)
I don't think that in the current state of affairs, they *have* to
provide you with such *evidence*. I would certainly tell anyone affected
by the firewall rules I deploy to pound sand if they come demanding
evidence. "My system, my rules".
It should be clear to us that the current system works well for
Microsoft clients: The advertisers probably prefer other advertisement
to not make it to the inbox. And most end users can't be bothered
– or would not even know how – to request MS to get involved with
this. I posit that for those that this gets inconvenient, they will
simply ask the corresponding sender to use their gmail account, or
subscribe again. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Not trying to defend them – and I'm 100& pro venting – but having
been on the other end as well as many others here, they have their
reasons for being so non-transparent. Some commercial, others not so
much.
Now is the IP blocked because of a larger class-C, class-B, or some
subnet
block? That'd be nice to know. But even if it is, if you're not
seeing
any activity from the specific IP address I'm referring to, why can't
you
just whitelist that IP from the subnet block?
When my $dayjob involved doing this in exchange for money, fame and
celebrity I went the transparent route. Each and every IP address we
blocked included a reason and links to evidence emails that invariably
were sent by our own users. From time to time we discovered poor reports
that lead to unwarranted blocks – those were resolved quickly. Would
this scale? Not in that shape, for sure. For a few million email
accounts we held it quite well with a couple people. I can't even
imagine how much people would it take to scale that to MS gargantuan
size.
But then many years have passed, and better tools exist today.
Rather than the rant I had before, I'll just say that current MS
technology in email receiving is not at the forefront – and hasn't
been for a long time. The situation we're all living through is a
consequence of the economics at play.
It's impossible to get a hold of anyone using Microsoft website
contact
form links that knows a lick about how their own mail servers work.
If you
tell them that you're IP is blocked they try to figure out why you
can't
access http://outlook.com
In their defense, I'm sure their numbers back them. 99.99% of the people
opening tickets are likely unable to access http://outlook.com :-)
The thing is, we should not have to resort to interacting with their
support channels so frequently. This unfortunately won't change as long
as the layer of suspense and mystery is not lifted from the art of
emailing Microsoft.
All the while, our users see us as being the bad guys. They don't
believe
that Microsoft/Hotmail/Outlook can be a bad guy because they're too
big. I
would be half a good mind to tell our users to sign up for this
Mailops
mailing list, just so they can read all of the horror stories that
happen
with Microsoft/Hotmail/Outlook mail server blocks.
The stories would be impossible to find because of all the questions
about how to access http://outlook.com.
Best regards
-lem
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