This is just that last of many cases of MS Outlook acting in an intentional power abusive market distorting way.
I do not know about tutanota and if they are a bad actor in the email space. But I remember them having done funny things like banning the complete German Hetzner IP range because Hetzner didn't want to give them customers information without an curt order (which I guess Hetzner isn't allowed to do either iff the customer(s) in question is a private customer...).
Like consider Google banning all Azure hosted mail providers independent of their reputation and DMARK,DKIM,SPF etc. because MS keeps with the law and doesn't give Google private customer information, it's that ridiculous.
Tuta are a privacy focussed and pretty responsible mail service. They have quite strict sending limits to dissuade bulk mailers and keep the service free for those who need it.
Whatever the cause, I’d be surprised if bad mail is sent in enough volumes to be noticeable to MS
i installed MIAB like 3 years ago. had this exact same problem with outlook at the time. did the same and never have had any more problems.
last year i helped someone install miab and somehow neither gmail nor outlook nor any "major" provider logged them as spam from the get go. i was truly impressed and surprised.
i have heard war stories about people self hosting email and having problems. sure 3-5-10 years ago that might have been the case but not now for the most part.
please give your self hosted email a try again. it will take you less time to set everything up than cooking dinner. try using miab or similar email software.
go cheap, like racknerd or something and save money from vultr/DO.
Just keep in mind that you need working reverse DNS record and not all cheap provides support it. Also cheaper hosting solutions usually have worse IP reputation.
You may have gotten lucky with IP addresses. When your cloud provider gives you an IP address from the pool, it is luck of the draw whether some customer in the past got that IP address on the bad list with some mail providers.
I strongly want what you say to be true, and would also encourage people to self-host email, but I want to make sure people are aware of the pits so they can avoid them or at least not have to learn the hard way.
> But I remember them having done funny things like banning the complete German Hetzner IP range because Hetzner didn't want to give them customers information without an curt order (which I guess Hetzner isn't allowed to do either iff the customer(s) in question is a private customer...).
All companies cover by GDPR (or similar privacy laws) would have this requirement. Can't be handling out information on customers to random companies willynilly.
My private email server gets completly blocked on regular bases. They are blocking the whole ip-range of my provider. You get no response from them whatsoever. You have to fill out a form und wait a couple of days. You can however sign up for a 200$ whitelist... from a different company owned by guess who.
I worked for a company that sent travel deals newsletters everyday. Deliverability to (then) Hotmail was abysmal.
We then got the recommendation of a company (cannot remember their name) that could analyse our IPs and give recommendations. Naturally, the recommendations were the ones that you could find everywhere so they were not useful, but the company did have access to MSFT's score of our IPs, so we could know when we were close to being blacklisted and could take action/ramp down/etc. How did they have access to those internal IP scores? I don't know, but it seems totally fishy :).
For sure we spent 5k+ USD yearly in this service (which is a huge amount of money in a 3rd. world country), and "somehow" after paying our deliverability did improve, despite doing the same things as before, as the recommendations were not ingenious.
So yeah, e-mail deliverability is a mafia, for sure.
Was it "Return Path"? If so, yes, they are just a racket. They ostensibly provide consulting services on this stuff, but in reality they have a (exclusive?) deal with Microsoft to change scores and allowlist, so you just pay them and they get your email through. Pricing is based on volume of email, I think we were paying $10k/yr for our emails to get to Microsoft hosted addresses.
How did they have access to those internal IP scores?
When I was doing DMARC stuff professionally, plenty of big names were willing to send DMARC reports our way. Microsoft was the only company to give us full text.
Even if you get them to create an exception for your IP, personal experience shows that this lasts for 2 months tops, then you're blocked again. I gave up, getting my personal mail server to communicate with Outlook is not worth it.
I would assume any provider that allows you to send email also allows a great deal of spam, so this might not be unwarranted. My provider is also frequently blacklisted, I just don't use it to send mail anymore.
What the original poster describes is anti-competitive behavior, for this reason alone the idea of blocking the whole IP range of a competing email service provider is very bad. Personally, I wouldn't use an email provider that blocks spam server-side without an option to turn this off because these filters often block legitimate mails and can cause all kinds of annoying problems.
Maybe Tutanota.com has a lot of outlook users reporting your marketing emails as spam. I generally do this if the unsubscribe route is too painful, or even if it takes too long to load.
I'm very surprised to see you are being downvoted, I was convinced everybody is doing that. Spam is spam, period. Asking me go click on a link that leads somewhere is just a waste of my time - and there are still a few culprits out there who instead of unsubscribing me straight away demand that I log in to "manage my notification preferences"!
It is good practise. You should never use the unsubscribe function as it tells sender the account receives is actually in use and valid. Thus they will sell your email to even more spammers.
You absolutely should use the unsubscribe link if it is solicited mail. It is very rude to ask for mail then harm the senders reputation because you don't want to unsubscribe.
But if the mail is unsolicited or the unsubscribe link doesn't work then absolutely yes, mash that spam button.
Which is not ideal, and might explain why Gmail routinely puts perfectly legit correspondence in my spam folder - again and again.
I realize this might well be a problem stemming from email clients having but one option to flag emails: spam. Ideally one should have more options - as it is scamming, spoofing and innocuous unsolicited marketing (and slow loading messages it seems) are all put in the same basket.
> as it is scamming, spoofing and innocuous unsolicited marketing
Those are all spam. Especially unsolicited marketing. Fuck everyone who sends that, and I hope they get banned from whatever provider they use and it kills their company. I always report all of those even with an unsubscribe link, as it’s not as if I can trust them not to use "unsubscribe" as a "send more spam" signal, they’ve already proven themselves untrustworthy by not using double-opt-in.
Though with some providers even "mark as spam" seems to be able to leak your email as they send reports which contain the message-id. Good in our case as we don’t want to spam anyone and can then blacklist the address, but bad in case you report evil spammers.
I wouldn't mind these providers being aggressive with spam filtering IF they would just bounce the messages so i know WHY. I've had so many cases where an 'email wasn't sent' by our systems and then the logs show it was accepted by outlook.com for delivery, but never even showed up in the spam folder (apparently, if customers are to be trusted).
Many providers seems to do this, respond everything ok and then drop the message silently..
Been there, done that. This is be a nightmare, mainly for back scatter from spam runs.
You can’t control who sends email that looks like it’s from you. If your email were bounced because of a spf or dkim failure, you could get an unlimited number of emails.
This sort of email oligopoly/mafia problem can only really be solved with legislation. There needs to be push from within the EU to legislate this hopeless situation.
How is legislation the only answer? Users can just stop using Outlookif they care that MS is blocking providers. If users don't care and stay on Outlook, why bother legislating it?
First: Most users don't care. From their perspective, its' always the senders fault/problem. And the burden is always on the sender to prove it was actually outlook that dropped the email etc.
Second: corporate & institutional users have no choice
Putting on my "postmaster at shared hosting company" hat:
Used to be. Gmail is done lot of work to be worse than Outlook. At least MS idiosyncraties are somewhat known and stable. I would say that most customer complaints are related to gmail.
FWIW that has not been my experience with hosting my own personal mail. The only deliverability issue I had with Gmail was with a newly registered domain and even then they did at least deliver the mails to the spam folder (and soon enough directly to the inbox) which is much more than Microsoft does.
I have a small sample size but for my SaaS which primarily sends email GMail marked as spam for a while but then gained domain trust and it hasn't been a notable issue. Outlook has my IP on a blacklist and doesn't even consider anything else. I need to send via relays to get an IP that is trusted enough for Outlook to even consider my message (which is signed with DKIM + SPF with a DMARC reject policy)
That’s one of the reasons I stopped working on hosted mail. It has not turned to anything better with big companies putting their hands over it. It’s more controlled now but the same crap as before, just as dangerous and a bit more expensive.
Currently working on a system with as much control as possible but piggybacking existing providers' transports.
Love mailcow I moved off exchange to mailcow. I’ve used email for I guess 30 years now and every year it’s less reliable. My kids do not use email at all , they are on the internet with out actually using email. Sure they have a google account for YouTube but their services tend to allow a sign up with out an email. I can see a future where it continues to be less of a thing and turn into something held on by older people.
I have an outlook.com account, too and having a look at the Spam-folder is as important as looking at the Inbox. Too many important mails get missing with outlook
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I do not know about tutanota and if they are a bad actor in the email space. But I remember them having done funny things like banning the complete German Hetzner IP range because Hetzner didn't want to give them customers information without an curt order (which I guess Hetzner isn't allowed to do either iff the customer(s) in question is a private customer...).
Like consider Google banning all Azure hosted mail providers independent of their reputation and DMARK,DKIM,SPF etc. because MS keeps with the law and doesn't give Google private customer information, it's that ridiculous.
Whatever the cause, I’d be surprised if bad mail is sent in enough volumes to be noticeable to MS
last year i helped someone install miab and somehow neither gmail nor outlook nor any "major" provider logged them as spam from the get go. i was truly impressed and surprised.
i have heard war stories about people self hosting email and having problems. sure 3-5-10 years ago that might have been the case but not now for the most part.
please give your self hosted email a try again. it will take you less time to set everything up than cooking dinner. try using miab or similar email software.
go cheap, like racknerd or something and save money from vultr/DO.
I strongly want what you say to be true, and would also encourage people to self-host email, but I want to make sure people are aware of the pits so they can avoid them or at least not have to learn the hard way.
All companies cover by GDPR (or similar privacy laws) would have this requirement. Can't be handling out information on customers to random companies willynilly.
We then got the recommendation of a company (cannot remember their name) that could analyse our IPs and give recommendations. Naturally, the recommendations were the ones that you could find everywhere so they were not useful, but the company did have access to MSFT's score of our IPs, so we could know when we were close to being blacklisted and could take action/ramp down/etc. How did they have access to those internal IP scores? I don't know, but it seems totally fishy :).
For sure we spent 5k+ USD yearly in this service (which is a huge amount of money in a 3rd. world country), and "somehow" after paying our deliverability did improve, despite doing the same things as before, as the recommendations were not ingenious.
So yeah, e-mail deliverability is a mafia, for sure.
That's not necessarily unreasonable, depending on which provider that is.
Sites like Wikipedia also block entire ranges to prevent spam. Unfortunately sometimes people do get caught up in that (as I did last year).
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Those links are often spammer controlled and just confirm your email address as valid.
But if the mail is unsolicited or the unsubscribe link doesn't work then absolutely yes, mash that spam button.
Which is not ideal, and might explain why Gmail routinely puts perfectly legit correspondence in my spam folder - again and again.
I realize this might well be a problem stemming from email clients having but one option to flag emails: spam. Ideally one should have more options - as it is scamming, spoofing and innocuous unsolicited marketing (and slow loading messages it seems) are all put in the same basket.
Those are all spam. Especially unsolicited marketing. Fuck everyone who sends that, and I hope they get banned from whatever provider they use and it kills their company. I always report all of those even with an unsubscribe link, as it’s not as if I can trust them not to use "unsubscribe" as a "send more spam" signal, they’ve already proven themselves untrustworthy by not using double-opt-in.
Though with some providers even "mark as spam" seems to be able to leak your email as they send reports which contain the message-id. Good in our case as we don’t want to spam anyone and can then blacklist the address, but bad in case you report evil spammers.
it is all spam; none of us want to see any of it, why do we need more fine grained control?
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Many providers seems to do this, respond everything ok and then drop the message silently..
It's better for governments to have just a few big email providers, so authorities have easier life if they need to snoop on someone.
You can’t control who sends email that looks like it’s from you. If your email were bounced because of a spf or dkim failure, you could get an unlimited number of emails.
Second: corporate & institutional users have no choice
Even a spotlessly configured MTA will not guarantee you anything.
That’s one of the reasons I stopped working on hosted mail. It has not turned to anything better with big companies putting their hands over it. It’s more controlled now but the same crap as before, just as dangerous and a bit more expensive.
Currently working on a system with as much control as possible but piggybacking existing providers' transports.
Nice to see you like(d) it.
Yes, sadly it gets worse, perhaps not even in bad faith but by trying to fix it.