Encrypted email service files DMA complaint claiming it vanished from Google Search Tutao, known for the encrypted email service Tuta Mail, has filed a Digital Markets Act (DMA) complaint to the EU over an alleged de-ranking in Google Search. Google Search rankings are all too familiar to search engine optimization (SEO) specialists charged with ensuring web pages rise to the top of search results. In the …
You misinterpreted my comment. Most sites will simply refuse to send you a confirmation email if you sign up with anything but gmail, as an anti-spam measure. I've encountered quite a few of these sites over the years.
This is why I gave up on using anything else. Many sites have simply decided that if you're not using gmail then you're probably a bot. It's sad.
One possibility is that their experience differs from yours. I've described my own history with self-running a mail server in another comment, which involved trying to get off some spam lists that I was on before turning the server on for the first time merely because of my IP address. The part I didn't mention was that, before I did that, I had to get a new hosting provider for the mail server because the company that I used to host other things was on a lot more spam lists. The ability to quickly set up a new rented server was great for me when I wanted to host something, but it was also useful for spammers. I didn't even bother setting one up there because I checked on it, but if I had, I think it would have been rejected by a lot of sites using expansive blocklists.
Maybe the person commented as they did because they had such a mail server, either one of their own or run by a company that were bad at their job. They may be overgeneralizing how common it is, but I'm inclined to think that they actually did encounter the problems they're describing rather than making it up. Even now where I have email through my own domain, though unfortunately not on self-hosted instances, I have encountered at least one service that rejected the address. I was registering for a promotion, and perhaps they were afraid that my domain was going to try to register a lot of times, although they had no problem with Gmail accounts and setting up a bunch of those is frequently managed by spammers. Either way, they did not accept it. This has only happened the once, but some sites are that aggressive.
But that's not what was implied above, is it. What was implied was that anything other than gmail or outlook domains were routinely rejected by websites across the board, which is patently not the experience of the vast majority of users. It may have been the personal experience of the writer, but is absolutely not the generic experience. IOW, a bullshit and utterly misrepresentative assertion, which should never have been posted, except by someone who doesn't give a shit about the impact of their words on other people, and/ or who is actively attempting to mislead.
My assumption still involves them being wrong, but assuming that the problems they encountered were due to their domain being blocked rather than their server being blocked. Either that or they actually do encounter sites similar to the one I described a lot more frequently than we do. After all, I can't say that most sites accept my domain, just that most sites I've used have accepted it. That's a rather small subset. Either way, I'm not sure that they were intending to mislead rather than simply being incorrect.
Whether or not they 'intended' to mislead, i.e. lied, the problem is their assertion was a crass and untrue generalisation. Exactly the kind of garbage that makes so many discussion threads a toxic wasteland.
On one level it's utterly trivial - pub trash-talk - but on another level, wilfully inflicting that kind of trash on people who have the experience and understanding to know exactly what rubbish it is, or who are likely to be misled because they don't have that experience or understanding, is actually insulting and genuinely destructive of good and enjoyable debate and communication. We should call it out for what it is.
Your ISP could be blacklisting the server that is sending you the confirmation email. If it gets through with a gmail or lookout address then that says a lot about their security...
AC, please stop talking bollocks. The El Reg commentards have been there, done that and got a whole wardrobe of 'T-shirts' when it comes to anything IT related.
I ran into a related issue recently, when a Kickstarter campaign I’d backed (ZX Spectrum Next) was sending out emails to backers to verify their accounts on the support forum, and several of us on Gmail just weren’t receiving them. It turned out in the end that the Next forums domain didn’t have a valid DMARC record and so their mails were being rejected by Gmail.
I had issues with 1 company that was using a mail protection provider that guarantees that you don't get a virus or something like that
Their approaches if any of the 30 spam lists have detected spam or a virus being sent from a mail server (not from a mail account) they block the smtp server (in my case 1 if the 6 that the shared host I use) and it was because someone sent spam to a honey pot server that was routed via that 1 smtp server (the block wasn't fully effective because they didn't block all the servers)
I actually called them and they wouldn't removed the temporary block and I had the same reponce when I mentioned Google and they said they change there ip often so they have to do work and actually Inspect each message when using Google (in the end I created a temporary Gmail account just so they could send mail to this one transport company to get around there stupid mail protection company they was paying for)
If that was a company that I was trying to buy something form I'd have asked them directly - on a sales phone number, not IT support MD's friend's niece's boyfriend - whether or not they were interested in my business and if they were they weren't going to get it if they blacklisted my email address.
I have run my own private mail server for many years. It used to be fun, now it's just tedious. I wrote a big rant but deleted it. The tldr is that it sounds like AC's mail server is being flagged as spam. Gmail, Apple and Outlook, whom I'm guessing are providing mail services for quite a lot of companies, would refuse to deliver mail, often silently.
or if you have it, utter bollocks.
I refuse to use Google for anything and as for Outlook, or to me, 'Lookout' is just as bad.
My email client is Thunderbird. My profile stated out life on Windows, moved to Linux and is now on MacOS. Definitely cross platform and is used by all the sites I register for.
What is a bigger problem is commenting systems such as Discus use a server for verification emails that is blacklisted by many ISP's as a source of SPAM and unless you are a paid customer of Discus, there is no way to get support. FSCK them.
《Discus, now there’s a name I haven’t seen in ages (thank goodness)》
I initially thought Balderdash was the name you hadn't seen.
Balderdash!* is a wonderful branding for an online forum.
*Etym, unknown poss. English drink of wine mixed with beer or water or other substances that was sold cheaply. sounds not incongruous with the content of such fora.
Fair dos, I guess my instantaneous thought was that you were saying some search engines may have ranked alphabetically way back when, obviously a nonsense interpretation on my part. So the yellow pages never crossed my mind.
As to my age? I’m older than my teeth and younger than my heart. Thanks Grandma for that little gem.
I have a friend who not only had a domain but his own email server. All emails from this mail server were systematically blocked (I’m not talking about registering for things, but simply sending an email from A to B).
He had to go through lots of hoops, including sending in copies of his passport, with each of the major email providers, before they started letting his emails get through.
If you want to run your own mail server you need a reputable IP address.
ie. Not a provider that allows anyone to sign up for £2 for 1 month of service and send out 1,000,000,000 spam emails. Also not a provider with lots of infected computers on their network. Etc etc.
You pretty much have to specifically use a service that considers their email sending reputation to be one of their selling points.
At work we resell internet access to other nearby businesses. One company self-hosts their email, and they believe email is always unreliable and it is normal to phone people asking them to check their spam folder... It is also worth noting that they do not DKIM sign their emails, and their SPF is invalid and therefore treated as nonexistent. I am surprised any of their emails ever get through...
That is the challenge of running your own mail server. You have to be careful not to have even the smallest misconfiguration from unofficial standards, or you will end up on spam lists that are difficult to get out of. Still, you probably have a chance of doing that. The other problem is that many of those lists will still list you if someone from an IP range even slightly similar to yours does anything dodgy, including if they are hacked. It doesn't matter that their IP address is different from yours, attached to a different account, and your addresses have been operating under your control and without issue for years. Someone will still block first and ask questions later.
I have operated my own mail server before, and with relatively good results*, but nowadays, I let someone else do that hard work and just point my MX records to them. I don't like having to do this, given that I self-run all the other services attached to my domains, but if I need the emails to definitely arrive all the time, I don't have much of a choice. It might be different if I had a dedicated IP range for my services which I could keep clean, but I don't. I do wonder how aggressive this will be when IPV6-only servers eventually happen, because I am able to get my own IPV6 block more easily than my own IPV4 one.
* To my knowledge, my self-run server didn't get added to any spam lists. I was certainly able to send from it to Office365 and GMail. However, there were some smaller lists that included massive IP blocks which included my host. I had limited success applying to have my IP removed from the blocks. I knew it was only a matter of time before those seemingly unused blocklists would end up affecting something I cared about.
I'm holding out for the Lucy-Liubots, thanks.
Actually, when you said Monroebots, the first thing I thought of was the one (7' tall, silver, crashes through walls) that Lister built from a kit in Red Dwarf. Not quite my cup of tea...
《And in parallel it is searching for “how to destroy humans”》
It doesn't need to. Quoting Gaiman and Pratchett's Good Omens:
"there’s nothing we can do to them that they don’t do themselves and they do things we’ve never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination. And electricity, of course."
They need some better SEO people for starters. 15 years ago when I was dealing with SE rankings, the content of the page was only part of the story. As important was who linked to your site as more authoritive links were looked upon more favourably.
When I search for their main phrase all I get are articles about how you send encrypted emails, not links to products. So get listed on those pages for starters.
Then that's a really really stupid law, because it doesn't let them make any improvements - either to reduce the impact of SEO (which this shitty encrypted email provider was obviously using if they were getting ranked for "thousands" of keywords) or just to improve things.
Tuta was Tutanota until fairly recently.
The aws instance servicing AU was awol for ~48 hours about a week ago (you could still login via a vpn or tor using a exit in the US or EU (different aws instance?)
Some of the service status sites were reporting (all of) tuta as down for much longer periods which probably didn't help either.
Still I hope Tutao can give Google a good kicking, even if Google don't deserve it in this case. Actually especially if they don't. :)
Or you can use gpg1 (would not trust the safety of the key-ring service required for gpg2), swap public keys, encrypt by command line, and send the file as a binary attachment. If that's really too much trouble, then you should fall back on social media and cryptic emojis - that will prevent you saying anything too dangerous.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
