this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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What does a provider make trustworthy for you?
A provider that isn’t on the ball about managing outbound spam will quickly find their IPs (if not the whole prefix) blocked. If someone runs a spambot from a VPS, and then you get the recycled IPv4 address when the instance is removed, what’s to tell Microsoft you’re not also a spammer?
I’ve been an admin for a couple of different companies that sent statements to customers. Keeping our legit email systems off spam lists was a daily challenge.
I work for a cloud provider, and even if I wanted to, I could not check for outgoing spam, other than reacting to the NOC mails.
Most mail server use transport encryption, which I can absolutly not inspect.
I never said anything about monitoring outbound SMTP traffic.
The more realistic mitigations are e.g. periodic scanning for open relays, actually handling abuse email reports, RBL checking
That's a lot more difficult to put into words than I thought it'd be.
I think the big thing is that they're not in the race to the bottom. Their customers choose them for their level of services, not because they were the cheapest host in a list. So spammers don't want to use them because they're not the cheapest, and they don't want to host spammers because that ruins their value proposition to their regular customers.
What else .. small enough that they're not faceless. and I'm not nobody to them either. They've been at this at least as long as I have, so it doesn't feel like they're going to disappear tomorrow. And they're fairly active with their community through a good old-fashioned mailing list. Which also helps to get to know them and what level they're working on. It's nice knowing that when I mail them, I don't get through to an AI, or an L1 on a script, I'm gonna get Andy.
It's a tough one though, because trust is earnt, not researched. But I do prioritise putting a mailserver on a provider that keeps a clean house - because you don't want to find yourself getting blocked because your neighbours misbehave.
tl;dr; everything AWS ain't.
That's a nice writeup. Especially the mailing list part struck with me.
So which provider is it.
I've gone through a lot of providers in the last decade. Currently everything sits in the DC of my current employee, but I feel like a freeloader, which I am clearly am.