On 24/09/2020 16:40, Simon Hobson wrote:
>
> But if you do "accept then bin", you can scale your resources for more average rates and just let messages sit in a queue for a few minutes when things are really busy. Given the resources available to MS and Google (to name just two), that's not really a valid excuse - but I bet it's one of the ones they use.

[...]
> I made a point of pointing out that our mail service would not fail to deliver a message that had been accepted for delivery.

What annoys me even more is that they could put incoming post identified as possible spam into the user's spam folder but very often they just blackhole it, so no one knows it's not been delivered at all. It almost seems malicious but I suspect it's just, as you say, down to maximising resources.

>
> That's the problem - it's mostly invisible. Take the likely scenario - customer emails to say "I'd like to spend money with you on ..." and gets no answer. Unless you really have a very compelling offering, the prospective customer just goes off elsewhere and you never know that you've lost business.
> I'm sure that a great many businesses would complain, and loudly, if they actually knew.

You'd think they'd complain but to many small businesses it seems overly
complex and they do nothing. I've tried reporting it to some business
users of O365 who have had my email to them blackholed and, because they
don't have IT staff and the whole point of O365 is to reduce the need
for IT people, they do nothing. Oh well.

> One thing I can be sure of, if Royal Mail (or whoever your local postal service is) "just binned" anything that their algorithms decided you weren't likely to want, there would be more than just strong words about it. In many jurisdictions, it's a criminal offence to interfere with delivery of a mail item.

I discovered this a few years ago when there were companies sending
lottery scams to UK addresses: Royal Mail actually does intercept and
destroy certain personally addressed mail! It's focussed on scams they
know to be illegal but, yes, they do identify (somehow) specific scams,
then intercept and destroy them, with no notification to sender or
recipient.

> As part of the rundown of services before I was made redundant, my employer was busy selling people onto O365 - and at no time would the customer be told about O365's dirty secret, that it will throw away some of your main and you'll never know unless the sender contacts you via a different means. Clients were also told that there was no GDPR problem for them to consider at all - even though anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together can explain the many ways in which O365 is fundamentally incompatible with GDPR, but that's a different thread altogether.

Yes, GDPR does seem to conflict with O365, no matter what the official
line is.


--
Mark Rousell