Steve Litt <slitt@???> wrote:

> The biggest accomplishment of this DMARC/DKIM thing was to make email
> such a mess that it sent even more of the dummy dwobes to Facebook, a
> private club having a monopoly over communication. What could POSSIBLY
> go wrong?

I don’t think it has. From past experience, it’s taught many people that “the only email you should use is gmail (or one of a handful of others)” because of the things they broke (deliberately).

At my last job, we ran a mail server for our clients. When I started there it was (IIRC) iMail ruling on Win NT and it got hacked regularly. I got asked if I could knock something up - which I did, a “temporary” setup with linux, Postfix, Postfixadmin, Amavis, and a few more bits. It was temporary for quite a long time, and needless to say, quite reliable in spite of me only having “hand me down” hardware to run my servers on - I was putting hardware into service that was (as my manager described it) 9 year past it’s swap out date ! But I digress.
After a good few years, I did a refresh and built a clustered system with before-acceptance mail scanning - something the big guys don’t seem to be able to manage.

As a policy, we’d setup clients with their own email to match their websites - so (e.g.) bloggscoffeeshop.co.uk would have (e.g.) info@??? for email. I’ve always thought it looks just plain naff when you see a custom website with a nice domain name - and a generic email like (e.g.) bloggs57@???.
But, many clients just refused to have two email accounts on their computer even though we’d offer to set it up for them. So many were simple redirects so that mail to info@??? just got redirected to bloggs57@???. Which worked fine until Google, MS, and Yahoo between them broke it and we had to explain to our clients that Google, MS, Yahoo, et al had broken their email setup deliberately.
But still, many refused to simply setup their nice email address as a second account in their client - I’ve noticed that even MS have relented and the built-in client in Win 10 now allows this, the built-in piece of rubbish in Win 8 didn’t. So many simply changed the address on their website to be their ISP provided email.

And as far as the clients were concerned, the problem was our broken mail service - hence they need to use a “proper” one.

I did look into applying SRS, but with the combination of tools I was using, that broke one of our key anti-spam measures.

<rant>

So as far as I’m concerned, the fact that they broke stuff was quite deliberate. The likes of Google, MS, Yahoo, etc would far rather people use their systems (so they can monetise their emails) than have it easy for smaller outfits to run fully functional emails systems. And between them they had/have enough of the market to simply declare something broken, change it, and force the rest of the world to change to suit them.

</rant>

Simon