Unable to email anyone from my primary domain name; thanks Google Mail and G Suite.

Thu Oct 24 12:33:10 UTC 2019

[ I'm just going to focus on one point. ]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 06:18:46PM -0600, Constantine A. Murenin wrote:
> it is revealed that Postmaster Tools cannot tell me anything at all, with
> all tabs and screens being 100% blank, allegedly because I'm not actually a
> mass email sender (I don't send hundreds of emails a day or whatnot), and
> they're too afraid that I'll figure out why my mail doesn't actually go
> through, instead of signing up for G Suite.

There is a persistent mythos -- a worst practice, actually -- among many
operations that obfuscating the reasons why messages are rejected is useful.
This is wrong.

Consider: either the sender is benign (as in this case) or they are not.

If they are benign, then denying the information necessary to understand
and solve the problem helps no one.  It's also counter to the decades of
cooperation and mutual assistance that have built the Internet.

If they're not benign, then either they don't care enough to acquire
this information or they do.  If they don't care, then providing the
information doesn't hurt, because it'll be ignored anyway.  If they do
care, then they WILL get it, whether by conducting research or by
breaching security or by the simpler/cheaper path of paying someone
on the inside off.  (If you're going to tell me that everyone who
works AT Google is working FOR Google, then I'm going to tell you that
you're naive and clueless.  If I were in the large-scale spam-for-hire
business, I'd have already planted my own people there a long time ago.)

Best practice when rejecting mail traffic is to (a) provide at least
a semblance of a reason why and (b) a remediation path that includes
escalation to real live human beings.  All mail systems (except for
the edge case of those which accept everything) make rejection errors
and that must be accounted for in design and operation.

---rsk