[ 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