As a company we realised about 12 months ago that email can no longer be considered a reliable method of communication. I understand the reasoning but the result is the result. Many new clients we deal with have whitelists on and we have to pester our clients to add us to their lists. Not a great experience for anyone. I think we should consider email pretty much moribund at this point.

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urbandw311er 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It is literally one of the last free and open channels on the Internet – I suggest you work on supporting its use and keeping it that way rather than moving to something controlled for profit or data harvesting.

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SoftTalker 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It being free and open is exactly what the big providers can't stand and why they are coming up with ever more "standards" that are complex to configure as well as "reputation" scores that are hard for small senders to clear.

Also why they do non-standard stuff like accepting mail but then simply not delivering it, rather than bouncing it.

	▲	nine_k 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		DMARC is not hard. "Reputation scores" and blacklists / greylists started in late 1990s / early 2000s as multiple grassroots efforts when spam started to overwhelm systems. Gmail did not exist, outlook.com did not exist, it was easy and expected to run your own SMTP (which I did). And it was very unpleasant. DMARC appeared 10 if not 15 years ago. There's no reason for a sane MTA configuration not to have it.
	▲	expedition32 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Microsoft has provided free email addresses to the public for decades.

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pixl97 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is no such thing as a free and open channel on the internet that will not suffer the tragedy of the commons.

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anonymous908213 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Calling it a "free and open channel" when 80% of consumers are on Microsoft/Google addresses that control who can deliver e-mail is laughable. It's dead, Jim.

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urbandw311er 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Fair point - I meant free in the sense that the protocol is open. I didn’t mean that it’s not under threat.

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stephbook 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You seem to miss the point WHY customers go there. I, for one, switched when I realized Google filters spam effectively.

	▲	theK 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That WHY seems to only address a very small slice of the market. Some other WHYs I've encountered - it was a way to outsource the mail server administration and already free in our corporate package Which is pretty much all I have from the corporate side. On the personal or small business side its most often - I don't really care that much about running my own stuff - I needed a personal email address All these are valid reasons/motivations but none explicitly argue that email messaging should become proprietary.

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rednb 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Strengthen your contracts / terms of service. Make it their responsibility to configure their email systems properly so they receive emails sent from your domains.

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saagarjha 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So what have you switched to instead?

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SoftTalker 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Postal mail still works.

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EGreg 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Spoiler alert: no method of communication is reliable anymore. All of them are controlled by companies that will route your messages to spam.

	▲	threatofrain 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If reliable means the message gets through no matter what, then it's good that no channel is reliable. Such a channel will inevitably be used for spam and attention grabbing.