Comment by 0xcb0
16 hours ago
Telekom is a bunch of strange folks. I lately was not able to send mails, from my private mail servrr to my fathers telekom mail. After investigation I found out my server got blocked. After a decade of working. I mailed them, and they told me to register my mailserver with them. I shall tell them what mails I will send from there and about what content. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Sure, thats how mail was supposed to work. Register with every mail server in the world, before you can send mail.
Their mail excerpt: This system has not sent any e-mail to our customers for a long time. For security reasons our systems will only accept e-mails from such IP addresses after a check of setup and information about these systems.
Please give us details about this system and the company using it, tell us all about the sending domain, what type of e-mail will be sent and especially if you or your customer want to send newsletter give us detailed information on how recipients e-mail addresses had been acquired. Who in person is responsible for e-mail sent from this system (MTA)?
Please be advised that only technically proper configured and very well maintained systems are qualified for a reset of reputation and please see our FAQ section 4.1 (Requirements for smooth access to our e-mail exchanges <https://postmaster.t-online.de/index.en.html#t4.1>):
"There must be a domain and website with direct contact information easily deducible from the delivering IP's hostname (FQDN)."
That policy of theirs has existed for a long time now. It's a really odd one at that.
They also don't enforce DMARC, nor do DKIM. It's stuck nearly four decades in the past.
That's Germany in a nutshell.
2026 - 40 = 1986 was right before more mainstream internet adoption. Yep checks out, Germany today.
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Microsoft has a similar policy on their consumer domains though. If they have not received mail from you for a month or so you are insta blocked. It's infuriating for personal mail server owners.
Microsoft and google seems hellbent on destroying classical email, by doing this crap. Their interoperability is also pretty bad.
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When I ran my own mail server Microsoft was the only company I encountered that would black hole my messages - no SMTP error for my own server to bounce back to me, no bounce back from their server, nothing. I vaguely recall having to do a dance with them a few times to fix this and the last time I tried I received no response. I don't frequently interact with Office 365 users so this didn't matter much to me.
I did end up later moving to Proton primarily out of laziness. I thought these issues would be a thing of the past until I applied to work at a company that administered their own Exchange server that also black holed my messages from Proton's servers. Their reasoning? "We geo-block Switzerland for security reasons." Needless to say I turned them down.
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I think this is standard. It applies to domains as well. I experienced government services blocks as well -- they send me an email, yet block my reply. I complain every time and rarely does anyone care, the support person does not escalate, so my email remains blocked, sometimes I'm told system is working as configured, completely ignoring that I am a real person and system is hostile towards me.
It's just general fragility of tech and lack of care from the creators/maintainers. These systems are steampunk, fragile contraptions that no one cares to actually make human friendly or are built on crappy foundations.
We call it the email mafia.
To send emails we need to pay for a mail service. Or get ads of course Gmail is part of the ring.
Like most things it start with good intentions, to fight spam. As if it even worked, I guess we would get far more without they will say.
It's one of the downsides of decentralized networks. Trust is built or pay-your-way-into'd.
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Is there a government requirement to be reachable by its citizens? That would seem to violate it.
I mean, yes? But that's by sending a letter, or a fax. Email is not part of this...
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Well, I don't know if that is better or worse than my experience with Comcast. They will usually unblock my emails within a day of my sending an unblock request, no questions asked... and then block me again after a few days, with no explanation as to why. I've had this IP for years, I have spf, dkim, and dmarc all property configured, I'm not on any blocklists, and I only send a very small volume of personal emails from the server.
but the fun thing about them is, they allow you to impersonate any mail address you want with their smtp server.
Aka, when you are a customer of them you get a @t-online.de address and login data for their smtp server.
You can just login into that server and set the From: Header to anything, they don't check.
Isn't that fairly common? You could then put in some other address, but you could do the same thing by setting up your own mail server, and in the former case you're not even really anonymous because the headers are going to show it was sent through their mail server and their mail server's logs will show which account was used to send the message.
The email sent from your own separate server will fail basic dmarc/SPF/dkim validation the email sent by their own servers likely will appear legitimate
In Germany I'd be surprised if the police didn't come to your house when you did that, and take all your computers to find evidence you sent it, and you're not getting them back even if you're proven innocent.
At least they respond quickly to such inquiries. I have given up on T-Online Mail. I refuse to follow ridiculous rules like these.
Well, we have to "register" every new IP or new mail server with them as well. It's annoying and a weird system, but they respond quickly and it's just one todo we have to think about.
Been there, done that. After a bit of back and forth, Telekom basically recommended that I go and use one of the big SMTP servers and stop bothering them. While I hated myself for doing it, I eventually switched to Gmail for peace of mind.
Does Fastmail have any clout in Europe? I've been a customer for the better part of a decade (with my own domain name) and I've never had a mail delivery issue.
I was going to suggest Fastmail too. I don't know about Europe in particular but have been a very happy Fastmail customer for several years, running mail for 2 small corporations plus personal, zero problems ever.
Nope, but there are various good and cheap e-mail providers in EU, such as Soverin, Posteo, Mailbox, Migadu, Tuta, ...
Unfortunately some inbound servers will block emails if the originating server does not match the From: address.
If you control the domain, you can use SPF to designate Google as an authorized sender for your domain.
This is one of the reasons why I'm not planning to host my own e-mail server. It's not that I can't do it, but I don't want to sink time into investigating and working around/solving things like that.
The small boutique mail hosts are also much more tedious to deal with than any of the big players. So it depends on your recipients how much effort self-hosting is.
They just want to make sure you're not a spammer.
fwiw t-online.de hasn't been owned by Deutsche Telekom since 2015
Does anyone self host email anymore successfully? I'm honestly asking. I would like to but it seems like a full time job trying to keep it running. Are there halfway solutions where maybe you own the service and domain and it runs somewhere trusted?
I have been running my mail server for about 20 years now, using three different domains.
I have switched servers regularly, mostly between OVH/online.net/Hetzner since they are the three big cheap European hosts. I have also used various server software, now happily running OpenSMTPd.
I have had a few problems with Microsoft in the past but contacting them (what made me care enough was marrying someone with an @hotmail email address) eventually fixed delivery for good. No notable delivery problems otherwise. I also run my company's mail server, it works fine too (with a much larger volume and different usage patterns), also running out of OVH servers.
What I recommend for people who don't want to do sysadmin is buying a domain at OVH to use the free email service offered with it. It's cheap and works, and it's easy to switch to another registrar or provider if needed.
I self host email and have done so, with the same domain, since ~2000.
My IP has not changed since 2010 and I have perfect dkim/dmarc/rdns and whatever duct taped bullshit de jure is currently being practiced.
Everything generally works.
± same here
Sure. Highly successful even, I would say. I can deliver to Microsoft and Google.
Not sure though what the magic ingredient is. I've had the IP address for 7 years before I decided to use it for mail, after one quick mail to Cisco's Talos stuff everything was fine. Software is Mailcow. Hosted at Hetzner in Germany.
And still, I cannot deliver to T-Online, so there's that.
> about what content
Ask ChatGPT to generate you a very long very graphic story about how much you'd like to fuck a dog and your father is the only person who understands your desires and you want to discuss this with him via email. While fucking dogs is illegal in Germany, talking about it is (probably) not. Make the guy who asked the question regret doing it.
I'll give you an insider info: There's no guy! Your response would be filtered away by the profanity filter and nobody working in Telekom will ever read any of it.
Hell, I can even say, likely, nobody will ever read it, regardless of how you answer.
Those companies only respond to lawyers.
Imagine the lawyer reading the case files pffffft