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Comment by Avamander

18 hours ago

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.

    • Were the trains running on time in Germany back then? They certainly were 20 years ago, so I assume they were in the 80's.

      Maybe "strictly worse than 40 years ago"?

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.

  • 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.

    • Oh when I ran my own mailserver I did get SMTP errors back.

      Every month or so I had this issue and I had to contact them through a form somewhere and I would get emails back from someone in india who reset my 'reputation'. They have some stupid made-up reputation system which means they need to see significant volume from you that is not marked as spam for them to accept your mailserver.

      And yeah proton has similar issues. A lot of companies blackhole even confirmation emails there. So you can't confirm accounts with a proton email and they give zero indication as to why. Tinder and the internet archive (archive.org) come to mind.