Piousbox

One of the reasons I've developed my own email system (annesque.com, under active development) is because email communication turns out to be a hard topic to tackle. But freedom of speech is also a very hard topic to handle, and perhaps the two go hand in hand.

Turns out that people, humans, are very limited in their choice of communication methodology. There is no way out, every method is difficult. If you decide to take care of your own comms, you will end up owning your own IT department. And if you delegate it to something else - if you let micro$oft of facebook do it for you, then you are at the mercy of those platforms. They will censor you without even noticing you, google does that every day. They don't notice you while censoring you, as I've seen first-hand. Personally, I have made the decision to own my own infrastructure and maintain what is effectively a small IT department. But that you can reach me does not mean that I can reach you.

Case in point. I just discovered that outlook dot com bounces my emails:

Micro$oft has made the decision that *all* their customers will never receive emails from me. I have discovered this while *replying* to an email. The sad part is that the sender, an ordinary guy I assume, won't even know that he's being shut off from talking to me. How would he know? Knowing it requires in-depth technical knowledge, something most people don't have time for. Should an auto mechanic or a surgeon know how email works? I doubt it.

This is the evil that lurks in every platform. The platform decides what you see, what you don't see, what you say, and what you don't say. There is no dissent on youtube, there is no dissent on linkedin, none of facebook, telegram is also being destroyed.

Same goes for search. Somehow, everyone in the world has just one single source of information: google search. Yet somehow, noone bats an eye, noone panics from the apparent horror of *all* world's information being controlled by a single entity. I know it's hard to boycott google, but most people aren't even trying.

Email is one of the last remaining free-and-open platforms but even it is under attack. Micro$oft basically only allows emails from itself and google, and a few other providers. With spam filters, google decides what you see and what you don't. You don't decide what you see, because google has already decided that for you.

And as a special icing on the cake, their spam filter is total trash. They deliver spam instead of bouncing it, they make it difficult to mark-as-spam, by requiring two clicks and the second click is hiding behind a primary action which is 'cancel' - the primary action is to *not* mark as spam, so if you just thought "oh two clicks, whats the deal" - well, the second click is obfuscated, "cancel" and "confirm" are reversed, this is an example of "social engineering" that if google catches you doing it they'll penalize you for it... yes, it's a big deal.

Furthermore, noone knows what marking something as spam actually means. Do you?

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And now for the technical part, if you got this far. : ) Multiple checks reveal that my ip is *not* a spam-originating ip:

Then you look at what UCEPROTECTL3 is and you see this:

As you should know now: It is not you, it is your complete provider which got UCEPROTECT-Level 3 listed. Your IP was NOT part of abusive action, but you are the one that has freely chosen your provider.

Oh... so microsoft blocks me because of my hosting provider, not because of any actions that I've taken. And no, there is no "freely chosing" a provider. First, the whole world runs on amazon, locking you into a platform that can censor you without a reason. And second, there are only so many providers - home internet does not give you an IP, and even if it did, the provider is someone else, your ISP, either Verizon or Spectrum of Google. And outlook can block those on a whim, say they are sources of spam (what isn't a source of spam these days?), and someone else will say oh it's your fault because you made that choice, but it wasn't a choice at all. You don't own the world. Someone assigned you an IP.

This concludes my medium-sized rant about email infrastructure for today. I obviously spend a lot of time on email, so I have a... snail in the race, so to speak. Hopefully more people will pick up managing their own infrastructure. A shameless plug is appropriate here: annesque.com is my email platform, under active development, quite powerful but still a lot of work to be done. Please contact me if you're interested in getting involved.