Silently Discarding Email Messages
In a Lobste.rs thread, Hugo Landau wrote:
A particular requirement I have for any email provider I use is the following rule: An incoming email which it is technically feasible to deliver must be delivered. In other words, mail must not be rejected for “policy” reasons...
I insist on this because I don’t want to not receive a potentially important message, but also because it’s in my view against my interests for my email provider to preempt my own decisionmaking on what mail I do and don’t want to receive. I wouldn’t find it remotely acceptable if my physical mailman started throwing away letters in purple envelopes without even telling me because he thinks they’re “probably” spam.
There’s also an issue that large mail providers rejecting incoming mail due to arbitrary criteria is one of the ways in which they effectively bully other, smaller mail providers into doing their bidding, and in which large mail providers make it harder for other mail providers to compete. So I see this as both a user-disempowering practice and one which is detrimental to the email ecosystem.
This is exactly my own thinking on the issue. Silently rejecting messages that were sent to me is a deal-breaker for me. I do not care how good your email service otherwise is, or what features you offer, if you silently discard any messages, then I will not use your service as my primary email hosting.
Tags: email