Yeah that's my experience as well. And it's impossible to find anyone to talk to at Google/MS/Apple about an email issue -- unless you send really large volumes, then suddenly all kinds of support and tools become available. IMO it's a deliberate attempt to get more people to switch to gmail. But maybe I'm a cynic.

The problem is that providing email server debugging services is very expensive because not many people really understand the whole SMTP stack these days. You can't find anyone who will talk to you at these firms because there's probably only about 20 people in the company who could genuinely help. Additionally the world is filled with people who would like to run a whole email server for a stream of personal mail who would get it wrong and demand debugging services. That's why they spend their time building automated tools.

The problem the article discusses about needing to send lots of mail to qualify for these tools is because the systems don't scale infinitely - data storage still costs these firms money - and botnets mean basically every single IP on the internet will try to abuse your service at some point or another. So tracking deliverability data without any thresholding means tracking it for every connected machine in the world, which is hugely expensive, all to satisfy the tiny minority of people who feel passionately that they should run their own email server. The only possible justification for that would be recruiting related, but they don't have challenges recruiting.

The problem is the old cars. Really, old cars have absolutely no business on todays roads, and if you want to park your old decrepit car in my brand spanking new garage you should upgrade your car, better still, buy one of mine. Of course I can't be assed to make sure that your old car can still park in our garages. Your track width is ridiculous and the amount of horsepower you have just doesn't cut it today. So keep your silly little museum piece that's all of 10 years old now and drive around in circles on your own lot.

If you have a few million of those or are part of our circle of buddies we just might cut you some slack. But otherwise, no matter that your vehicle performed fine just yesterday, it's up to us to change the rules at will and demand that you adapt.

You're ascribing bad faith where there is none. Spammers make it difficult to keep the email system alive at all, even between big firms. If you think it's easy, go set up your own webmail firm and show them how it's done.

Carjackers make it hard to keep the road system usable at all, even between large fleets of cars. If you think it is so easy, why don't you set up your own fleet management system and show them how it is done, you miserly driver.

Apple will silently drop an email (no bounce message) based on text content of attached pdf files. This happened at my day job, we found the page of the pdf that triggered it via divide and conquer.

You could pay for hosting from a smaller provider on your own domain. Sure it costs money, but you don't have to support those giants and you get to keep your own address.

It seems they already do that, which is why their e-mails are getting dropped when sent to a recipient hosted by the giants.

I was reading it as they are self-hosting and are therefore having their emails dropped. While I have had similarly terrible experiences with self-hosted mail, I have found even smaller dedicated providers have absolutely no issues with getting mail delivered.

+1 these days I need to wrangle two inboxes. Thanks google.

>Microsoft, Apple and Google

Well what do you want for nothing? Randomly losing email is what the free email services do. That is hardly the fault of everyone else...

Microsoft 365, G Suite