News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Outlook.com Is Quietly Rejecting Email from Domains Witho... by idiotsecant on Sunday November 08, 2026 @04:19PM (#50417398)
Because the protocol is flawed at its foundation - there is no good way to make sure that the person sending you something is a person and someone you'd want to interact with. If the big providers weren't doing this stuff, we'd whine about the enormous amount of spam.

The solution is communications that are demonstrably not spam and not unwanted.

There have been lots of proposals to this effect but maybe you have to put up two cents in a crypto wallet, which the other person can claim if the mail is unwanted. If someone takes your two cents, you remove them from your lists ASAP. The receiver doesn't benefit meaningfully from the 2c so they are unlikely to claim it. The sender is only damaged if a lot of different people claim the 2 cents. Maybe a few domains are default whitelisted even if they don't put up 2 cents, to protect against entities that are important but would be frequently spite-claimed (IRS, courts, and other similar). If you use a provider that doesn't whitelist, fine, but you're going to miss those emails

Re:Outlook.com Is Quietly Rejecting Email from Domains Witho... by croes on Sunday November 08, 2026 @05:09PM (#50417914)
Nearly all the spam I get has an email address from those providers.

Seems they are the disease not the cure

Re:Outlook.com Is Quietly Rejecting Email from Domains Witho... by anonreplier on Sunday November 08, 2026 @05:30PM (#50418118)
Mine isn't from those email hosts, but it from google cloud or Azure typically (not AWS for whatever reason). Related, the gmail spam filter is terrible.
Re:Outlook.com Is Quietly Rejecting Email from Domains Witho... by Frotag on Sunday November 08, 2026 @07:34PM (#50419413)
>Related, the gmail spam filter is terrible. It seems insane that gmail doesnt provide a way to automatically send a mail (eg based on domain, keywords, etc) to spam. I know theres block sender but for example aliexpress uses a different name for every email so that's useless.
Re:Outlook.com Is Quietly Rejecting Email from Domains Witho... by SoftTalker on Sunday November 08, 2026 @10:39PM (#50420776)
Most of my spam is from gmail addresses. Why Google hasn't figured out how to stop the fake Norton renewal notices is just mind-boggling.

Lately I've also been getting a lot from compromised MS365 accounts.

Re:Outlook.com Is Quietly Rejecting Email from Domains Witho... by pixl97 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @05:31PM (#50418127)
I think you misunderstand the disease.

What this is called is survivorship bias. The question I would ask is how much mail are you not seeing at all because it's dropped at the edge first thing because it's IP block listed?

Next, how much spam are you seeing from them because they and Google are the largest providers on Earth? Kind of like selecting a random person from the population in the US and going "look, it's a white guy". Yea, that's how statistics works.

Lastly, because the are good at blocking spam at the edge, then that's the last bastion of attack for spammers to put their efforts in if they want any return at all.

Re:Outlook.com Is Quietly Rejecting Email from Domains Witho... by unpleasurable on Sunday November 08, 2026 @11:19PM (#50421029)
Sorry but bastions are defensive.
Re:Outlook.com Is Quietly Rejecting Email from Domains Witho... by cowlevel on Monday November 09, 2026 @12:24AM (#50421394)
I self-host and don't have a spam filter. Spam makes up about 1 in 5 messages I receive. It's always the same spam campaigns that would be easily filtered with a few regexes.

Self-hosting allows me to use a different receiving address for each entity I contact, so I also know exactly who put me on spam lists.

Re:Outlook.com Is Quietly Rejecting Email from Domains Witho... by pixl97 on Monday November 09, 2026 @12:06PM (#50428335)
It's been a while since I've been an SMTP server admin but when I was I managed a few hundred thousand mailboxes under different domains. Most likely know one knows about your domain and it has little traffic. On average I saw users domains get around 5 spam to 1 ham. Of course you have outliers. I had one domain that received around 1000 spam to 1 ham. That was a domain that looked like it could belong to a university and it got absolutely flooded.

Anecdotes are not a great thing to run mail servers on, broad statistics are.

Re:Outlook.com Is Quietly Rejecting Email from Domains Witho... by TaLiTr on Monday November 09, 2026 @10:37AM (#50427071)
I'm the sysadmin at my company and we regularly get emails spoofing our own addresses! It's wild that Microsoft can't even protect customers when they have all the info to do so.
Re:Outlook.com Is Quietly Rejecting Email from Domains Witho... by what on Sunday November 08, 2026 @05:23PM (#50418048)
> frequently spite-claimed (IRS, courts, and other similar)

These entities communicate via plain old mail, that costs more than 2 cents already.

Re:Outlook.com Is Quietly Rejecting Email from Domains Witho... by timcobb on Sunday November 08, 2026 @09:47PM (#50420396)
Spam is a super solved problem though and I'd rather have false negative spam than email oligarchy.
Re:Outlook.com Is Quietly Rejecting Email from Domains Witho... by cowlevel on Monday November 09, 2026 @12:21AM (#50421382)
> the protocol is flawed at its foundation - there is no good way to make sure that the person sending you something is a person and sending content you'd want to interact with.

There is and it's the same as other protocols including proprietary ones - a sender address whitelist.

There's no proprietary protocol that solved spam either.