Thread by @doctorow

This week on my podcast, I read last week's @Medium column, "Dead Letters," about how consolidation in mailhosting and the spam-wars have made it all but impossible to host your own newsletter or mailing list.

doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-7…

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During last year's Substack bubble, there was a lot of enthusiastic talk about email as the last decentralized online protocol, and how that meant that creators and audiences could use it to connect without having to stay on the right side of giant corporate gatekeepers.

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But the reality is that commercial mailhosting is gathered into a small number of large firms, as is free webmail - and email that originates from a server that isn't run by one of those giants is apt to be mis-flagged as spam and blocked.

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That's been my experience. I've had my own mailserver (courtesy of @orenwolf) for a quarter-century, and my email routinely disappears - algorithmically moved to a Gmail or Outlook spam, folder, or worse - blocked from delivery altogether.

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There was a THREE YEAR period when I couldn't send mail to anyone using an email address hosted by AT&T (who had bought up hundreds of small ISPs and consolidated their email hosting). I emailed them every month, for years, without a response.

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It's hard enough to host your own email, but it gets worse when you're hosting a newsletter (AKA a "mailing list").

I run one, the plura-list: it consists of one message per day, sent by me, with unrolled versions of my Twitter threads.

mail.flarn.com/mailman/listin…

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I took two weeks off blogging in September and when I started, this triggered an algorithmic tripwire in a giant webmail host with more than a billion users - for my thousands of subscribers there, everything I sent after I resumed went straight to spam.

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Even worse was Comcast, which blocked my server because its anti-spam contractor, Vade, decided that the ANTI-spam confirmation emails that my server sends out when you subscribe were spam. With a single algorithmic decision, millions of people stopped getting my list.

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This is basically what the Old Open Internet People predicted would happen during the spam wars - we'd get small groups of people using unaccountable, imperfect, error-prone processes to block small email servers until email was centralized into a handful of companies.

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And, of course, spam continues, provided you sign up with one of those big commercial operators. I get hundreds of pitches per day from PR people who've bought shitty "press lists," imported them into @Mailchimp, and then blast away on behalf of their clients.

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Mailchimp won't tell me which lists I'm on. It won't let me block other people from adding me to lists without an opt-in. By any objective measure, it's a mass-scale spam facilitator, but it isn't being blocked by AT&T for three years. Comcast delivers its mail.

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This is a worst-of-all-possible worlds - we lost email's decentralization AND we created a path for "legitimate," relentless spam.

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Here's the podcast episode:

craphound.com/news/2021/10/1…

Here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the @internetarchive, they'll host your stuff for free, forever):

ia601408.us.archive.org/16/items/Cory_…

And here's the RSS for my podcast:

feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podca…

eof/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/10/18/lab…