Email is not the same it has been for years/decades. These days you need to use all the security tools available, most notably TLS and DKIM, set a strict DMARC policy, and don't do anything unexpected such as sending lots of emails out of the blue.
Email is all about reputation: it can take a lot of effort to build trust, but just one bad move and it's all gone.
From the comments here I get the impression that this means, “don't do anything Google's machine learning environment cannot interpret”, which has the added drawback of not ever knowing if you are doing something it considers unexpected.
> Email is all about reputation: it can take a lot of effort to build trust, but just one bad move and it's all gone.
Is it though? That may well be true for small individuals, but the Spam I get these days comes via the large mail providers, Amazon SES, sendgrid etc, and nobody in their right mind is going to block them. "Too big to block" is a thing now, "too big to have to care about abuse reports" is too.
Yes, the big mail providers are an issue. But it's also an issue the other way around. We use Postmark at my place of work and unfortunately, that doesn't prevent all of our mail from being marked as spam. Some mail gets blocked because it comes from the same IP address as some spam mail. I know that Postmark puts effort in preventing spammers to use their service but Amazon probably doesn't care a lot about people misusing SES.
Wouldn't that imply that they have a lot of spammers on their network? As far as I understand, the value proposition is both "you don't need to worry about email" and "we have so many customers (sending legitimate emails that are very similar in content) and so little spam, we have great reputation and you're inheriting that reputation".
If that doesn't work out, is their reputation not good enough? Is the receiving server too strict? Are those blocks occurring on major providers or for individual servers where an annoyed person might just blacklist an IP if they get spam from them more than once?
Note that "a lot of spammers" isn't really a lot in laymen terms. It varies by provider, but last I worked on this if anywhere from 2-5% of all emails you send are clicked as spam the provider will start blocking you.
We got blocked once because we got a single spam click: the ISP said they have a zero tolerance policy. We had years of sending hundreds of email per week without a spam click.
> Email is all about reputation: it can take a lot of effort to build trust, but just one bad move and it's all gone.
In my experience, the email blacklists and filters are somewhat forgiving. I accidentally configured my email server as an open relay (didn't know what that was at the time), and for a brief period was sending a not insignificant percentage of spam worldwide.
Once I discovered my mistake and corrected the issue, I was able to submit domain removal requests to the various blacklists, or just wait for my domain to fall off the radar. I expected it to be worse, and was pleasantly surprised to find that this kind of "forgiveness" is really an industry standard.
But then, that was just one bad move. I'm not so sure about two bad moves, and I'd rather not find out.
Email is all about reputation: it can take a lot of effort to build trust, but just one bad move and it's all gone.