I dislike this kind of overblocking a lot. Not just TLD blocklists, but also IP blocklists.
I recently had to write an email to my local police station (xx@polizei.nrw.de) and their server was rejecting it because my IP (vultr) was on the "Proofpoint® Dynamic Reputation"-blacklist. I owned this single IPv4 for at least 3 years, so they whole vultr range must have been blocked by Proofpoint.
Great if you can't even contact your government because they are using some shitty blocklist product.
Personally, I run a mailcow instance with Rspamd and get only very few spam mails, albeit my email was being leaked in the ledger.com hack a few years ago. When I was still using mailbox.org, I got crypto spam mails (update your wallet yada yada) in my inbox twice a day. So just a configuration thing(?).
> Great if you can't even contact your government because they are using some shitty blocklist product.
I wonder how this is legal. Then again, I guess them throwing snail mail into the trash or refusing to open letters from particular individuals (as an example) would carry a different weight than some technical solution that nobody understands acting badly, with no particular person really being "responsible" for it.
I made similar experiences with a Hetzner VPS that I use to run mailcow (the TLD I'm using is .xyz). I refuse to give up though. One time I tried to contact my local city authority but they straight up blocked my emails. What followed was an email exchange with a slightly annoyed undertone by the guy that I reached via the postmaster address. In the end he apparently put me on some whitelist and my mail could be delivered.
Especially annoying is that in some cases filters blocking my mail are used on the postmaster address too, so to resolve an issue I have to use my gmail address.
I gave up on sending email myself and switched to smtp2go. I couldn't even get gmail to deliver my custom domain's email if I sent it from home (it was including my home IP in the outgoing headers!).
For low-volume home use, I definitely recommend just outsourcing SMTP to a company that does it professionally.
You need to host your email somewhere else. Any of the big name VPS providers are going to be on a blocklist. I've tried a bunch and its always the same pain
Gave up hosting my own, just not worth the headaches.
Do you live on Christmas Island? A certain infamous .cx domain was revoked when a resident complained that the owner didn't have ties to the island (though the content probably had more to do it than anything)
Is there a public list of TLDs that organizations block by default? I was surprised to find out .live which I was considering to buy for my family's personal email.
In my experience any ccTLD never gets blocked, including "funky" ones like .sh or .dj. My primary email ends with .online, and I also have some aliases in case .online "fails" (as in services refuse to send an email to it). I'd estimate it happens a couple of times per year.
