Mailbox providers

The other day I tweeted that I often used the term “receivers” to describe receiving MTAs.

A number of folks chimed in and the clear consensus was that the term most people used was “mailbox provider.”

The big problem I have for mailbox provider is that when we’re talking about filtering, or reputation, mailbox providers are not a monolith. Providers have different ways of filtering mail and that’s relevant to some discussions.

But, for now, I’ll use mailbox provider instead of receiver.

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I’m hearing a lot of claims about best practices recently and I’m wondering what people really mean by the term. All too often people tell me that they comply with “all best practices” followed by a list of things they do that are clearly not best practices.
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