Notice

The lugh.ch email service is being discontinued by the end of 2023.

Timeline

• October-December 2023: user notice and migration support
• 2024-01-01 to 2024-01-02: Migration to new email provider

Non-technical explanation for this

The effort required to guarantee email reception and delivery has exploded in recent years.

Technical background

I run email services since 2003 and it got considerably harder in the last few years thanks to big email providers.

Especially Microsoft is actively ruining the decentralized nature of email by blocking huge amounts of ASNs, which also negatively affects honest email service operators within those blocked networks. In addition to these actions, the Microsoft IP delist portal process is poorly implemented and delisted IP addresses are either relisted automatically, or the process does not work at all. Also, it is almost impossible to get in contact with a real human to explain technical details.

This downwards spiral combined with many businesses using Office 365 ruins the experience for smaller email providers like this one as the blast radius of a poorly scored IP reputation is dramatically increased.

I'm hoping on some kind of "great web reset" where we realize centralizing all the things was a bad idea. The amount of feedback in the Microsoft Tech Community thread confirms this is a widespread issue that nobody really cares about.