No, I went straight to trying to shame them on Twitter. The part where I said "We’ve tried to talk. @Apple just stops responding once they realize what we’re asking" was just a joke, you got me.

Having friends inside of Apple that provide you with something no one else can obtain is a fairly decent definition of favoritism.

You cannot send Push notifications to the stock iOS Mail app no matter how hard you try. They can. There are functions inside of iOS that are made better because of this (auto copied 2FA codes, for example).

There's no evidence "nobody else can obtain" it. The parent's link to the Apple developer forum shows somebody else obtaining it. There's no evidence that MXroute couldn't do the same.

There is no defined process for obtaining it. If you'd like to tear down that statement into little pieces and dissect it, I recommend getting a new hobby because it's not that interesting.

MXroute doesn't go around threatening US companies with EU law from Texas. As for your requirement for evidence, this situation does not require your approval unless you work for Apple and can offer some help in the matter. The tweet you are critiquing is me (owner of MXroute) attempting to gain Apple's attention to get what Fastmail and that EU user have obtained. I'll continue doing what I'm doing, if that's alright with you. I'm well aware of the situation and what others have done. What I need at this point is eyes on the prize. I'll get what I'm after, but a public statement that I currently cannot get what I'm after is entirely appropriate for the avenue I've chosen to do so.

It's a mistake to assume that I'm merely flailing my arms chaotically and generically playing the role of Karen.

This is a pretty unfortunate context for this, but I just wanted to say that I've been using your service for years, and me and my handful of customers are 100% satisfied.

It sucks that Apple won't just embrace interop with host mail services in some formal way, I'm not sure what the benefit of this specific flavor of gatekeeping achieves. It also sucks that HN contrarians are reflexively dumping on this, instead of supporting entrepreneurs like one might hope in such a community. Anyway, keep up the great work, I'm with you long term.

The stock Mail app for iOS does not support JMAP.

The stock iOS Mail app does not support JMAP and therefore it has no relation to Push notifications for the stock iOS Mail app.

This is exactly why we put this as a forbidden use case in the MXroute policy:

“Deceptive use against third party services by creating multiple email accounts to pretend to be multiple users of their service”

Because if you want to maintain a good reputation with people, you don’t facilitate people taking advantage of them.

It varies. It likely is an exaggeration for you, but for someone else it isn’t. It only needs to target a few domains to act as a DDOS. Rejecting invalid recipients reduces spam scanning overhead. It’s very significant at scale, for someone managing enough domains to see it.

The problem seems to be that while many domains don’t see this behavior, it seems random which ones do. Having the catchall in place when someone finally does target your domain like this seals the deal: Every one of the 16,000 recipient addresses that were accepted were just added to a list of working email addresses to be sold to spammers for the next 15 years. One hour to ruin your domain, and maybe it never happens to you, or maybe it happens to you tomorrow.

I’ve seen it go down like this at least a few hundred times in the last decade. Safe to say I’ve managed email for a few domains during that time. Enough to say it doesn’t happen to most people, but the ones it happens to usually end up having to disable their catchall or buy a new domain.

As an admin of shared mail servers you often have to base protections and actions on the worst of events, as those are the ones that threaten your infrastructure.

Feel free to open a support ticket about that and request that I evaluate any such 30 minute delays. If it’s the Friday server and you’re referring to inbound, mitigation has been applied while I work on the long term fix.

We (MXroute) maintain low queues (high queues set off alarms, literally). Funny detail, I actually have our combined mail queues as a widget on my phone: https://files.freesocial.co/f.php?h=0fyHTzMz&p=1 (don’t judge me, I like iOS this week)

We have excessive resources as well as our own IP ranges. Any delays are most likely related to someone else. Can’t send someone email faster than their mail server accepts it. Happy to answer a support ticket about it but all of our mail queues are human audited every few hours.

Best wishes for you and your startup, we need more good people out here.

Edit: There is one exception being one older server that is experiencing a bug specific to cPanel, which is mitigated presently with a final resolution in progress. That’s just sysadmin stuff.

There's some good feedback in there and I appreciate it!

Whatever you decide, I'm here for you at MXroute and would love to have you on board. I understand your concerns and I wouldn't say anything to invalidate them, the burden of choice is yours and I'm merely here if you need me <3