Posted by thatha7777 10 hours ago
They even have a Whistleblowing link at the bottom of their website: https://www.bankingsupervision.europa.eu/about/esfs/html/ind...
they forgot to include a message-id
something the RFC standard recommend but doesn't require
but it being required is a de-facto industry standard for sending automated mails
and is clearly documented by support sides of large mail providers (like Google)
the mail standards only defines what parts you can put together, but widely fail to define how this parts can be interpreted, what are sensible combinations, etc.
and they don't cover spam/suspicious mail detection at all
so you can't just go by RFC, you need to read up on what all larger mail providers have as additional requirements (which mostly are the same, and Message-Id being the most common dominator) and then hope that another provider you didn't read up one doesn't have some other surprising rule (which doesn't tent to be the case if you don't do anything surprising, but it sucks anyway).
I can definitely confirm that this is a common thing. But I think this is a "small org"-problem more than a "European business"-problem. Apparently, the company has somewhere between 500 and 1000 employees (I couldn't find good data, sadly). With a size like this, the "support" is probably outsourced (meaning they don't know anything), there are maybe 100 engineers (probably less) and the mailing is either done via a third-party or set up by an Admin that left three years ago.
Without any basis, I will speculate that you will notice this more in Europe because there is simply no company at the size of Stripe or similar.
Most companies here use stripe on their website.
i'm not greek but a greek ecommerce i buy from uses viva
The RSS spec is one way. RSS readers do a fine job of interpreting files done the right way. Publishers don’t always do a good job with publishing error free RSS files. So RSS readers devs have to anticipate all sorts of errors and conduct error handling to ensure RSS items are properly handled.
This is why companies want to keep their file format proprietary. Other devs can really do damage to the ecosystem and ruin the experience
Currently working on replacing a couple decades old system, and my csv output is using a library that isn't quoting all the strings that don't require quotes... so I'm forced to do it (for compatibility) with the other system this csv is going to. (sigh).
That's too kind of you, but on the other hand it really doesn't solve the issue of bad priorities and lack of overall Quality. Some engineer might log a couple hours fixing a Level 3 severity bug, emails will start working better, but the poor (or at the least, dubious) backwards technical stewardship (or lack of it) will keep going on inside the company, unnoticed from outside (until something bad eventually happens to some client)
Message-Id being required for automated mails is a de-facto industry standard
while the consequence differ it missing will also make it much more likely for most other large mail providers to reject your mail or classify it as spam.
It's also well known. Pretty much viva engineers fucked up doing proper research.
Now to be fair:
- it sucks that you can't just implement the RFC(s)
- the standards suck, docent of different RFCs overlapping and replacing each other and referencing often older versions of other RFCs, with docents of ways to do the same things of which only some can be used reliable in practice and a common gaps in the standards about edge cases or about the "higher level semantics" of constructs.
- so overall mail seems very simple at first but if you want to automated send mails reliable internationally it's a total pain and Message-Id is just the head of the iceberg