Posted by thatha7777 13 hours ago
I feel like this isn't just business services though.
American engineers are used to working for either big tech or "Silicon Valley inc." European engineers are used to working for Volkswagen, Ikea or Ryanair. Very different kinds of businesses who treat tech very differently.
Over here, competing on user experience and attracting users with a slick interface that people love to use isn't really something most companies think about (and so they get their lunch eaten by the Americans).
Nowhere is the European mentality more evident than in cybersecurity, where outdated beliefs still dominate. In this mentality, everybody is out to get you (and that notably incudes your vendors, your business partners and your customers), so all infrastructure has to be on prem, open source is free and hence suspicious by definition, obscurity is the best kind of security, encryption doesn't work so data should go over custom fiber, and if you have to expose an API on the public internet, an Authorization header isn't enough, it should also require MTLS behind a layer of IpSec.
I'm an European engineer and I can confirm that our tech is often broken and customer-reachable people are usually obtuse and hostile about it. We don't even seem to properly implement our own legal requirements. Sometimes, Americans implement the RGPD better than we do.
HOWEVER, I have learned the hard way to never apply that spirit to email.
In Europe you see this stuff all the time with old school "IT" (what old industrial companies call tech) people balking at the prices of commercial API-based senders and email marketing ESPs.
"Money to send emails in the cloud? HAH! Back at Siemens in 90s we were running millions of emails out of our servers just fine!"
Nobody understands that deliverability has gotten immensely harder these days, and trying to DIY it if its not your core business is just plain stupid. I would never in a million years try to roll my own email, it's nightmarish legacy cruft and footguns all the way down, in everything from IP/Domain Rep to something as simple as the HTML in the email templates themselves.
Microsoft Outlook and Gmail have the last word on everything in email, and their defacto duopoly (over B2B and consumer email respectively) means you play by the rules they set in 2008 and are too lazy to change or you don't get delivered. The protocol of email exists separately from the world of the actual inbox providers, which are locked down to insane degree given the security/spam concerns with email.
Microsoft regularly sends legitimate emails from Microsoft to my spam folder.
Even with a six-figure email spend and weeks of troubleshooting the best response we could get from our mail provider was that they were having problems getting traction with Microsoft on the issue.
One of my main emails is still on a "free" outlook.com hosted with a personal domain that I never shifted to paid 365. I've also got an MTA server (mailu) of my own that I've been testing with... my own email under outlook.com is literally the only one of the MS systems I can't seem to deliver to, the rest work fine. Same for google.com for that matter... kinda wild.
There are still too many edge cases like this one that can't get fixed because of ignorant support not doing it's job. In my life, every company that escalates to an engineer instead of punting the ticket with some asinine 'but it works right now, goodbye' message gets rewarded via keeping my business. The ones that don't are immediately cancelled. Sometimes I even do a chargeback as extra punishment. Maybe I'm just old, but I have near zero tolerance for immature support playing games with my time.
As you said, its not a bug.
A feature request might fare better.