Most legit providers offer filter rules you can configure as you need.

Filters are for email post-delivery. By the time a server is executing your filter instructions, Microsoft’s server has already delivered the message and disconnected. It’s too late at that point. If some rare mail service were to bounce a message based on user-specified filters, it would have to be after the msg has already been delivered. This would risk “backscatter”, whereby the bounced response attempts to connect to the /perceived/ sending server, which could be incorrect. And even if it is correct, the sending server may not accept the bounced msg.

The configuration I describe can only competently be done on the server and it necessarily must be the same behavior for all users on that server because the refusal happens before the sending server even has a chance to send an SMTP “RCPT TO” line.

Unless you are intentionally finding services that do not use M$ infrastructure then you risk losing a lot of access.

It would be senders who lose access. I’m already happy to not connect to surveillance advertisers. The idea is that users on surveillance ad platforms lose access so they cannot deliver to my inbox.

Any email service could be configured to block Microsoft.

Indeed, whoever controls the server could do that. But who does? I don’t have an always-on WAN-facing machine, so I am interested in finding an email provider who does the blocking because as an end user I don’t have the privs.

I’m not sure why you want to do that at the platform level though. That’s a great way to not have delivered legitimate email traffic.

Microsoft is a surveillance advertiser who I boycott. I do not want to feed MS’s ad machine. For outbound mail, I can do an MX lookup first and only send email to non-MS non-Google recipients, but that’s not reliable because some recipients mask their email providers using a firewall like barracuda networks. So when such users try to email me, I would like their email to be refused.

About blocking “legit” traffic, MS does that anyway. I’ve seen MS reject RFC-compliant non-spam email 1st hand. I am happy to reciprocate.

I gave some feedback here, but wanted to give video ideas (in vain of course because the Norwegian Consumer Council is not here in Lemmy.

Would have been great if one of the high-up enshitifiers were giving a seminar to the staff to emphasize how consumers are pushovers. They really missed something important. He could have said “just throw more CAPTCHAs at them… they will solve them… the consumers have no spine, which is great for us!”

Would also be cool if they did a more serious Michael Moore style documentary, where they cover historic enshitification, such as British mail delayers (that is, there used to be a job where a human would look at how fast postal mail was being delivered and if lower class mail would be delivered as fast as 1st class mail, they would deliberately hold it back). And Intel who deliberately crippled their CPUs to clock at slower speeds than the chips were capable of. There are countless examples like this.

The Norweigans missed the most important (and easiest!) action:

• Public services themselves need to get off Facebook & Twitter. If they can’t walk the walk and take their own advice, it’s not just an optical embarrassment. As someone who already boycotts the shitty gatekeepers (Cloudflare, google, ms, fb, apple, twtr), I am already free from enshittification — except when I must interact with a public service.

WTF?! The only unmanagable evil force I must deal with comes from the gov itself, who imposes shitty gatekeepers in the course of doing public tasks. I can’t boycott the government.

Belgian public services ALL use Microsoft for their email. So you should do everything on paper in Belgium. But what do they do? They scan paper letter/form/submissions and then they email it to themselves via Microsoft’s server. I shit you not. Microsoft is inescapable even by the most disciplined. And it’s only because the government itself will not ditch the motherfuckers.

Exceptionally, it’s somewhat redeeming that the Norweigans mention that public services should use open source. But that just scratches the surface. The very first thing they should do is get off Facebook and Twitter.