It's not a list of email providers that work with FT.

It's a list of email providers that work.

In my day job, I send a fair bit of transactional email (several thousand pieces per day). I also send about half a million marketing emails a month (from a separate system and domain). There are some people who message me that they never got the email back from me with what they requested. Certain ISPs tend to show up in that list of problems. Others don't. Gmail is by far my largest email recipient (45% of my sends). I literally _never_ hear about problems with anyone using Gmail. Yahoo is my second-largest recipient (15%), and they're the source of about 10% of email issues. Hotmail's next (9%), and they're maybe another 10%. AOL's in fourth place with sends (5%) but at least half of my email issues come from them, maybe more. Comcast is the sixth-largest recipient (3%) but at least another 10% of email issues. The remaining 20% of email issues I encounter are with misconfigured private domains.

Issues with email deliverability are not on IB. The blame rests squarely with the email vendors who just haven't put the resources into figuring out how to make email work. Google, love 'em or hate 'em, has--Gmail just works. For someone like Comcast to be 3% of my sends but 10% of my problems when the largest receiver (Gmail) gets nearly half of my volume and has zero percent of my problems--not to mention AOL who has 5% of my sends and fully half of my problems--should illustrate just how bad these guys are at providing email.

We as transactional senders can do everything we can to maximize deliverability--send from private, high-reputation IP addresses, make sure SPF and DKIM records are properly set, make sure the email content and formatting doesn't give any reason for a scanner to think it's spam, etc., but it's ultimately up to the email provider to correctly decide whether a message is wanted by the end user or not. Most email providers suck at that. Google's figured out how to make that distinction accurately.

I get the joke you're making about FT endorsing a paid boutique provider, but ultimately, having the email you asked for delivered is a benefit to you, not FT. If your current email vendor isn't doing a good job getting the messages you want to you, it's harming you, so it's up to you to fire them, and a paid boutique provider (like Fastmail) is a benefit to you, not FT (think of it as deciding to get a PO box after you've gotten tired of the neighborhood kids stealing mail out of your regular mailbox; your electric company sending you a bill isn't responsible for the fact that the kids stole it out of your mailbox or even that the post office lost it). I'm not suggesting everyone here needs to get a paid boutique provider--Google works perfectly fine in my experience. Some people hate Google, though (understandable--not everyone is happy to trade away what shreds of privacy we all have left for access to a good product), and something like Fastmail is a great option. If you want to stay in the free email realm, what I can say is that Yahoo is a very distant second to Gmail in terms of reliability (though it's better than pretty much all of the other free options or ISP-offered options). Use at your own risk of mail getting stolen by the neighborhood kids.