"The fundamental issue is that SendGrid’s business model depends on making it easy for legitimate businesses to send email at scale."
I disagree with this conclusion, if not only because other email service providers don't have this issue.
It wouldn't surprise me if something was broken with SendGrid's internal infrastructure. I used to be a SendGrid customer until my deliverability started being affected by this issue. SendGrid took weeks to reply to my customer service messages about resolving this, even though I was a paying customer and was renting private IP addresses from them to send mail.
I finally gave up and closed my SendGrid account in July 2021. Despite this, they continued to send me monthly invoices until May 2022. Multiple SendGrid representatives promised that they had resolved the issue, but it wasn't until one CSR added me to SendGrid's global suppression list that they finally stopped.
If the attackers in this case are cleverly exploiting anything, I would bet on aggressive grey patterns like that more than I would US culture wars. Noticing that a company has policies that let you hide in plain sight means that you're paying close attention. Knowing what issues are hot button culture flamewars means you can access literally any American news outlet.
>closed my SendGrid account ....continued to send me monthly invoices
I used to run IT for a medium company. The amount of times I saw this with various SaaS companies was troubling. We had hundreds of services some as small as a single manager that demanded X and company wide tools. It was frequently a several months long hassle to get them to stop billing us when we cut ties with them. I wish I kept personal records now it was a minority but definitely in the 15%'ish range.
I disagree with this conclusion, if not only because other email service providers don't have this issue.
It wouldn't surprise me if something was broken with SendGrid's internal infrastructure. I used to be a SendGrid customer until my deliverability started being affected by this issue. SendGrid took weeks to reply to my customer service messages about resolving this, even though I was a paying customer and was renting private IP addresses from them to send mail.
I finally gave up and closed my SendGrid account in July 2021. Despite this, they continued to send me monthly invoices until May 2022. Multiple SendGrid representatives promised that they had resolved the issue, but it wasn't until one CSR added me to SendGrid's global suppression list that they finally stopped.