You have a good point… and I’ve worked on both sides of the fence. Currently, I’m at the “healthy culture” camp, but it wasn’t always that way.

While I was working at companies that had a not-so healthy culture, there were things I did to “bring visibility” to these non-work tasks. However, I should add that at these types of companies didn’t really offer a lot of financial compensation for this non-work, but at no-time did anyone challenge my productivity.

Basically, I’d suggest:

1. Be (technically) opinioned and make it visible. Often, it’s not your boss you need to impress (as they see your work every day), it’s your boss’ boss. If you have a reputation within the company as a guru in something, it’s easier for your boss’ boss to “see” that you’re bringing “value” outside of you day-to-day tasks.
2. Bring visibility to these (side quest) discussions. At one company, I created a chat room to use as a sort of “technical self-help”(for all Engineers) and any DMs I got, I would ask them to funnel the discussion into the chat room. I asked them to do it “so others can find the answers to similar questions” and more importantly “to bring visibility to these discussions”. You, your boss, your boss’ boss can see how much time you invest in these topics and they can see that this help does not come for free.
3. If your not meeting your goals (or are stressed out) , due to these side-quests - tell your boss. Explain (as early as possible) that project X will slip if you keep focusing on unblocking others and let them decide what to do. If you followed-up with Point 2, you’ve got concrete evidence to justify where your time is being spent.
4. When people ask you “what are you doing?” (like during your Stand Up). Do not answer “nothing” or “supporting others”. Be detailed, mention the actual technical topics (and if you’ve got this chat room, reminding yourself is much easier).
5. Last bit, which might not be helpful. If it’s the same questions or some fundamental misunderstandings that your often answering: maybe offer a Dogo/training for anyone who’s interested. When you offer it, shout it from the highest tree top - it’ll go far in establishing yourself, in the company’s eyes, as a guru (even to those who don’t understand the topic) and it’ll (helpfully) reduce the amount of questions in that topic.

But from the companies perspective this is a net-gain.

You’ve just unblocked 10 people so they can continue to work… and even if their weekly individual productivity is 25% of yours, combined they’re doing more than twice the amount of work you’re doing and it only cost the company a week of your time.

Yeah, at times it’s frustrating and distracting, but hopefully you’re getting compensated for the knowledge you bring inaddition to the work you deliver.

Oh, I know the answer to this one: superbad.com (suitable for work).

Oh wow, I had no idea. I didn’t see any signs saying you couldn’t (this was 10+ years ago) and I figured if the gondola’s could cruise around, so could a little kayak.

Now I know better…

When I visited Venice, we had some whitewater kayaks with us in the car. We thought it would be a really memorable and unique experience to kayak around the canals of Venice.

Then we got there (in late summer) and took one look at the water and said “nope, I’m not dipping my toe in that toxic mess.”

… and I do not regret that decision.

OP, what bluGill said is exactly your problem (assuming your DMARC and friends are setup correctly).

The concept is referred to as “email (or domain) reputation”. The implementation details are closely guarded secrets, unique for each email receiver.

One of the metrics for establishing a positive email reputation the “How much email does your mail server sends?” : the more the better**

If you’re a large company, it’s fine… but if it’s just a personal domain with < 20 per week, you’re not going to establish a reputation and (depending on the receiver) you’re email might just get dropped.

The other (frequent) metric is: “Of the emails that are sent, how many are read, and how many are flagged as spam?” In order, for these crowd sourced spam filters to work, they need you to send large amounts of email. Receivers like Gmail/Google are pretty forgiving. However, Outlook/Microsoft are very aggressive, meaning if enough outlook users flag your email as Spam, then future emails sent to outlook from your domain will probably automatically be marked as spam. Obviously, these are all black boxes, so I can only offer my personal observations (take it worth a grain of salt).

As bluGill mentioned, there is a solution, but it involves moving your custom domain to a larger (re: paid) email provider. If you were to move to Google (for example), it doesn’t matter if your custom domain sends 5 emails per week. Those 5 emails are being sent from Google mail servers (using your custom domain) , which means they’re gaining the “reputation” of google and you can be certain that your emails will arrive, even if it’s (non-obvious) spam. Because, the email receiver assumes that Google will shut you down, if you’re a spammer.

It’s a sad state that one of the original “pillars of the internet” (email) has degraded to feed only the big tech companies… but unfortunately this has been the case for many years.