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Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#151

Post by ColinWright »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #147
ColinWright wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, every server-level spam filter I'm used has had so many false positives it's caused me significant problems. Also FWIW, people to whom I send email regularly tell me that their email systems mis-classify my emails as spam. I've spoken with several networking specialists, and they all shrug their shoulders and say: "It's the server level spam filtering ... it's not very good." GMail in particular is known to be…

Just as a counterpoint, my company uses Google Workspace for email and we receive a good deal of spam. Been using it a couple years now and it's been very good at identifying spam, with very few false positives.

(I've up-voted you ... our contexts are different, our experiences are different, the results are different, and it's important people get all points of view).

I have/work with three different companies ... two of them use Google based email systems, one (my own) does the filtering "in house". One of the G-based systems performs well, the other has multiple false positives every day.

I'm sure it performs well for the majority of people ... it's likely that the emails I send and receive are atypical, and Google performs badly because they are not "normal".

Everyone has to decide where that trade-off lies. In my context, I simply cannot trust Google, or any other server-side filtering, for important email. As others have said, it simply means the spam folder is a second inbox.

As I say to my clients about so many things: take advice, understand the trade-offs, make a decision, deal with the consequences.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#152

Post by denton-scratch »

jasonjayr wrote: post #41
jcranmer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, what you see in the spam filter is the stuff that isn't obviously spam--the latter category is entirely black-holed. False positives in spam detection are really bad, so you want to tune your algorithm to have really low false positive rates--which means you get high false negative rates in turn. Having a spam folder to filter non-black-holed spam into allows you to introduce another level where false pos…

It shouldn't ever be black holed, it should rejected in the SMTP transaction. I'd love to never have to ask "did you get my email message?"

I don't agree. There are servers and domains that only send spam. There's no point in passing those through a computationally-expensive filter system; we already know they are spam.

> I'd love to never have to ask

Yeah, me too. But email is a best-efforts delivery system; email delivery can fail for reasons other than spam-filters.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#153

Post by jeffybefffy519 »

I think the question you should be asking is why the email standard has not evolved in a way to give users more control. Like + addressing that gmail uses is a great user control but its not supported everywhere. Extending on features like that would really empower users to control content in their mail box more.

An idea I have is if i could do this: ‘@.gmail.com’. Then change the subdomain part as i feel fit. Similar to plus addressing but dont allow no subdomain so its hard for marketters and spammers to remove.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#154

Post by jasonjayr »

denton-scratch wrote: post #152
jasonjayr wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't ever be black holed, it should rejected in the SMTP transaction. I'd love to never have to ask "did you get my email message?"

I don't agree. There are servers and domains that only send spam. There's no point in passing those through a computationally-expensive filter system; we already know they are spam. > I'd love to never have to ask Yeah, me too. But email is a best-efforts delivery system; email delivery can fail for reasons other than spam-filters.

You don't have to send it through the filter. You can decide @ accept() time that the message will rejected. If you intended to blackhole it; you were planning on burning bandwidth and letting the sender send their bytes entirely, and then responding "2xx OK, whatever"

Instead, just simply say "500 FOAD." after DATA and be done with it on the non-zero chance the sender actually has something important to say, and needs to decide if they need to use another channel.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#155

Post by blunte »

They do find their way to inboxes, especially for folks who continue to use services like Yahoo mail. Some get through Gmail too.

There are a LOT of older folks who are terribly un-savvy users who do not engage their brains when behind a computer.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#156

Post by _aavaa_ »

anderspitman wrote: post #77
pwg wrote: post #2

> These emails are so bad and there is almost no chance of them finding their way through a spam filter, why are people still sending them? Most likely because the cost to send per email is so low as to be essentially free. As well, there may be some amount of 'Nigerian email' issue here. I've heard it said that the "Nigerian prince with 65M needs help moving money to your country" emails are so poorly worded on purp…

I'd pay for a service that responds to every spam email with a GPT-generated conversation, with the goal of wasting more of their resources than yours. Maybe you could train it on a central database that keeps track of which conversations get the most consecutive replies from scammers. You might not even need GPT. Maybe just the act of responding with a reasonable amount of text would create a large filtering burden…

I don't think it'll waste much time, they'd just run their own conversation generating bot for the first few emails before passing to a human. It'll just be two NN models talking to each other.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#157

Post by tata71 »

pwg wrote: post #2

> These emails are so bad and there is almost no chance of them finding their way through a spam filter, why are people still sending them? Most likely because the cost to send per email is so low as to be essentially free. As well, there may be some amount of 'Nigerian email' issue here. I've heard it said that the "Nigerian prince with 65M needs help moving money to your country" emails are so poorly worded on purp…

Per email?

Or per address/domain?

What's the best "altruistism wins" way?

Paid addresses, like ETH network?

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#158

Post by chefkoch »

ColinWright wrote: post #137
jaywalk wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who uses spam filtering in their email client anymore? That's done at the server level.

FWIW, every server-level spam filter I'm used has had so many false positives it's caused me significant problems. Also FWIW, people to whom I send email regularly tell me that their email systems mis-classify my emails as spam. I've spoken with several networking specialists, and they all shrug their shoulders and say: "It's the server level spam filtering ... it's not very good." GMail in particular is known to be…

As someone who up until recently managed the mail system and antispam for a business processing ~250k mails a das, false positives are an outlier. We had a ticket because of this perhabs once a week and most of the time it was because of poorly setup Mailservers in the other end. Server side filtering works quite well, most of the spam comes from hijacked leggid accounts that are burned quite quickly.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#159

Post by asdff »

aeternum wrote: post #141
asdff wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To get this approach to work you need to mass email to get over the low hit rate. The next question that follows, is why don't providers crack down on these scammers who need to send mass emails for their numbers to even pencil out? I'm struck this all hasn't happened 25 years ago at this point.

Because newsletters, special interest groups, internet forums, product updates also a valid uses of mass email.

If you can filter that from spam you can also filter these users from those that abuse mass email.

Re: Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

#160

Post by ColinWright »

chefkoch wrote: post #158
ColinWright wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, every server-level spam filter I'm used has had so many false positives it's caused me significant problems. Also FWIW, people to whom I send email regularly tell me that their email systems mis-classify my emails as spam. I've spoken with several networking specialists, and they all shrug their shoulders and say: "It's the server level spam filtering ... it's not very good." GMail in particular is known to be…

As someone who up until recently managed the mail system and antispam for a business processing ~250k mails a das, false positives are an outlier. We had a ticket because of this perhabs once a week and most of the time it was because of poorly setup Mailservers in the other end. Server side filtering works quite well, most of the spam comes from hijacked leggid accounts that are burned quite quickly.

Great, I'm genuinely pleased to hear that your experience of server-side filters is a positive one. Mine is negative. The fact that you have a positive experience does not refute that mine is negative.

Please: I've experimented with this for over two decades, and continue to do so. I know that lots of people say that server-side filtering is fine. My direct personal experience is that for me it is not fine, including the spam filtering provided by Google's email service. I do not deny that for other people it's fine, I'm just saying ... don't deny my experience.

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