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Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

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Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#41

Post by toothbrush »

pdkl95 wrote: post #40

Aka, the "second-hand smoke" effect of gmail (or any similar service). Even if you are fine with giving your data Goggle (or Facebook, etc), it's a problem if your forcing that decision on others. The solution is probably using email in a manner closer to how it was originally designed: many local MTAs instead of a handful of centralized MTAs. Here's a product idea, which could make someone a lot if they can find a w…

I love the second-hand smoke analogy. I will use it when having The Talk with my friends :).

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#43

Post by DanBC »

ryanlol wrote: post #33
Panino wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Spamhaus DNSBL alone drops 99% of spam with almost no FPs. Add DROP, fullbogons, and greylisting to increase the percentage further. None of these methods read the message body, and there are plenty of other options as well. I self-host and receive about 5 spam messages per year, all without looking at the message body.

I'm not sure if you know how spamhaus DNSBL works, "no FPs" is ridiculously far from the truth. They make it near impossible for bigger hosts not to get blacklisted unless they fully comply with spamhaus.

Do you have any cites for this? Everything I've seen suggests that Zen has a very low false positive rate. That's the point of Zan - block a decent amount of spam and no real email so that your slower better filters can work.

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#44

Post by ryanlol »

DanBC wrote: post #43
ryanlol wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you know how spamhaus DNSBL works, "no FPs" is ridiculously far from the truth. They make it near impossible for bigger hosts not to get blacklisted unless they fully comply with spamhaus.

Do you have any cites for this? Everything I've seen suggests that Zen has a very low false positive rate. That's the point of Zan - block a decent amount of spam and no real email so that your slower better filters can work.

Spamhaus has a history of extorting larger ISPs into dropping their customers instead of just blocking said customer.

https://www.virusbtn.com/blog/2011/10_13.xml

It's worth noting that spamhaus had no real reason to do this as they had already blocked the hosting company a2b was providing bandwidth to, so blocking all of a2b didn't actually stop any more spam.

Zen is far far from not blocking any real email, they regularly block large ISPs that refuse too indiscriminately drop customers on their request.

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#45

Post by pdkl95 »

toothbrush wrote: post #41
pdkl95 wrote: post #40

Aka, the "second-hand smoke" effect of gmail (or any similar service). Even if you are fine with giving your data Goggle (or Facebook, etc), it's a problem if your forcing that decision on others. The solution is probably using email in a manner closer to how it was originally designed: many local MTAs instead of a handful of centralized MTAs. Here's a product idea, which could make someone a lot if they can find a w…

I love the second-hand smoke analogy. I will use it when having The Talk with my friends :).

It's Aral Balkan's analogy, from his talk[1] that I strongly recommend showing during That Talk. His presentation is amazingly approachable for a broad audience. Even my not-interested-in-tech mother has started to understand these issues specifically because of Mr. Balkan's explanation.

[1] https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#46

Post by cbpy »

Animats wrote: post #29

My incoming mail goes through SpamAssassin at the IMAP server, which does a decent job. All my mail addresses are public on web sites, so there's a lot of junk filtered out. My phone also uses the IMAP server, so I don't need any Google services. It's an Android phone, but it's never been logged into Google, wasn't bought from a carrier, and many of the built-in Google apps have been removed. (Hint: when you start up…

Or you can also install Cyanogenmod without installing the Google-apps package.

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#47

Post by x5n1 »

leeleelee wrote: post #31

The takeaway? Don't use standard e-mail (gmail or otherwise) for anything that needs guaranteed privacy. Once you send an e-mail, it is not within your control what happens to it or who sees it. That's why, for example, in healthcare -- messages are commonly wrapped in secure message "containers". The e-mail simply has a link that takes you to a third party where the actual message is stored, encrypted, has an expira…

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#48

Post by Tepix »

systemz wrote: post #42

Configuring and maintaining email servers is a mess. Most of the people are just outsouring it. There is a lack of simple to use free tools to provide self hosted email.

Have you tried sovereign ( https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign )? For someone who knows a bit about Linux, it's a snap to install and get running.

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#49

Post by mattmcknight »

bluecmd wrote: post #4
trjordan wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most systems never found a good way to encrypt data at rest. You either have to let the user manage the keys / passphrase, giving up things like search and password recovery, or you have to manage the keys in a service, which doesn't provide privacy from the service that manages the keys.

Spam is also a problem. How do you do spam detection if you cannot read the message?

Don't give your public key out freely.

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#50

Post by mattmcknight »

peterhunt wrote: post #13
tkinom wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have the public keys of all senders, one can easily white/black list the known known/non-spammers. All the undecided goes into just one folder. Probably not be that hard to sort out.

This is actually very hard to sort out and is a deal-breaker for end-to-end email encryption. https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000780....

But why would you need the sender's key? They need to encrypt with your public key, which you only provide to a limited list, and change when it gets blown. What we need is an automated way for requesting someone's key, approving or disapproving that request, and then storing their key for future use....in gmail.
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