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The Hostile Email Landscape

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Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#201

Post by Too »

brongondwana wrote: post #188
nabla9 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html Internet Mail 2000 IM2000 is a project to design a new Internet mail infrastructure around the following concept: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility.

Anything which loses immutability loses in my book. Once I get an email it's my own copy, and it never goes away. How I'm reading im2000, the sender can retract or change the message, because they have the copy. I guess if I marked every message as "keep a copy for me" as soon as I read it, it would be OK - hard to do that while not having to read spam just in case I want to keep a copy though.

Detecting moifications can be solved with a hash or signature of the message that is sent out and always kept by the recipient. Doesn't solve the retracting though, or the social aspects of what to do if you actually detect a hash mismatch.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#202

Post by skrebbel »

It bothers me that this entire thread is about technology. This is anticompetitive behavior by a small group of oligopolists, plain and simple.

The big providers need to build an accessible system for entering the email market or face tremendous fines from worldwide governments. There are plenty ways imaginable to do this, especially if you allow the process to involve real people and paperwork.

It shouldn't matter whether this is simple negligence or conscious work to keep out competition. The end result is that it's made nigh on impossible by a few market leaders to enter said market.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#203

Post by weihaw »

Gmail has Postmaster tools that let domains with moderately large mail flow be able to monitor their spam reputation scores, email authentication e.g DKIM / SPF, DMARC rejection rates, etc. This tool can help address a number issues folks here have mentioned wrt Gmail. In particular please look at the "Delivery Errors Dashboard" description in the help center article.

help center post: https://goo.gl/7QHoqc Postmaster tool: https://gmail.com/postmaster/

(disclosure I work in Gmail)

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#204

Post by chmike »

SMTP Mail is broken. The best justification is that error messages can't even be sent back to avoid abuse by spammers. People are constrained to use services like gmail to avoid troubles. This is a serious privacy threat.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#205

Post by kintamanimatt »

weihaw wrote: post #203

Gmail has Postmaster tools that let domains with moderately large mail flow be able to monitor their spam reputation scores, email authentication e.g DKIM / SPF, DMARC rejection rates, etc. This tool can help address a number issues folks here have mentioned wrt Gmail. In particular please look at the "Delivery Errors Dashboard" description in the help center article. help center post: https://goo.gl/7QHoqc Postmaste…

What about for the small time, personal servers? How do we get our mail delivered without having to use a third party service like Mandrill?

I'm not blaming you personally, but the way Gmail handles email originating from personal servers is reprehensible.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#206

Post by chmike »

adekok wrote: post #20
cm2187 wrote: post #7

The problem is not so much the attitude of the big guys. It is that smtp is fundamentally broken. we need a better mail protocol that ensures: 1. Traffic always encrypted and content always signed 2. Guarantee that the sender is who it claims he is 3. Decorrelating the email from the domain, a lot of users are prisoners of their current provider just because the address they gave everyone ends with the provider's dom…

> It is that smtp is fundamentally broken. Because the SMTP cabal is fanatically opposed to changing it. The response I had 15 years ago was "It takes 10 years to deploy any serious changes to a protocol". Uh... so? Does that mean we shouldn't do it? Apparently, yes. 15 years later, there have been no substantive changes to SMTP. Repeat after me, SMTP is perfect. It's perfect! Well, there are a few known issues. But…

Changing SMTP would create a lot of interoperability problems. I agree with this. This is why I concluded that we need a new protocol that solves the problem of SMTP. If it's good it will take over SMTP's market share. That's the way to go. It's like IMAP taking over market share of POP, ...

It's been some years now that I'm thinking on this messaging and spamming problem. It is not a protocol or technical issue. The problem is the abuse of the communication system by spammer.

The worst is that people have to hide their contact address or use semi private messaging systems. This is totally contradictory to the evolution of the communication systems. We have smartphones and can't reliably send a message to any body in the world ? Internet is lacking a solution for that.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#207

Post by pilif »

OP might still have some configuration issue (check the headers of the mail that has been placed in the spam folder. Gmail usually tells you what the problem is).

Last August, I have added IPv6 to our mail server, so its address for sure didn't have any prior reputation. Once the PTR and SPF records were correct, sending mail over v6 to gmail was no problem at all.

I have yet to see any delivery issue over v6 that's caused by a lack of reputation

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#208

Post by technion »

What has completely decimated mail management in my experience had been the rise of cryptolocker related emails.

You could always deal with traditional viruses by blocking certain types of attachments. A false negative on spam just annoyed someone with some Viagra sale they probably didn't want.

Nowadays, you fail to block an email and suddenly a user loses his entire department's file share for the day.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#209

Post by chmike »

jasode wrote: post #34

>This isn't how the internet is supposed to work. The email architecture was started back when it was a smaller network of researchers at universities, governments, etc. Everybody basically trusted each other. Once the "internet" is available to the general public and commercial interests, it becomes vulnerable to the "bad actors" problem (e.g. spam abuse). That's why we have the inevitable situation today of a few e…

How do you solve the problem of "cold call" with a trusting system ? How does one build up trust with a new account ? Spammers could create million accounts at once and fake trust build up between them. That's why I'm not convinced that trust will solve the abuse of messaging. A messaging application must allow "cold calls". Relying on trust built up by others is not a reliable system because it can be abused.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#210

Post by chmike »

tromp wrote: post #169
zrm wrote: post #147

I was thinking about this a while ago and have been meaning to write it up and post it somewhere, so I guess this is as good a time as any. Hashcash (also known as the precursor to Bitcoin) was proposed to solve this problem in 1997: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash The trouble with it is that it requires computation for each sent message, which is bad for senders with low resource devices or legitimate mailing…

Sounds like a plan! With a memory-bound proof-of-work system like my Cuckoo Cycle, computing the hash could require the use of more than 4GB of memory for over 5 minutes on a 20-thread server, thus preventing the use of botnets for avoiding the expense.

Not sure Internet providers or google will be enthusiast about this proposal. This is equivalent as asking to pay to register a new destination address. In this case the mail relay owner has to pay. It would be more fair to ask users who send mail to pay to register a new destination address. Google and mail relay provider would be more happy with this variant.
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