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Gmail Will Warn If Message Is Not Authenticated/Encrypted

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Re: Gmail Will Warn If Message Is Not Authenticated/Encrypted

#191

Post by inopinatus »

jonknee wrote: post #161
inopinatus wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they have a reputation system in which I've gained a good standing and you haven't. Have you considered that your attempts to game their system have actually been regarded as abuse?

All major email providers do similar things because this is exactly the setup you'd have if you were a spam operation. Email is just something that you shouldn't try and do yourself on a small scale.

Email remains the poster child (given its age, perhaps that should be poster grandparent) for how a lightweight federated communications protocol can service needs from micro to mega.

For comparison: the sidelining of XMPP by corporate interests was awfully disappointing; the centralisation of social networking feeds is downright heartbreaking. But none of that should put us off trying and trying again. Everyone with an interest in how the Internet protocol stack works in context should try running their own mail service, it's a fantastic and low-cost way to gain insight.

Re: Gmail Will Warn If Message Is Not Authenticated/Encrypted

#192

Post by pmlnr »

I'm gettin tired of seeing 'mail is hard'. No, it's not. You need to learn it, and there are a lot of knobs and buttons, indeed, but it's not hard, especially not with the plethora of tutorials around.

Sysadmining was never that easy and was never intended to be done by the general public by clicking on a few 'continue' buttons and as the web is evolving, so is mail. Deal with it.

Re: Gmail Will Warn If Message Is Not Authenticated/Encrypted

#193

Post by ejolto »

techsupporter wrote: post #96
elihu wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the problem, exactly? > Most people are not capable of running their own mail server. I think that is a big part of the problem. It should be relatively straightforward for someone who isn't a full-time email server administrator to setup a mail server correctly, but it's not. At least, it wasn't easy last time I tried it with Postfix and (iirc) Courier on Ubuntu. All the cryptography options are disabled by…

If it helps, I recently rebuilt my mail server and changed from FreeBSD+qmail+Courier to Ubuntu+Postfix+Dovecot. In doing so, I used this series from Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/how-to... It shows how to set up SPF, DKIM, TLS, anti-spam filtering, Sieve, certificate-based authentication (I still haven't figured out how to do this with an iPhone), and so on. The only bolt-on it…

Thanks for the interesting link, I've been curious for a while about running my own email server.

Do you encrypt the email on disk, or are they stored in plain text?

Re: Gmail Will Warn If Message Is Not Authenticated/Encrypted

#194

Post by vidarh »

sangnoir wrote: post #122
gscott wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For now they will just warn on it. In a few months they will send it to spam. Just wait.

> For now they will just warn on it. In a few months they will send it to spam As a recipient of all kinds of mail, I'm okay with that. I'd rather not see that unencrypted email than have it QUANTUM INSERT'd or whatever the Chinese equivalent is.

There's nothing stopping the spammers from getting certs.

Re: Gmail Will Warn If Message Is Not Authenticated/Encrypted

#195

Post by [deleted] »

amichal wrote: post #150
dheera wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So run it on AWS. In general, I think running mail servers off a residential, or even business ISP is very sketchy. E-mail is my primary line of communication for important matters, and I can't afford to have a snowstorm, busted hard drive, orange juice spill, or basement flood take out my mail sever.

Ec2 blocks/throttles outgoing smtp

[deleted]

Re: Gmail Will Warn If Message Is Not Authenticated/Encrypted

#196

Post by icebraining »

dheera wrote: post #148
Kadin wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most ISPs don't allow inbound (or, often, outbound) connections on port 25, so the number of people who can run mail servers at home is pretty limited. I think even Cox stopped allowing it a while ago, and they were among the most lenient of the big ISPs. (Comcast hasn't allowed it for a while.) That, I think, is why the distribution managers don't make the default configurations a little more friendly/sane; most use…

So run it on AWS. In general, I think running mail servers off a residential, or even business ISP is very sketchy. E-mail is my primary line of communication for important matters, and I can't afford to have a snowstorm, busted hard drive, orange juice spill, or basement flood take out my mail sever.

I don't think it's "sketchy" to have different requirements. For my personal needs, email is definitively important, but it doesn't need HA, and its store-and-forward architecture means it copes fine with an hour or six of downtime (serves usually retry for several days until giving up).

Re: Gmail Will Warn If Message Is Not Authenticated/Encrypted

#197

Post by treenyc »

jcoffland wrote: post #30

This sounds great but Google has been making it harder and harder to run your own mail server even for personal use. I think they would be happy of email servers were only run by a few large companies. They make it sound like they are doing the right thing but really they are bully the industry to do it their way. So many people have Gmail accounts that you can't run an email server that cannot send email to Google.…

Main complain to Google or other big company. Stop putting email in spam that doesn't have reverse DNS set. Why should one IP be tight to one email domain?

Re: Gmail Will Warn If Message Is Not Authenticated/Encrypted

#198

Post by sangnoir »

vidarh wrote: post #194
sangnoir wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For now they will just warn on it. In a few months they will send it to spam As a recipient of all kinds of mail, I'm okay with that. I'd rather not see that unencrypted email than have it QUANTUM INSERT'd or whatever the Chinese equivalent is.

There's nothing stopping the spammers from getting certs.

My comment has nothing to do with spammers, and everything to do with the possibility of unencrypted email I receive (spam or not) being nefariously tampered with while in transit (see QUANTUM INSERT)

Re: Gmail Will Warn If Message Is Not Authenticated/Encrypted

#199

Post by unprepare »

jacquesm wrote: post #190
sinatra wrote: post #88

I think as HNers, we're focusing too heavily on niche cases (like running your own email server). But, for general public who is still sharing their own (and more importantly, their clients') SSNs, passwords, and other very sensitive information on email, this may be the trigger that educates / trains them to be more careful. I am definitely looking at this as a positive.

With SSNs the problem is not in the fact that they are in an email, but the fact that they are sensitive information at all.

SSNs have become a complete joke.

Like why would I need to give my SSN to register for an account to take the GRE exam? And why would anyone ever make SSN an optional field? If its not required why would you ever ask for it?

https://mygre.ets.org/greweb/createAcct/createAcctMain.jsp

Re: Gmail Will Warn If Message Is Not Authenticated/Encrypted

#200

Post by striking »

Johnny555 wrote: post #180
striking wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is also far less instantaneous and is locked into a single kind of infrastructure. It's useful for only one thing. I don't think it needs to be changed, really. It will stay this useful forever, probably.

"locked into a single kind of infrastructure" What does that mean? A mail server can be a small perl script running on an embedded computer, or it can be a hundred front-end SMTP servers using a database as a back end datastore, there's no real infrastructure limit other than being able to make and receive connections on TCP port 25.

You can't add in-message active content, though. (At least not without some serious hacks, like that thing LinkedIn did.)
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