Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spam blacklisting is out of control

blog.roastidio.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 430 posts

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#111

Post by derekzhouzhen »

LinuxBender wrote: post #2

There is a typo in their title. If intentional please instead consider words like block reject and deny for the people that do not speak English as a first language. I've dealt with real time blocklists as long as they have existed. They are not going away any time soon. I agree that the paid exception lists are a bit shady but I also see the validity of their methods of temporarily punishing everyone on a hosts netw…

Thanks, I fixed the typo.

Blocking outgoing port 25 unless going through an extra step is IMHO against the spirit of the internet, and would make operating a personal email server harder than necessary. The world of email is already too centralized as it is.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#112

Post by berdon »

newaccount74 wrote: post #100
berdon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about situations where your email somehow (mistype) gets set up for someone else's account? I have 2-3 people with similar emails to my previous email address that would mistype and I'd receive their emails. These weren't spam but the companies wouldn't offer _any_ way to fix this. My recourse is to just flag them as spam in gmail.

That's why I said the email should contain info about the sender -- there should of course be a way to contact them. Ideally you should just be able to reply to the message and tell them about the error. If there's no way to contact a company, that's a whole different problem, and not really one that would be fixed with unsubscribe links in important email messages.

In 99% of the cases - there is no recourse. In one instance, I tried replying and they asked me to prove my identity as the customer to cancel the emails.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#113

Post by ratww »

derefr wrote: post #46
wl wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We were also informed that our normal, business communications with paying customers should have unsubscribe notices appended to them. Which is to say, you're a paying customer of a service and we send you some kind of alert or critical announcement ... and it should have an unsubscribe link. You absolutely should. The amount of junk I get because someone else signed up for something and fat fingered their email ad…

That's a (very legitimate and important) reason to do double opt-in unilaterally for all email communications. Companies should make 100% sure that the person who signed up, and the person receiving the email, are the same person, before they associate the email with the account. Otherwise, malicious people can sign up arbitrary third parties for tons of random crap. But it's not a good reason for adding unsubscribe…

> So consider the extreme case: what if the user fat-fingers an unsubscribe (without realizing) to their local electric company's e-invoices, which is what they've been relying on to prod them to log onto the site and pay the bill?

I actually unsubscribed from my provider's invoices. That's because I have activated direct debit from my bank account so they're always paid, and I can view my past invoices on the website.

However you make a good point. I'd say the one thing where it doesn't make sense to have an "unsubscribe" at all is on "bill unpaid" emails.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#114

Post by berdon »

elondaits wrote: post #105
berdon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about situations where your email somehow (mistype) gets set up for someone else's account? I have 2-3 people with similar emails to my previous email address that would mistype and I'd receive their emails. These weren't spam but the companies wouldn't offer _any_ way to fix this. My recourse is to just flag them as spam in gmail.

You can create a Gmail filter to delete or archive them automatically and avoid poisoning the spam filter.

But...it is spam? If they don't give the tools necessary to stop the spam (unsubscribe or a link to "received this by mistake") then it's spam - intentional or not.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#115

Post by noduerme »

js2 wrote: post #97
mjrpes wrote: post #34

I fought the battle to keep my SMTP server IP off blacklists, and lost. You can do everything possible, have a perfectly clean IP, have a good amount of outbound email traffic, only send transactional email, etc. Still, there will be edge cases where email does not go through. AT&T email servers would constantly blacklist me and not respond to requests to remove me, gmail/yahoo/outlook would silently put emails in th…

How do you know whether your mail is going through? I can understand for messages that bounce, but how about mails that are silently dropped or end up in spam folders?

In our case it's quickly obvious since our server sends verification codes when people sign up for online accounts or change their passwords. We'll see a pattern of customer complaints from certain mail services within a day of being on any major blacklist.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#117

Post by gog »

basilgohar wrote: post #71

This has literally just recently (re-)become an issue for me because after a good year or so of not being blocked, several emails from my server started getting filtered as spam by both Google and then just being outright blocked by both Google and Microsoft. When I got through Microsoft's steps to unblock, after several days and steps, they send me the message that actually my IP is not blocked. Google's recent mess…

How did you contact Google and Microsoft regarding deliverability issues?

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#118

Post by thaumaturgy »

wl wrote: post #80
thaumaturgy wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how unsubscribe links are supposed to work. Once the unsubscribe is activated -- and it's supposed to be very easy to activate -- then it's permanent. There's no "un-unsubscribe", "oops I clicked it again", "some other service glitched and clicked it for me". Further, there's a distinction made between "commercial" and "transactional" messages in both law and etiquette. The unsubscribe link is expected in…

> Further, there's a distinction made between "commercial" and "transactional" messages in both law and etiquette. The unsubscribe link is expected in commercial messages, not transactional ones. Most of the junk that gets through my spam filter are transactional or other "mandatory" messages intended for someone who fat fingered their email address. If those senders don't want to be marked as spam, they need to prov…

Email confirmations should be standard but that's not what we're talking about here (and I'd expect that ~rsync is handling that properly).

Unsubscribing from transactional emails eventually causes the following support conversation: "Hi, uhh, rsync? Yeah, so, I'm having trouble logging in to my account and we really really need our backups, our intern just nuked a database. Yeah, it's uhh... cto@company.com. What do you mean my account's not active? ... ... Why didn't you just tell me my card expired? Well yeah, of course I unsubscribed, but I still wanted to know my account was being shut down!"

There's a scale of headaches happening here. At one end of the scale we have "nuisance", as in, "I'm getting too much email, or I have a stupid email address, or I don't know how to filter messages from reputable senders", and at the other end we have "job-ending cockup", as in, "I'm just now finding out that a critical part of our disaster recovery plan hasn't been working for a long time because somebody somewhere was inconvenienced by a notification, and I'm finding this out now because today happens to be the day we really need that disaster recovery plan".

Pushing the needle away from the nuisance end moves it closer to the disaster end.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#119

Post by berdon »

incongruity wrote: post #106
berdon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about situations where your email somehow (mistype) gets set up for someone else's account? I have 2-3 people with similar emails to my previous email address that would mistype and I'd receive their emails. These weren't spam but the companies wouldn't offer _any_ way to fix this. My recourse is to just flag them as spam in gmail.

Emails should be confirmed before being used for ongoing communication. Simple as that. It’s easier to get right up front than it is to clutter and confuse in the cases already illustrated.

Sure - but these companies aren't doing that. They're sending emails without any means of preventing it, e.g. spam.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#120

Post by walrus01 »

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #101
Silhouette wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I am happy for you that you have found a solution, the solution you found is symptomatic of a very dangerous situation: it is increasingly impossible for individuals or SMEs to use essential online facilities like sending messages or transferring money reliably unless they use a broker service as an intermediary. We are allowing small numbers of tech firms to take control of vital functionality that should be u…

This is the real value of cryptocurrencies. Yes, I know HN doesn't like them, yes there's a bunch of get-rich-quick bros and scammers out there, please try and separate the grift from the tech and consider how vital it is that people are able to control their finances without a third party having the ultimate say as to whether a transaction takes place or not.

cryptocurrencies and not screwing up global implementation of SMTP are completely different things.

cryptocurrencies are not in any way going to solve the problem of people centralizing their MX all onto office365 and gsuite.

Post reply on HN