Spam blacklisting is out of control • Hacker News Board

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#161

Post by phishersfritz » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 10:03 PM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #151

bo1024 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what the lawyers said beyond "I'm a lawyer and would like you to edit the blacklist" ? Are these companies doing something illegal by blacklisting you unfairly, or do you have grounds for some sort of civil suit (if so, what grounds)?

I would think "Tortious interference" is the most likely legal basis to complain about it. "Tortious interference is a common law tort allowing a claim for damages against a defendant who wrongfully interferes with the plaintiff's contractual or business relationships"

Safe your 500 bucks per hour. A lawyer will not do anything.

A blacklist is not directly interfering with your business. They just provide a list that contains IPs, your IP, and say we have seen spam traffic from it in the last x hours. The mail receiver, who trusts and uses the list might be interfering, but it is his right to pick and choose who he is accepting email from. Same right you have to pick and choose who you let into your bar, apartment, club, house, ... what so ever.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#162

Post by walrus01 » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 10:08 PM UTC

CPLX wrote: post #159

walrus01 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone can spend $500 on lawyer billable hours per SMTP destination multiplied by N number of destinations. I also think that the likelihood of success in sending legal threats to somebody that demand they accept your SMTP traffic will not stand up in court, if you ever escalated it that far. As somebody who runs postfix MX on the receiving side of things, I can guarantee you that the day I receive a legal thre…

He didn’t say threaten them. It’s pretty easy to envision a situation where a lawyer sends a quite friendly and factual email to a company, that is literally identical to the one the IT head would have sent, but because it’s coming from a lawyer the recipient uses completely different internal routing to process the request. So someone actually takes the request seriously. Seems both plausible and a reasonable thing…

In the American legal system, if somebody spends the money to take the time to have their lawyer hand craft and send me a letter about something such as this, I'm going to take it as a threat whether or not it specifically contains one.

The implication is that if you do not do whatever is demanded in the letter, the next step will be the client of said lawyer escalating the situation to paying their lawyer to actually sue you.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#163

Post by wl » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 10:15 PM UTC

bo1024 wrote: post #150

wl wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 been relying on to prod them to log onto the site and pay the bill? To name a specific example of this problem, I want Gulf Power of Florida to stop sending exactly the kind of email you speak of. Bills. Nastygrams when the person falls behind on the bills. Unwant…

I think you're trying to use two wrongs to make a right. If we're talking about things Gulf Power of Florida should do differently, then rather than add unsubscribe buttons to bills which is a bad idea, they should confirm people's email addresses before sending them email.

What's wrong with giving the user the ability to remove themselves from any automated emails? The alternative is being hit with the spam button.

They should have confirmed their user controlled the email address, too, but why not go with both?

And this is hardly confined to Gulf Power. Verizon, Spectrum, countless banks...

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#164

Post by girvo » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 10:16 PM UTC

vorpalhex wrote: post #153

thaumaturgy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The service is not meant to cater to the lowest common denominator. If you unsubscribe from critical notifications and get screwed over.. that is on you. It is not fair to the rest of us to be inundated with endless spam just so some screwup can be kept from doing something stupid.

Transactional email from a backup service you deliberately signed up to isn’t spam, so congratulations you’ve got what you’re after.

Now someone will likely reply shifting the definition of what “spam” is to include Rsync’s critical service emails, and now the term spam is so wide as to be meaningless.

At that point it’s on you to manage your own spam filter if you truly feel “your critical backup service is down” is spam. I haven’t been inundated with endless spam for about a decade.

Abusix don’t know what they are talking about, and basically all services that let you manage your email notifications still send through critical “your service is about to be turned off because your card details failed” emails regardless of how many checkboxes you disable — and for good reason.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#165

Post by TedDoesntTalk » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 10:16 PM UTC

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…

I did not even know services like Postmark and Mailgun solved this problem. Thank you!

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#166

Post by phishersfritz » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 10:18 PM UTC

adrium wrote: post #131

I have been running my own mail server for two years on my private ISP and have less problems than expected - even with the dynamic IP address (in practice, it changes once in 6-12 months) and no PTR. I also switched the ISP once. I have SPF, DKIM, DMARC. Edit: The nice thing about running the mail server personally and without a relay (like mailgun) is that mail is to-my-end encrypted. If the other party is running…

Your comment about no issues with no valid PTR surprised me.

Spamhaus PBL is build based on your ISP telling Spamhaus which IPs are dynamic and which IPs should not send email. Your ISPs seemed to be nice enough to allow you delisting from it, which not all ISPs will allow.

Abusix has a similar list, but its completely build based on dynamic looking or no PTRs. You can create an account and delist without any issues.

Never the less there is way more services than GMX that block based on dynamic or no PTR. A lot of smaller solutions have this option checked by default. And it actually has been a best practice for decades to have a proper PTR.

If you can, I'd set one and be done with it.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#167

Post by lytefm » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 10:18 PM UTC

> On the other hand, if a legitimate email from a future friend or a potential business associate were accidentally blocked, the lost opportunity cost is several magnitudes higher.

To some extent, this also applies to legitimate business mails going to Spam. That was a big reason for me to switch away from Outlook to a provider where I could configure the spam filter to the equivalent of "Viagra scams etc".

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#168

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 10:18 PM UTC

girvo wrote: post #164

vorpalhex wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The service is not meant to cater to the lowest common denominator. If you unsubscribe from critical notifications and get screwed over.. that is on you. It is not fair to the rest of us to be inundated with endless spam just so some screwup can be kept from doing something stupid.

Transactional email from a backup service you deliberately signed up to isn’t spam, so congratulations you’ve got what you’re after. Now someone will likely reply shifting the definition of what “spam” is to include Rsync’s critical service emails, and now the term spam is so wide as to be meaningless. At that point it’s on you to manage your own spam filter if you truly feel “your critical backup service is down” is…

[deleted]

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#169

Post by suzzer99 » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 10:20 PM UTC

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…

My Dad still sends all emails to my main address and my gmail address, due to the occasional spat between netzero and godaddy that would block emails to my main address.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#170

Post by dane-pgp » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 10:21 PM UTC

dtech wrote: post #126

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only currently realistic way to acquire cryptocurrency or for non-tech people to use it is through a 3rd party broker. It's about as difficult as running your own SMTP server I'd say. edit see this current front-page submission about how Bitcoin fails to provide this despite being centralized in exactly the same way as the decentralized SMTP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30224637

> for non-tech people to use it

Then it should be only the SMTP server operators who have to handle the crypocurrency side of things, so email users never have to worry about it.

As you say, acquiring and using the cryptocurrency would be about as technically difficult as what the SMTP server operators are already doing, and there are a variety of 3rd party brokers they can choose if they want to simplify things and not run a node themselves.

The system I'm imagining is one where each newly registered domain has to put up a cryptocurrency bond if the registrant wants to send email from it. Existing domains would be grandfathered in (having already built up their reputation) and new domains would have their bonds burned if some N-of-M stakeholders agreed that they were sending (DKIM-signed) spam.

Choosing those stakeholders would be controversial, but hopefully no less controversial than the system we have today where Google can use the threat of a Gmail blacklist to make every SMTP server in the world follow its wishes. Ideally some of the stakeholders would be non-profits like the ISRG and Mozilla Foundation.