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Spam blacklisting is out of control

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Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#321

Post by [deleted] »

lytefm wrote: post #174
kbenson wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just the internet moving to match the real world. In the real world, reputation matters and some people don't want to talk to you unless someone can vouch for you. For areas where the general public needs to interact, third party intermediary services spring up to fill this need. This is why for any store over the size of a mom and pop operation in a neighborhood, you can't just tell the owner who you know by…

> and that seemed to work "warming them up" to the likes of Gmail and yahoo, etc Yes, warming up a "fresh" IP definely works. If you suddenly send thousands of mails from a new server - sure, you'll be labeled as Spam. If you slowly increase the volume over time, have a good domain and recipients that interact with the email, things should be fine. GMail has quite helpful guidelines [1]. 1: https://support.google.com…

[deleted]

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#322

Post by noduerme »

walrus01 wrote: post #213
CPLX wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, not really. In the world of companies talking to other companies lawyers are involved all the time. In some scenarios (real estate transactions, or M&A, for example) it would just be completely routine for two companies on exceedingly good terms to communicate back and forth via attorneys. Your main premise seems to be that the recipient should take all this very personally. But it’s not personal, these are b…

An intentionally initiated transaction where everyone already knows each other, and knows in advance that lawyers will be involved (as you say, m&a, real estate, etc) is a very different thing than receiving a demand letter from a previously unknown party out of the blue. Like I said in my original reply here, we are talking about sending threats to third-party isps, with which the originator of the smtp traffic has…

I made all kinds of good faith efforts personally to contact someone at AT&T through their forms and phone numbers, without ever even speaking to anyone who could resolve the problem if they wanted to. Lacking any other way to get through to them, legal seemed like the only recourse.

I would think that if you were the ISP owner blocking our mail to your customer, a single phone call from the customer or from us would convince you that our IPs were not a spam threat. That's certainly the way I prefer to deal with anything. But when dealing with something as monolithic and totally deaf as AT&T, lawyers were the only way.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#323

Post by wl »

bo1024 wrote: post #305
wl wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Well, I think letting people get silently charged monthly without sending them any message about it is a bad idea, even if they say they want it. Similar with not telling them about an outage to their service.

Well, then that mail is going to get legitimately marked as spam when I didn't request it, I have no business relationship with the sender, and there's no other way to make it stop. And the user is still getting silently charged because it's going to my inbox, not theirs.

Unsubscribe is the alternative to the spam button. If you don't provide it, you are asking to be marked as spam, no matter how important you think the email is.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#324

Post by wl »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #156
vorpalhex wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always login and re-enable an email on the service. The service is allowed to request information needed to process the unsubscribe. I get emails for some dude's Chevy when it needs servicing. I can't unsubscribe. I am stuck getting emails about a car I have never owned from some dealer in Pittsburg. I need an opt out that lets me communocate "hey, some dumbass fatfingered his email, stop spamming me."

Genuine question: your comment and a bunch of others make me wonder why people seem unable to filter email by sender. That used to be a pretty standard part of having an inbox. Are you using a mail client or service that doesn't have filtering built in? Do you find it difficult to set up a filter rule? Are you unfamiliar with filter rules? Do you use filters but just ideologically object to any unwanted email? I'm ho…

Gmail filters are incapable of marking things as spam. Worse, if something matches a filter rule, it's whitelisted.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#325

Post by judge2020 »

quags wrote: post #110
huhtenberg wrote: post #15

> Or I can leave the current hosting company Yep, that's the one. If your hoster doesn't care about spam spreading from their IP space, you should take your mail server elsewhere. There's literally nothing to think about. And if they do care about this issue, they are likely to be taking steps to remove any of their IP space from the blacklists, without being nudged. PS. I've been running a mail server for close to 2…

I have run my own mail server about as long, run an RBL, and a transactional mail service too. This is a hard line approach and blacklisting a /24 on a second offense that never expires just doesn't work long term but at least you are not completely blocking it and accepting it but as spam. Lets be real there is spam coming from gmail and hotmail/outlook as well and places like abuseix specifically state they don't b…

I think the issue is that, short of customers running their own BGP routers and hosting their own subnet, anything smaller than a /24 assigned by the ISP is completely transparent to BGP databases and thus spam filters / IP reputation databases.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#326

Post by gjs278 »

rsync wrote: post #298
xist wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a comment below from the other side of the equation it sounds like the email in question WAS indeed marketing for a lifetime promotion. People should have every right to unsubscribe themselves from that, and thus should have some sort of feedback loop attached to the email being sent (to the detriment of your bottom line I fully understand and sympathize with). If this was indeed a marketing email, then I don't…

"People should have every right to unsubscribe themselves from that, and thus should have some sort of feedback loop attached to the email being sent (to the detriment of your bottom line I fully understand and sympathize with)." I agree. We have a flag for such a thing and set that flag when people ask us to. They ask us in a nice email exchange between human beings. We're very responsive to this since they are our…

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Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#328

Post by dqv »

zepearl wrote: post #236

Is anybody using "fail2ban" connected to "badIP"? (as described e.g. here https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/protect-your-server-comp... ) (in both modes, download & upload) My root server hosts as separate VMs at least a website and an email server => both are magnets for all kinds of scans and intrusion attempts => I've got logscans + honeypots etc... set up (fail2ban then closes the source IP's connection for a w…

I tried to use F2B and https://voipbl.org on a small 1 core + 1 GB RAM vm and it did not work out very well. I'm pretty sure iptables was crashing because there were so many IPS to block. Your mileage may vary. Probably needs something a little more powerful than what I had.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#329

Post by Karrot_Kream »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #304
josephcsible wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These blocklists are employed by the actor receiving the email. If I send an email to alice@example.com, Alice is the recipient, not Bob the sysadmin for example.com.

This is incorrect. The service you are sending the mail to (example.com in this case) is receiving that mail. They are then delivering it to the user, or not, depending on the agreement they have with the user. If example.com and a user of example.com have agreed that example.com is responsible for providing spam filtering, then they would be remiss in delivering the email to their customer. This is the way that emai…

I'd hardly say this is a feature. It's an artifact of the fact that once upon a time computers were expensive, so many people had to share a server with multiple email accounts, and a netop had to run this server. The fact that Alice is beholden to example.com helps nobody but example.com. In an ideal world, Alice would not have to couple her infrastructure with a blocklist and Alice would have the choice of blocklist herself.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#330

Post by [deleted] »

jart wrote: post #228
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…

The open internet is dead. Spammers, fraudsters, and abusers have killed it. I can see how you might hate me, but I only speak the truth. Once upon a time the Internet consisted of a bunch of anonymous university students and u.s. government, Bell, IBM, etc. employees doing unfettered research. Today the Internet consists of anonymous grifters trying to squeeze a buck out of you any way they can.

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