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Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

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Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#201

Post by kragen »

antics wrote: post #145
pyre wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could always mooch off of Gmail's spam filtering... Use SpamAssassin in conjunction with a gmail account that is only used as an attempt to attract as much spam as possible. Then just download the spam folder over IMAP and use it to teach SpamAssassin...

Respectfully, no. The primary issue in spam filtering is not that we don't have training corpora, it's that spammers are very efficient at finding holes in your system. One example is when the Hotmail team first enabled keyword filtering. When the spammers found out experimentally, they began injecting HTML comment tags into high-weighted words like "free", breaking the model. When the Hotmail team took steps to comb…

That's a perfect example of how spam detection is harder for a centralized server operator like Hotmail or Gmail than for somebody who's running their own server: if I were to add a delete-HTML-comment-tag preprocessing phase to my own copy of SpamAssassin, spammers would have a difficult time detecting that, and so would not be able to adapt. (Because none of the dozen or so people who can get mail on the server are spammers.)

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#202

Post by rgrieselhuber »

ohgodthecat wrote: post #126
klodolph wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... why don't you buy something like Rackspace email, which costs $2/mo?

Because the minimum cost is $10/mo for Rackspace email. I personally have switched between payed google apps for domains and fastmail (those are both $50/yr and under).

This is why I would never start a business in this space. You're saying $10/month is too much to protect the privacy of your email.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#203

Post by gnosis »

nupark2 wrote: post #192
Deadsunrise wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you pay for this? For the last 3 years I've been creating a platform for this kind of servers for a small spanish ISP. It has grown to 15 Openvz hosts. A rails app connects to the host to create the virtual machine. Centos is installed and configured with puppet. A rails app is installed in every server and used to configure the accounts, domains, etc. Postfix, Cyrus, IMAPS, SMTPS, POP3S, HTTPS, Sieve for filte…

The primary reason I won't outsource this service is trust. I don't trust anyone with that data. Access to my email allows for resetting all my passwords, seeing all my contacts, and tracking literally everything about my day-to-day business and personal life.

I hope all your email is encrypted, because otherwise every hop the email traveling to/from your server takes has access to all the data you hold so dear.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#204

Post by zobzu »

Whatever people may say, I run my own mail server on my DSL line at home (static ip), on a regular cheap PC. It's also the gateway, web server and a few things like that - since 2000.

It's currently running Dovecot, Postfixc, Roundcube, MySQL (even thus I plan to switch to PostgreSQL since, 10 years, but I'm lazy :P), amavisd-new, spamassassin. It's setup with SPF records and DKIM. I used to have grey listing as well, but I turned that off a year ago.

I have several emails, and friends, family also, hosted there.

* Spam: The "spam advantage" from Google's gmail makes me smile. I get less spam on my accounts, even the ones for which I post my email everywhere, than on my gmail account (which I never use anywhere, or even use for mail - its just my Google account - so its been guessed or used through OpenID, or Google leaked it somehow). Even with grey listing off.

Some guys seems happy with their 2 spam a month on Gmail. Well I get zero spam a month. And I almost never have false positive either (happened maybe 5 times in 12 years? and those were very spam-looking emails from automated services which i actually wanted to read)

* Maintenance: That makes me smile as well. Sure, I update the server every month or so. It's a 10min task. Stuff don't break. And yes, I know my stuff also, which helps. Backups are done via duplicity to a friend's system, and to a separate drive (had to switch the drives once)

Mail stay alive 5 days if box goes down. 12 years, did get network outages sometimes, never lost a mail. Not one. Sometimes, Ive friends with similar servers and we MX each others for safety, but that was not necessary up to now, because its never been down longer than a day (again its always "network outage" or "power outage" kind of issues).

* Interface. Well, I can understand it, but I don't care. Why? Because I very rarely use the web interface. I use IMAP clients and ssh+IMAP (mutt). Sometimes, I do use the web interface, and RoundCube is actually very decently good, even if its not super complete. It's fast and enjoyable at least.

* Domains refusing to talk to me Well, this has happened sometimes in the past. I sent requests for white list, and it got granted 99% of the time (in fact, its been only denied by trendnet). When denied I set the transport to use my ISP's SMTP. I haven't had to change those settings or make request in the last past 5 years or so. Again, its a much smaller deal than what you're lead to think.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#205

Post by zobzu »

gnosis wrote: post #203
nupark2 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary reason I won't outsource this service is trust. I don't trust anyone with that data. Access to my email allows for resetting all my passwords, seeing all my contacts, and tracking literally everything about my day-to-day business and personal life.

I hope all your email is encrypted, because otherwise every hop the email traveling to/from your server takes has access to all the data you hold so dear.

Actually most SMTP now talk SSL to each others, so while the hops (generally, just 2: sender and receiver) could also be compromised, the attack surface is smaller than one would think.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#206

Post by cdcarter »

bwarp wrote: post #119
fbuilesv wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I unlike you, took the pragmatic way (without quotes or Unix). Email is part of my life and I don't want it going down. I don't spend time configuring servers, updating packages, guaranteeing uptime. My email is federico@mheroin.com, and I write it everywhere. I still don't get any spam. If I need an alias I just append characters to the email address and I don't have to fiddle with anything else. I can get it quite…

Some more info... Email augments my life but does not control it. That's where the distinction is. Much as writing letters is a tool, so is email. If it went away, the world would not end for me and I intend to keep it that way. Availability? If mail doesn't get delivered immediately, thanks to the joys of SMTP, it will come later (when my ADSL line is back up). If it's urgent, someone can put mouth to phone rather t…

Unfortunately, your lifestyle can't work for all of us.

I currently freelancing my way through school. Not as a developer, but as a stagehand. The way I get work is through email. At any given moment, one of any number of production managers, lighting supervisors, technical directors, or production supervisors might be sending me an email. This email will say when and what types of laborers they are looking for. They may need labor tomorrow or 4 months from now. Usually, these positions are booked on a first come first serve basis.

I need my email. If my email went away or didn't go to my phone reliably and on time for an hour, I could miss an opportunity for hundreds of dollars. If it didn't go to my phone for a week, I wouldn't make rent that month.

Yea, it sucks that my life is driven by email, but this is so much better than the way things used to be for stagehands.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#207

Post by etherael »

This is actually a pretty good indicator that integrating PGP in a usable "it just works" fashion might be a really good thing to do these days. If the question is why are you allowing google the ability to violate your privacy, the solution of running your own mail server is only valid to the extent that we acknowledge the current reality that the vast majority of people do not use encryption or signing for email correspondence.

How about a simple sign / encrypt / forward service for untrusted (ie, pretty much everything) hosted email accounts that takes all incoming unsigned/unencrypted mail and at least encrypts it before delivering it to your untrusted mail server? Of course then the issue is how do you prove that you're any more trustworthy than google or any other party, but it's an interesting problem to consider.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#208

Post by etherael »

peawee wrote: post #121
cyrus_ wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This trumps all the other privacy arguments. If the government wants to read your email, it need not access it at the endpoints -- it already has access to it in transmission over the compromised backbone. You would need to encrypt your emails to avoid this.

Someone I know once told me crypto is funny because all you have to do is compromise the OS's socket implementation.

Is that before or after you write a gui interface using visual basic to track an IP address? :/

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#209

Post by fluidcruft »

pyre wrote: post #185
hammock wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why pay when you can get it from Gmail? :)

What happens when Google suspends your account and you loose all your email, docs, etc? Your online identity (you no longer have your main email address) gone?

Own your MX record and use forwarding and/or Google Apps for Your Domain?

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#210

Post by gnosis »

zobzu wrote: post #205
gnosis wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope all your email is encrypted, because otherwise every hop the email traveling to/from your server takes has access to all the data you hold so dear.

Actually most SMTP now talk SSL to each others, so while the hops (generally, just 2: sender and receiver) could also be compromised, the attack surface is smaller than one would think.

"most SMTP now talk SSL to each others"

Not to dispute your claim, but how do you know this? Is there some sort of global, internet-wide survey of SMTP servers somewhere that supports what you say?

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