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Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

laforge.gnumonks.org

221–230 of 267 posts

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

#221
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you _send_ emails from your ADSL line? Mine are rejected since I have a semi-dynamic IP address.

Most ISPs will let you smarthost out via their upstream mail server.

This is what I do. My ISP has a relay which I send all non local email from postfix to. I have a static IP address.

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

#222
post #83

I took "the pragmatic UNIX way" about 15 years ago with email. It works. I've not had to change it and don't feel compelled to bother changing it. I host my own mail server. It's not hard regardless of the platform you use. I use debian+postfix+mutt as it pretty much works out of the box. I've changed perhaps two lines of postfix configuration (to set up maildir) and added a couple of lines to my muttrc to pick up ma…

"My contacts list is a text file called contacts.txt. Works on anything. Can be grepped. My calendar is a text file called cal.txt. Works on anything. Can be grepped." I really like the sound of that. Can you elaborate a bit on the format, or provide a couple of sample lines from each?

Yes - it's very simple:

contacts.txt - in order of surname, firstname

Surname, FirstName, Primary telephone number with code, Email address so:

   Joe, Bloggs, 02033345545, joe@bloggs.com
I only keep a single number for people, but you could extend it to two numbers if you want.

cal.txt - latest dates at top of file:

   2012/02/02 16:00+ What to do         # time specific event
   2012/03/03 --:--  Someone's birthday # all day event
When something is done, the line is deleted. If something is not done on the date, it is just left as "overdue" at the top.

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

#224
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really easy to install SpamAssassin and point your MTA at it. Even the default configuration is highly effective.

It's still a service which you have to maintain and there's constant config & upgrading required since some spammers are smart enough to test their messages with it first. I've run SA professionally for modest (low hundreds) of users. It works reasonably well but it's a job and I'm not paid to do it personally.

nupark2 is correct. There's less maintenance involved in running SpamAssassin than there is in running Firefox.

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

#225
post #145
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…

SpamAssassin takes care of this for you by automatically downloading new filtering rules. You host the spam filtering software, but the actual rules are out-sourced by default. It even includes configuration for multiple DNSBLs, DNSWLs and RHSBLs by default. You can add your own local rules if absolutely necessary too.

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

#226
post #158

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…

You only have ~100 email accounts per server?

yes, it's pretty stupid but it's the product that the commercial team sells (your own small managed private mail server). Some of the servers have more than 2000 accounts but others have 6 or 10... A few years ago, until 2006, the servers where small appliances installed on the client's office. Now they work the same way but mostly virtual and since most of the clients are small bussiness.. some have really few accounts.

On our shared mail system we have about 40k accounts in 2 cyrus servers (with 2 more for HA)

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

#227

  You team up with some friends, people you know and trust, and you share the administrative and financial effort
I have been burned by people I trusted much more often than by google.

  You use a local, small Internet service company rather than one of the big entities.
How is that better? You're still bequeathing your data to a commercial third party.

I get the OP's point, and hope I never have to eat my own words, but the reasons to go through all the hassle of moving out of google et al aren't all that compelling imo.

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, right, I tried that too, they said they've discontinued that service years ago.

If you ISP provides SMTP for their e-mail (almost all do), then barring outbound From address filters, you can set up your SMTP server to treat the customer facing mail server as a smarthost. The ISP doesn't need to do anything specific to support it.

I was absolutely sure they did filter, but I've just tested and apparently they don't. Well, that's unexpected. I might switch to self-hosting again then.

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

#229
post #92

1. Running a mail server is an unbelievable pain in the rear from an IT perspective. Note that by "mail server" I mean a good setup with spam filtration, webmail, SMTPS, IMAPS, etc. 2. Really good rich webmail. I personally use Mac Mail.app most of the time, but having that rich webmail is nice. 3. Filters mail at the server side. 4. Very good spam filtering... I post my gmail addresses on web pages with no obfuscati…

I haven't used Mail.app since an incident about 2 years ago where it deleted a bunch of my messages. I was moving them from one folder to another when the connection to the server dropped.

I don't know why this should happen with IMAP (it is possible to move messages from one folder to another atomically) but it did.

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

#230
post #166
post #92

1. Running a mail server is an unbelievable pain in the rear from an IT perspective. Note that by "mail server" I mean a good setup with spam filtration, webmail, SMTPS, IMAPS, etc. 2. Really good rich webmail. I personally use Mac Mail.app most of the time, but having that rich webmail is nice. 3. Filters mail at the server side. 4. Very good spam filtering... I post my gmail addresses on web pages with no obfuscati…

I disagree on most points... 1. It takes a few hours to set up, sure, but it isn't difficult – setting up a mail server on a *nix box isn't exactly uncharted territory, every possible aspect of it is documented to death on the web. And once it's up and running it takes practically no effort to maintain. Yes, even with spam filtering that keeps my inbox spam free, despite my address having been used in several public…

I'd love to ssh to my server and use some modern MUA like Sup, but there are lot of places where you cannot ssh through local firewalls.

When you work parttime as a consultant or when you just meet with some potential customers/investors/cofounders/whomever you often need to use THEIR infrastructure. So what then? Do you imagine that you'd be unable to get an email from the people you're talking on the spot just because you need to tunnel somehow to your server? Bit weird..

One option is to always use own mobile connection, but still there are places where there's no carrier (like some server rooms), or you have to use customer's intranet at the same time you're relying on what's in your emails..

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