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How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers

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Re: How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers

#91

Post by prodigal_erik »

DanBC wrote: post #47
phpnode wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, it's absolutely mundane and non offensive to call a thing or a behaviour retarded, it's really only offensive when talking about disabled or unintelligent people. For example: "Steven Hawking is retarded" == offensive "The design of this chair is retarded" == inoffensive

I'm not going to try to persuade you that a hateful slur is offensive, even when it's not being used about people. "Bob is so gay" == offensive "That chair is so gay" == probably still offensive I'm happy to agree to disagree. You don't think your use of the word is offensive - that's fine. But you don't get to tell me what I (or others) find offensive, and many people find any use of the word retarded offensive. Per…

Sexual orientation (and race, because someone's sure to make the analogy) has little effect on one's public life, it's just taking society a long time to realize that it's not relevant enough to make any sense as a pejorative. I don't think we're likely to regard intelligence that way, whichever words the euphemism treadmill brings.

Re: How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers

#92

Post by snowwrestler »

overbroad wrote: post #73
sbierwagen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many blacklists include all the EC2 addresses: for obvious reasons, they get used to send spam a lot.

Do you think that is a smart idea? To black list entire netblocks? I mean, can we assume that every person using EC2 for email is sending spam? It would seem to degrade the usefulness of EC2 for anyone wanting to run their own mailserver.

Blacklists are run by anti-spam zealots who really don't care about what is fair or a smart idea.

For example my employer's mail server--which has been sending legitimate person-to-person emails for years (no bulk)--has ended up on blacklists several times because some blacklist operator decided to black-hole an entire netblock at our ISP.

From the blacklist operator's perspective, the broad effect of the block is intended to cause headaches for a ISP as a form of punishment for allowing outbound spam. Our deliverability (and many others) was just cannon fodder for that fight.

Re: How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers

#93

Post by DanBC »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #91
DanBC wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to try to persuade you that a hateful slur is offensive, even when it's not being used about people. "Bob is so gay" == offensive "That chair is so gay" == probably still offensive I'm happy to agree to disagree. You don't think your use of the word is offensive - that's fine. But you don't get to tell me what I (or others) find offensive, and many people find any use of the word retarded offensive. Per…

Sexual orientation (and race, because someone's sure to make the analogy) has little effect on one's public life, it's just taking society a long time to realize that it's not relevant enough to make any sense as a pejorative. I don't think we're likely to regard intelligence that way, whichever words the euphemism treadmill brings.

Sexual orientation and skin colour are still used as insults even though sensible people agree that it's stupid to do so.

> I don't think we're likely to regard intelligence that way

I have no problem with people saying "This decision is dumb" or "This decision is stupid" or "This decision is idiotic". I do have a problem when people say "This decision is retarded" because that's not general stupidity, it is linked specifically to people with learning disabilities.

Re: How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers

#94

Post by overbroad »

doesnt_know wrote: post #85
overbroad wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that is a smart idea? To black list entire netblocks? I mean, can we assume that every person using EC2 for email is sending spam? It would seem to degrade the usefulness of EC2 for anyone wanting to run their own mailserver.

It doesn't really matter if it's "a smart idea", it already happens and you have no control over it. A simple search for setting up your own mail-server is just a search for people who have done that saying "don't ever setup a personal mail server because it's guaranteed to be blacklisted". Spam has lead email to basically become this closed ecosystem. If you don't use one of the already established major email provi…

While I understand your sentiment, I respectfully disagree that it does not matter if it's a smart idea. Because if it is not a smart idea then that means we can do better. One of the projects I'm working on solves the "closed ecosystem" problem. The use of the term "closed ecosystem" is ironic because it seems to me that the "open" nature of email receiving (not sending) is what leads to the spam problem. In other words, I do not see the problem as the fact that people can send mass quantities of junk email. I see the problem as the fact that daemons accept and deliver mail from anyone. (And then resort to blacklisting.) What if the system was "closed" by default and instead a sender would contact the receiving SMTP daemon directly (no internediary) and would first need either a means of authentication (i.e. he has been pre-approved) or a way to have his sending address revieved and then receive permission to send. Right now you can see someting like this within a domain. For example, one gmail user might be able to send to another gmail user, directly, as they are both able to authenticate. They both have accounts (private accounts, not some RBL, DKIM or other scheme managed by an interloper) and these accounts can be checked. But if one gmail user wants to send to some non-gmail address, the non-gmail recipient has no knowledge of the sender in the form of an account against which he can authenticate. There's no privity between sender and receiver. Instead third party schemes are used. Such as blocklists for sending.

Consider the idea of running a mailserver than only accepts mail from a predetermined set of sending addresses. What would be the chances of receiving junk mail?

Re: How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers

#95

Post by overbroad »

snowwrestler wrote: post #92
overbroad wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that is a smart idea? To black list entire netblocks? I mean, can we assume that every person using EC2 for email is sending spam? It would seem to degrade the usefulness of EC2 for anyone wanting to run their own mailserver.

Blacklists are run by anti-spam zealots who really don't care about what is fair or a smart idea. For example my employer's mail server--which has been sending legitimate person-to-person emails for years (no bulk)--has ended up on blacklists several times because some blacklist operator decided to black-hole an entire netblock at our ISP. From the blacklist operator's perspective, the broad effect of the block is in…

I wish we could get these anti-spam zealots to apply the same effort to stopping junk postal mail. The history of direct mail is interesting and perhaps instructive. It has been kept alive by those who do the delivery (cf. those who do the sending). I have sometimes wondered if the same might be true for email.

If your emplyer knows its recipients (e.g. business partners) and can coordinate with them to run an SMTP service for recieving and sending messages on a different port, would that solve the problem?

Re: How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers

#96

Post by prodigal_erik »

DanBC wrote: post #93
prodigal_erik wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sexual orientation (and race, because someone's sure to make the analogy) has little effect on one's public life, it's just taking society a long time to realize that it's not relevant enough to make any sense as a pejorative. I don't think we're likely to regard intelligence that way, whichever words the euphemism treadmill brings.

Sexual orientation and skin colour are still used as insults even though sensible people agree that it's stupid to do so. > I don't think we're likely to regard intelligence that way I have no problem with people saying "This decision is dumb" or "This decision is stupid" or "This decision is idiotic". I do have a problem when people say "This decision is retarded" because that's not general stupidity, it is linked s…

Some, maybe all, of those words used to be diagnoses of intellectual disabilities. I don't think laymen distinguish them much at all; I was never taught to do so. If the goal is to deter everyone from showing contempt for lack of intelligence (though I don't think that's going to happen) I don't see another word with the same connotation as progress. Am I overlooking something?

Re: How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers

#97

Post by pyre »

If you fetch/read mail locally, you can get around this by pulling down emails from the spam folder directly via IMAP.

Hotmail email forwarding has this same issue, but only has POP access, so you can only access the inbox without the web interface. You can tune down the aggressiveness of the spam filter to a minimum (but not turn it completely off).

Re: How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers

#98

Post by pyre »

bosch wrote: post #41

People who do this are really annoying and have no concepts of separating business and personal life. If you don't mix business with pleasure then why are you doing it with your e-mail? How hard is it to check two accounts or have two accounts setup on your phone? There are some lines where business and personal shouldn't cross and e-mail is one of them. How does the appearance look? You send e-mail to foo@business.c…

Is 'funkyjizzbeats20' a typo for 'funkyjazzbeats20'?

Re: How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers

#99

Post by pyre »

DanBC wrote: post #35
rabidsnail wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been getting increasingly fed up with gmail, but not quite to the point of making me set up exim. Does anybody know of a mail server I can throw on ec2 and forget about?

The answer to "Gmail drops some wanted messages into the spam folder" is definitely not "set up exim" nor "set up [insert email server here]". There's a reason that people running servers at that level (from that time) are called BOFH.

  > (from that time)
Are you trying to imply that 'mail servers' are some sort of ancient devices whose era has come and gone?

Re: How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers

#100

Post by doesnt_know »

overbroad wrote: post #94
doesnt_know wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really matter if it's "a smart idea", it already happens and you have no control over it. A simple search for setting up your own mail-server is just a search for people who have done that saying "don't ever setup a personal mail server because it's guaranteed to be blacklisted". Spam has lead email to basically become this closed ecosystem. If you don't use one of the already established major email provi…

While I understand your sentiment, I respectfully disagree that it does not matter if it's a smart idea. Because if it is not a smart idea then that means we can do better. One of the projects I'm working on solves the "closed ecosystem" problem. The use of the term "closed ecosystem" is ironic because it seems to me that the "open" nature of email receiving (not sending) is what leads to the spam problem. In other w…

"Consider the idea of running a mailserver than only accepts mail from a predetermined set of sending addresses."

How is this functionally any different then blacklists? That's just a whitelist instead. So instead of new mail severs "quite likely" being on a blacklist, they are definitely not going to be on a whitelist.

And no, it doesn't matter if isn't a smart idea when you aren't in a position to change anything. Even if you have a perfect technical solution to the problem, you still have to convince every existing major provider to adopt a solution that isn't even a direct problem for them.

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