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Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

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Re: Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

#221

Post by haroldp »

travisp wrote: post #81
haroldp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the wrong way to run a mail server. I know how common it is at big providers, but it's still wrong. You should REJECT a message if you won't deliver it. If it was a legit message inappropriately REJECTed, then the server that's relaying it can generate a bounce back to the sender, and something can be figured out. Dropping a message on the floor like that, after you have promised to deliver it is almost alway…

I imagine the reason that it's done is because rejecting it gives spammers more information that could possibly be used to get around the rejection. It's much harder if they aren't sure whether or not the message was received. Whether or not that's appropriate is another thing, but that is probably the rationale behind it.

More likely the rationale is that it's easier to filter stuff asynchronously after it is sitting in queue, and there's no longer a TCP connection hanging off it, waiting for a response. In other words, it's cheaper.

Re: Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

#222

Post by onli »

joenathan wrote: post #214
onli wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That is not what barely means at all. Barely means "only just". Not at all? Well, it is possible my translator (leo) is wrong. I think i have a fairly good understanding of the english language, but i am not a native speaker, so i tried to check my understanding. I still think it has in this case at least the connotation.

It doesn't, your translator is wrong.

The connotations is not. The translation may be.

That is the link: http://dict.leo.org/ende/index_en.html#/search=barely&se...

Re: Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

#223

Post by beedogs »

Recoil42 wrote: post #153
roc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While we're keeping history in context, let's also not forget this is also the company that was borderline irrelevant prior to their current direction.

>While we're keeping history in context, let's also not forget this is also the company that was borderline irrelevant prior to their current direction. You're retconning. Apple hasn't been 'borderline irrelevant' since before they launched the iPod in 2001. There's a six year gap there in between the iPod and the iPhone, and imho they didn't really change their direction until 2010 or 2011, with the release of OSX L…

No one bought the iPod until about 2004, when they started selling them for PCs.

http://www.michikono.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/windowsl...

Re: Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

#225

Post by beedogs »

bitcartel wrote: post #218
beedogs wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS X is going down the same path as iOS, too: Mountain Lion scolds users for downloading apps without going through the App Store; this can be disabled by digging around in the system settings, but I can envision a day where you'll need to open a terminal to set a system property from the command line, and then a day when they simply disable unsigned binaries from running altogether.

Sadly, there's a very real possibility that this could happen as Nanny Computing (anyone coined a better term?) is proving to be quite profitable.

The switch from x86 to ARM for their entire computing line -- if it happens, as has been rumored -- will be what closes the door on power users.

Re: Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

#226

Post by haroldp »

lloeki wrote: post #63
tlrobinson wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"not all spam messages make it to your spam folder with any provider - the worst offenders are often just thrown out" This is news to me. Citation needed?

Greylisting, for one. You could also reasonably configure a filter to not land emails over a spam threshold. Given the amount and type of spam in my Gmail Spam label, I'm quite sure there's a hard filter in place there too.

Greylisting does not throw anything out. It does the exact opposite. The mail server simply says, "I have a temporary problem, so I can't take this right now. Try again later" Mail servers are supposed to (and do) try again, at which time a greylisted message will be delivered. Accepting a message for delivery In Go Faith and then dropping it on the floor, is poor, lazy, cheap, RFC-breaking spam filtering.

Re: Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

#227

Post by belorn »

When you let someone else handle your email, they own your email. There is no postal secrecy law, no rule against reading. They can touch, modify or delete according to their whims. It's their email now.

So I am not that very surprised to hear a news article like this. It makes perfectly sense with the current mentality. It also adds another nail in the coffin about idea that "only a machine is reading my emails. Why should I care about that?".

Hopefully this will encourage some people enough to run their own mail servers. It's far less problematic than most people think it is. Maybe it was hard to install and configure this in 1990s, but this is 2013. You buy a domain name, install a Debian machine, and do:

  aptitude install postfix
  aptitude install postgrey
Afterward one follows any one of the many simple guides to install either a webmail (roundcube most commonly), or go to (http://www.postfix.org/docs.html). If a spam gets through, install blacklisting or spamassassin. Easy 3 step guides exist for both.

It always surprises me that people can use a software library with complicated, half insane API's, but can't follow a single page of simple single steps installation. It's not hard and you get the bonus of actually owning your own emails again. If you are a company, this should not even be a question. If the options are to give away all your emails and customers emails to a third-party and thus lose all ownership to them, or asking a sysadmin/programmer to spend 5-10-30m tops to do an email installation, the answer should be obvious.

Re: Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

#229

Post by plg »

belorn wrote: post #227

When you let someone else handle your email, they own your email. There is no postal secrecy law, no rule against reading. They can touch, modify or delete according to their whims. It's their email now. So I am not that very surprised to hear a news article like this. It makes perfectly sense with the current mentality. It also adds another nail in the coffin about idea that "only a machine is reading my emails. Why…

yes yes yes! I 100% agree. It would be interesting to hear from someone with some legal knowledge. I suspect in many countries it's the case that if you host your email with a third pary (iCloud, gmail, FB, etc) you give up some rights to privacy ... whereas if you host your email on your own server that you physically control, for example in your personal home, your rights to privacy are greater.

Even on Ubuntu Server it's very very easy to setup a mail server. Linode has guides, and there are others on the interwebs as well.

Just make sure to implement a regular backup regime.

In my experience IMAP to my own mail server is WAY faster than dealing with Gmail (even web interface).

Re: Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens'

#230

Post by secure »

belorn wrote: post #227

When you let someone else handle your email, they own your email. There is no postal secrecy law, no rule against reading. They can touch, modify or delete according to their whims. It's their email now. So I am not that very surprised to hear a news article like this. It makes perfectly sense with the current mentality. It also adds another nail in the coffin about idea that "only a machine is reading my emails. Why…

In my experience, it is not so much the installation itself, but the regular maintenance and the many subtle errors that can occur, which make running your own email server NOT as trivial as you make it sound :).

As for a few examples:

1. Mailservers around the world have different degrees of strictness in what they accept. Some require the sender’s mailserver to have a valid and matching PTR and A/AAAA (!) DNS records. Others don’t care. Some check black lists, some don’t. Some even resolve the MX record of your sender domain, connect to it and try to start delivery of an email to ensure your address is valid.

2. By default, postfix doesn’t warn you about undeliverable messages for quite some time (a week is the default, I think). So if there is any error in your config (e.g. I changed my DNS resolver config, then didn’t restart postfix), your mails will be stuck without any notice, for a number of days.

3. If there are SSL certificates invoked, they should be valid. Some mail servers will not use TLS at all, some will fall back to plain text, others will cancel delivery if your certificate is invalid.

These are just a few examples I have encountered recently, but every time they happen I am incredibly frustrated that emails either did not reach me (usually I detect that quickly) or are not delivered (detected only after a few days).

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