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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'

#231

Post by revelation »

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…

It's very very problematic. With all the spam, your mail server is not going to be trusted by any major providers. Their weak heuristics have no problem banning your 1 user mailserver, but they have gmail whitelisted to not ever ban them.

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

#232

Post by mturmon »

scholia wrote: post #180
mturmon wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every OS has chauvinistic users, but there's nothing to be gained by trotting them out for strawman arguments.

Sense of humor failure?

I don't think so. I just believe, from long observation, that this line of thinking goes nowhere, but generates a lot of words on the way. (e.g., look around this thread ;-)

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

#233

Post by haroldp »

secure wrote: post #230
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 recor…

I agree with both of you. Mail is hard, not easy. We should host our own email anyway, because the alternatives suck.

I wonder if there is a "Mail Admin Best Practices" doc floating around the web yet?

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

#234

Post by shawn-butler »

roc wrote: post #27
rm999 wrote: post #9

Everything about icloud - from the terrible design to the clunky interface - is as Steve Jobs liked to say, "shit". I have icloud and I'm not even sure what it's for; is it a backup service, an e-mail provider, or a way to find my phone? None of these have much in common, so the fact that they're all bundled together really confuses me. And its name is a bit of a misnomer, you can't even do standard cloud stuff like…

iCloud is first and foremost just a bit of service glue to make the native email/calendar/etc apps 'work' without sending people to Google or assuming they have a work Exchange account. In that capacity, it's as good as it needs to be. [1] Similarly the file sharing is just to set a third-party baseline so that file/save sync'ing between Apps on the mobile devices 'works' without sending people off to Dropbox. And in…

iCloud is also way to communicate bits of data between apps running on different devices for same user. Which works well as available/reliable key-value store without rolling your own.

Read book on iPad at page 20. Open book on macbook or iPhone and book left open at page 5 when last exit turns to 20.

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

#235

Post by Volpe »

secure wrote: post #230
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 recor…

So this implies there is a market for a simple mailserver that just mimics gmail (or whatever) on your own server:

e.g.

apt-get install gmail-server

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

#237

Post by rwmj »

revelation wrote: post #231
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…

It's very very problematic. With all the spam, your mail server is not going to be trusted by any major providers. Their weak heuristics have no problem banning your 1 user mailserver, but they have gmail whitelisted to not ever ban them.

In practice this is nonsense. I have run my own email server since 1999 and "trust by major providers" has not been a problem for me.

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

#238

Post by shocks »

haroldp wrote: post #233
secure wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recor…

I agree with both of you. Mail is hard, not easy. We should host our own email anyway, because the alternatives suck. I wonder if there is a "Mail Admin Best Practices" doc floating around the web yet?

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3096-behind-the-scenes-giving...

This is pretty good. :)

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

#239

Post by fusiongyro »

secure wrote: post #230
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 recor…

I haven't messed with the defaults on undeliverable messages, but my recollection is that Postfix sends you a "hey, it didn't go through, but I'm going to keep trying" email at 4 hours, and you get the final "I gave up" email about a week later.

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

#240

Post by belorn »

secure wrote: post #230
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 recor…

Subtle errors are a problem, as anyone who is a programmer or sysadmin will tell. It's a constant issue when programming in C or Javascript, and it's almost a job description for a sysadmin. Mail installations could clearly be improved here with testsuites that test the installation and not just the mail server code.

But to address some of those concerns.

While errors in the config can cause big problems, it's not very common for people to change it once it's installed. It's like doing changes to the kernel, Apache, or Xorg settings. Sure, things can easily be broken there but for the common case, the defaults are good once one has passed the installation wizard/guide.

In case of SSL issues between mail servers, I am rather sure that postfix only does a best-effort. Thus if your certification expires, they will fall back to plain text. However most CA's will warn you several times once it gets close to the one year mark, so it's not a very big workload to handle. If you know of an email server that will cancel delivery, please let me know as I would be very interested to hear it.

PTR is a real issue, but if you have static IP, PTR records should be rather easy to get. It is also a one time cost for the domain name. For a company network, a static IP and support is commonly included in the price. You email/call them, and they add a PTR. For private users, a VPN solution might be needed in some cases, but I'm unsure if it's that much of an requirement. Gmail seems fine in sending emails to locations without PTR, or receiving emails from servers without one. However I have not tested this fully or with other services like to Apple or Microsoft.

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