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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'

#251

Post by graeme »

rdl wrote: post #243
Volpe wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Search is IMO the hard part. I know you can do Lucerne, but getting that working well with email is hard. Until recently Outlook's search was crap compared to gmail. too, and mutt is still essentially "headers only". Still, shouldn't be that hard to do as long as it is your own server and you trust it; I imagine a lot of the difficulty of gmail is scaling, and even a single user with 20-50GB of mail isn't in the same…

Gmail search is actually pretty spotty.

I download my email to the Mac mail app. That has let me find some emails that were unfindable on the web interface (even when I searched by sender email!)

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

#252

Post by samspot »

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…

Don't forget maintenance of the hardware itself, backups, and everything else that comes with running a server (assuming you didn't buy one in the cloud).

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

#253

Post by ux-app »

rwmj wrote: post #237
revelation wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess this is one of those YMMV cases. I could never deliver to hotmail addresses no matter how many hoops I jumped through.

Also: how do you know you've never had deliverability issues? If the server on the receiving end is blocking your mail it will happen silently.

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

#254

Post by mistercow »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #208
mistercow wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably just done via host file (or otherwise at the DNS level) for filtering undesirable sites. It's rather sensationalist to call that "forging network traffic". I don't even know if you can reasonably call it "censorship". What Apple does with the internet in their own stores is both inconsequential and also totally their own business. In contrast, deleting email based on content is neither inconsequential…

As trivial as it may be, I consider it censorship when they stop being transparent. Displaying "Blocked!" when someone tries to access the site is, as you said, totally their business. Implying a successful HTTP connection but a missing file? Still, as you said, inconsequential. The attitude that leads someone to make it look like a 404 instead of a blocked site? That's the same attitude that makes them block emails…

I don't know how they have it set up, but the laziest way to block pages is to add them to /etc/hosts mapping them to 127.0.0.1 . If you do that in OS X and Web Sharing (apache) is enabled (and it might be on their machines, although I hear Mountain Lion got rid of it?), then navigating to http://blocksite.com/whatever.html will give a 404 unless the web sharing directory actually contains the file "whatever.html". So it's very likely a simple matter of a lazy configuration rather than a nefarious attempt to make you think that the blocked site doesn't exist (which, really, what would be the motivation there?).

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

#255

Post by belorn »

pdelbarba wrote: post #241
Volpe wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've actually wondered this myself. Why isn't there a good preconfigured drop in solution for this? It would be especially nice if it had a good web front-end that you could log into remotely. How hard would it be to develop something like this? I assume it would be a matter of forking an existing project and adding some custom configs. The hard part would be the web component.

Freedom box has talked and hopefully worked on doing this, but Im not sure if they have gotten as far as improving the interface of a webmail yet.

Still, I do think there exist some very talented grafic designers out there that would enjoy playing around with a webmail interface. Hopefully, articles like this will increase the demand and interest in run-it-your-self webmail packages, so one would do that and not spend all focus on building more CMSes.

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

#256

Post by sdizdar »

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…

Or maybe we need "dropbox for email" YC S13 company.

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

#257

Post by martinced »

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…

The biggest issue is your domain getting blacklisted for whatever reason. It may look like the name of another spammer's domain name. The server you rent may be colocated on a rack with a spammer's box (or a box owned by spammers) and have weird reverse IP SNAFUs. Your very server may not have the latest 0-day patch and bet 0wned by script kiddies and, bam, again... Blacklisted.

Note that I do NOT know much about email servers and that is precisely the point. I eat iptables rules for breakfast, I can set up a Debian server from scratch and I can certainly configure a mail server. But there's more to it than meets the eye. Been there, done that. And we got burn.

I don't know "why", but all I know is that we had problems!

tl;dr: 30 team person startup and we tried to use our own mail server. Too many problems. We moved to Google Apps for domain and all our problems were fixed...

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

#258

Post by IgorPartola »

rdl wrote: post #243
Volpe wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Search is IMO the hard part. I know you can do Lucerne, but getting that working well with email is hard. Until recently Outlook's search was crap compared to gmail. too, and mutt is still essentially "headers only". Still, shouldn't be that hard to do as long as it is your own server and you trust it; I imagine a lot of the difficulty of gmail is scaling, and even a single user with 20-50GB of mail isn't in the same…

What if there were images on, say, AWS that let you spin up a mailbox instance? Packaging up a standard "I want a mailserver" system might be doable.

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

#259

Post by adimitrov »

rdl wrote: post #243
Volpe wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Search is IMO the hard part. I know you can do Lucerne, but getting that working well with email is hard. Until recently Outlook's search was crap compared to gmail. too, and mutt is still essentially "headers only". Still, shouldn't be that hard to do as long as it is your own server and you trust it; I imagine a lot of the difficulty of gmail is scaling, and even a single user with 20-50GB of mail isn't in the same…

> and mutt is still essentially "headers only"

Mutt is more like "everything I can come up with from the command line." Sure, I won't make my grandma use it, but I've never needed any searching capability beyond grep and co.

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

#260

Post by rz2k »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #208
mistercow wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably just done via host file (or otherwise at the DNS level) for filtering undesirable sites. It's rather sensationalist to call that "forging network traffic". I don't even know if you can reasonably call it "censorship". What Apple does with the internet in their own stores is both inconsequential and also totally their own business. In contrast, deleting email based on content is neither inconsequential…

As trivial as it may be, I consider it censorship when they stop being transparent. Displaying "Blocked!" when someone tries to access the site is, as you said, totally their business. Implying a successful HTTP connection but a missing file? Still, as you said, inconsequential. The attitude that leads someone to make it look like a 404 instead of a blocked site? That's the same attitude that makes them block emails…

404 is an accurate statement by the browser when the distinct hosts file maps xmission.com to localhost. A 503 error would be a forged response. 404 is the expected type of response with two separate modularized/encapsulated systems where the browser merely reports that it found nothing from the typed in URL. Saying that the site is "blocked" would involve creating a special facility just for this purpose.

I don't think this is at all like the ISP redirection pages that were more clearly non compliant with IETF internet standards.

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