Apple’s Deleting iCloud Emails That Contain The Phrase 'Barely Legal Teens' • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by jasonlingx » Wed, Feb 27, 2013, 3:18 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #286

bithive123 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have enough experience or make enough simplifying assumptions, anything is trivially easy. But it doesn't take much imagination or experience to see that bootstrapping your own email isn't trivial. For instance, I defy you to buy a domain name and a hosted debian machine without maintaining an existing email account. As a developer / sysadmin who used to host his own mail and uses complicated half insane APIs…

(1) use public email account to buy domain + hosted debian box (2) set up mail server, create account(s) (3) reset public email account with domain registrar + hosting facility to newly set-up email addresses (4) kill public email account You only need one for a very short while to bootstrap your own email server, you don't need it forever.

You're missing his point...

But I'll bite, if your mail server goes down - and it will - you now have no email. You can't email your hosting support. You try to log in to your host control panel to do a reboot or raise a ticket but forgot your password. You can't get the reset email. Somehow you manage to login and raise a ticket but won't get any email notifications when the technician responds asking for your server id number...

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

#312

Post by X-Istence » Wed, Feb 27, 2013, 3:25 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #298

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…

I've written about this before, but I used to run my own mail server and it's no cake walk. I used to do greylisting with spamd and ended up silently losing quite a lot of email. (Many mail hosts do not re-send from the same IP, meaning messages essentially get stuck forever.) Doing spam checks at DATA time and rejecting obviously bad emails outright seemed much more effective and less dangerous. I never managed to g…

I use postfix without greylisting, instead I drop the message if it is going to a non-existent user (drops about 99% of all mail), then drop it if it comes from an invalid domain (there goes another 0.5%) and then a block list (cbl.abuseat.org). The rest is valid email, which gets spam/virus scanned and delivered to my mailbox. Not very CPU intensive at all...

Then it goes through amavisd that does the spamassasin checks, as well as verify DKIM and the like, and then it gets delivered to dovecot.

Now, Dovecot as an IMAP server is fantastic. Along with dovecot-pigeonhole I can sort messages into different folders server side.

Dovecot currently handles one mailbox for me that I archive a mailing list into ... 150k messages and counting, and no issues. Uses Maildir on the backend. Although, I do think at those sizes it comes down to good file system caches, and a good file system that doesn't have a problem caching the entire directory.

It works well for me, so well in fact that I am moving all my stuff from Google Apps for Domains back to in-house. For two reasons, 1. more control, and 2. I have had issues with Google Apps in the past, and even with a paid account the support has been lackluster. I'd like to know more about my email, be able to check logs if need be to see what is going on.

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

#313

Post by jasonlingx » Wed, Feb 27, 2013, 3:30 AM UTC

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…

> spend 5-10-30m tops to do an email installation Hahahahahahhahahahahhahahahahhah

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

#314

Post by mindcrime » Wed, Feb 27, 2013, 3:36 AM UTC

niggler wrote: post #310

mindcrime wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: Thanks, but no thanks. I just went in the opposite direction a couple of months ago, switching to a paid Google Apps account so they can handle email f…

There are a few things to note here: 1) in some industries (like in finance) the regulatory requirements make it near impossible to use external email services. For example, there needs to be a record of every email sent out of accounts in the company that needs to be presented to regulators when they demand it. 2) People within the same company may slip up and send emails to coworkers that shouldn't be read outside…

Absolutely true, and I wouldn't argue against hosting your own email is there are such very specific constraints on your organization. We don't have any of that, and hosting our own email makes zero sense for us.

Or to put it another way... we're a 2 person, self-funded, bootstrapped startup. Our most precious resource right now is the time of myself and my cofounder. Every minute we spend tweaking and tuning an email server, is a minute we're not talking to customers, doing market research, working on our product, developing strategy, doing competitive intelligence research, etc. For us, that's not a tradeoff that makes sense.

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

#315

Post by revelation » Wed, Feb 27, 2013, 3:37 AM UTC

rz2k wrote: post #260

TallGuyShort wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

404 is an error code sent by a HTTP daemon. Browsers don't reuse them.

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

#316

Post by skeletonjelly » Wed, Feb 27, 2013, 3:40 AM UTC

bdcravens wrote: post #177

cryptoz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has been doing this for decades. Ever try to collaborate on a web project using MSN Messenger? Every message you sent that contained 'index.php' was mysteriously dropped. It IS Orwellian, but you should not be surprised. The big communication services all seem to have their own little moral or technical hacks they use to keep your discussion limited and away from certain topics / words.

Proprietary IM networks are just that. Email is based on standards, with RFC's defining behavior. Moreover, proprietary IM is based on a some level of membership in that network. Email is open and often involves individuals outside of Apple's iCloud network, users who haven't agreed with Apple to any terms of service or the like.

Sure email is but spam isn't in the RFC is it? That doesn't get delivered straight to your email inbox, or emails from domains that are on blocklists.

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

#317

Post by cheeseprocedure » Wed, Feb 27, 2013, 3:55 AM UTC

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 only have a few small-ish mail servers under my care, and I couldn't agree more.

Reviewing the history of the mailop list [1] shows how frustrating it can be when a behemoth (AOL, MS, etc.) stops accepting your mail. It's bad enough when you're a sizeable mail operation; as a tiny standalone mailserver, you are not at all a priority, and it's possible you'll lose the ability to communicate with a significant fraction of the Internet's email users (regardless of how complete/correct your configuration) and with little recourse.

[1] http://chilli.nosignal.org/mailman/listinfo/mailop

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

#318

Post by gcr » Wed, Feb 27, 2013, 4:01 AM UTC

beedogs wrote: post #225

bitcartel wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why?

What makes an architecture (ARM) more suited "for the elite" than another slightly more complex architecture (x86)?

If anything, power users can just recompile their open-source software for ARM and that will be that.

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

#319

Post by namuol » Wed, Feb 27, 2013, 4:08 AM UTC

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…

As an alternative, are there any secure email services on the web we can use instead?

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

#320

Post by jrockway » Wed, Feb 27, 2013, 4:09 AM UTC

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 agree with you. Most professional email services have much less aggressive blacklisting than single-user email services run by their single user.

In many years of running my own server, this was never a problem. I checked blacklists on a somewhat regular basis but was never in them. And people I sent mail to usually replied, which means they are either psychic or my mail got delivered. (The problem comes when you start sending spam, of course, which is what many people do get blacklisted for.)

The problems with running your own email server are spam and the time it takes to keep things running. All the other issues are trivially solved.