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You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail

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Re: You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail

#11

Post by premyslruzicka »

bambax wrote: post #9

> We have a strategy how to wipe out spam for good. I don't love Gmail and I certainly don't love Google, but using Gmail "wiped out spam for good" for me. In my experience, false positives are close to zero and false negatives extremely rare (and not very annoying), so how is spam not a solved problem?

I hear you. The problem with spam is that the current infrastrucutre allows anyone to distribute spam on a massive level and forces online apps to use expensive third party services to deliver their newsletters to inbox. For a regular end user on Gmail the problem is hidden but not solved. When you have spam, you need spam filters. Spammers get better, you must catch up...

We want to solve that by replacing mail as you know it now. It's a long way ahead but we're on it.

Re: You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail

#12

Post by baudehlo »

bergie wrote: post #10
bambax wrote: post #9

> We have a strategy how to wipe out spam for good. I don't love Gmail and I certainly don't love Google, but using Gmail "wiped out spam for good" for me. In my experience, false positives are close to zero and false negatives extremely rare (and not very annoying), so how is spam not a solved problem?

As usual with Google, they're still not handling multilingual situations too well. It has been a long time since I've seen any spam in English, but tens of mails in languages like Finnish and Georgian get through every day. I wonder if the easiest solution would be a language blacklist. I have no legitimate reason to want to receive email in languages I don't understand.

This is already available in some SMTP servers.

But it's not a cut and dried situation. It's hard to identify language in very short emails. It's quite possible to get false positives too, when you get mail from someone with an accented name. Language detection gives you a probability that it's in a particular language, not a yes/no.

Re: You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail

#13

Post by baudehlo »

bambax wrote: post #9

> We have a strategy how to wipe out spam for good. I don't love Gmail and I certainly don't love Google, but using Gmail "wiped out spam for good" for me. In my experience, false positives are close to zero and false negatives extremely rare (and not very annoying), so how is spam not a solved problem?

It very much depends on your account visibility. I have the email address helpme@gmail and it gets about 20 spams a day into my inbox (and thousands to my spam folder, so I'm not arguing that it's a bad filter). So it's far from solved.

However I used to work in anti-spam and so know full well that it's not a solvable problem - no matter what some new startup claims.

Re: You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail

#14

Post by premyslruzicka »

baudehlo wrote: post #13
bambax wrote: post #9

> We have a strategy how to wipe out spam for good. I don't love Gmail and I certainly don't love Google, but using Gmail "wiped out spam for good" for me. In my experience, false positives are close to zero and false negatives extremely rare (and not very annoying), so how is spam not a solved problem?

It very much depends on your account visibility. I have the email address helpme@gmail and it gets about 20 spams a day into my inbox (and thousands to my spam folder, so I'm not arguing that it's a bad filter). So it's far from solved. However I used to work in anti-spam and so know full well that it's not a solvable problem - no matter what some new startup claims.

I agree, mail has to change at a very basic level to not allow anyone to send spam.

Re: You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail

#15

Post by jrabone »

I run a mail server for my own company and my immediate friends and family.

I hope you aren't planning on using one of the many ESPs to do your actual delivery; increasingly I am blacklisting them (and by ASN) since despite any claims to the contrary they don't give two shits about spam or UCE. There may or may not be collateral damage but I really don't care anymore; I have a home-grown analysis script that runs daily over my logs and generates pretty HTML summary reports of who got blocked and why, and 6 months in it's looking pretty good.

One size fits no-one for email (which is why Spamassassin always fails me sooner or later). There are entire ASNs that have no business talking to me and get the firewall. There are entire countries that (on the basis of GeoIP lookup) get aggressively greylisted. Nobody has ever sent any of my users a legitimate email with a utf8-encoded subject. The list of rules just keeps growing.

And finally, if anyone reading this has anything to do with

bestpure.co.uk besttip.co.uk bighut.co.uk exclusivetips.co.uk liteme.co.uk officialnow.co.uk opost.co.uk piple.co.uk savertips.co.uk retailrat.co.uk tipmail.co.uk websaveguide.co.uk wepost.co.uk

please go and get an proper job. Or die. I don't mind which.

Re: You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail

#16

Post by noinput »

Looking forward to trying it, however requested an invite and the scanner on the Thank You screen mentions my @gmail.com account got a thumbs down for Deliverability and being 'weakly secured'. Kind of a bold statement to make about gmail, no?

Re: You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail

#17

Post by bambax »

bergie wrote: post #10
bambax wrote: post #9

> We have a strategy how to wipe out spam for good. I don't love Gmail and I certainly don't love Google, but using Gmail "wiped out spam for good" for me. In my experience, false positives are close to zero and false negatives extremely rare (and not very annoying), so how is spam not a solved problem?

As usual with Google, they're still not handling multilingual situations too well. It has been a long time since I've seen any spam in English, but tens of mails in languages like Finnish and Georgian get through every day. I wonder if the easiest solution would be a language blacklist. I have no legitimate reason to want to receive email in languages I don't understand.

I'm French and receive email in English and French; spam detection seems to work just as well in those two languages.

Re: You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail

#18

Post by bambax »

premyslruzicka wrote: post #11
bambax wrote: post #9

> We have a strategy how to wipe out spam for good. I don't love Gmail and I certainly don't love Google, but using Gmail "wiped out spam for good" for me. In my experience, false positives are close to zero and false negatives extremely rare (and not very annoying), so how is spam not a solved problem?

I hear you. The problem with spam is that the current infrastrucutre allows anyone to distribute spam on a massive level and forces online apps to use expensive third party services to deliver their newsletters to inbox. For a regular end user on Gmail the problem is hidden but not solved. When you have spam, you need spam filters. Spammers get better, you must catch up... We want to solve that by replacing mail as y…

But then you're not solving end users' problems, but Google's; and who's going to pay you to do that...?

Re: You Can't Afford To Stop Using Mail

#20

Post by calinet6 »

bambax wrote: post #9

> We have a strategy how to wipe out spam for good. I don't love Gmail and I certainly don't love Google, but using Gmail "wiped out spam for good" for me. In my experience, false positives are close to zero and false negatives extremely rare (and not very annoying), so how is spam not a solved problem?

In addition, when signing up for an invitation to my gmail account, this thing tells me Gmail has problems.

Dude, if Gmail has problems, how the heck do you think you're going to do better? Gmail doesn't have problems. Gmail IS e-mail.

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