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The Hostile Email Landscape

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Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#121

Post by rndn »

nabla9 wrote: post #59
sjackso wrote: post #16

I've run into similar issues with a similar setup. It's frustrating. You can convince gmail user A to whitelist your messages, and so they'll get through to user A, but gmail user B probably still won't see messages from you unless you tell him to dig them out of the spam trap. And your messages to A might still be classified as spam if they have attachments or hyperlinks in them. (Even if you've been corresponding w…

http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html Internet Mail 2000 IM2000 is a project to design a new Internet mail infrastructure around the following concept: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility.

In wich ways is this different and superior to a fee?

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#122

Post by lsc »

cgriswald wrote: post #105
lsc wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so... your customers were paying a third party to block you, so rather than working with your customers to figure out what the problem was, you threaten to sue the third party.

That's a rather glib and obtuse way to put it. I'm an Amazon customer. If Amazon can't reach my gmail address because Google started using some third party filtering service, what exactly would you expect me to do? Even if I had the ability, I certainly don't have the inclination to spend time resolving this issue. I'll go so far as to mark something "not spam", but that's about it. The cost to me of not hearing from…

>The cost to me of not hearing from Amazon is virtually zero. The cost to Amazon of not being able to communicate with all its customers that use gmail is huge. It's an Amazon problem, not a customer problem.

And... this is exactly the point. If the filtering company works for the end user, and the end-user doesn't want the mail (or at least doesn't care if it doesn't get delivered) - then the filtering company should block it.

My point here is that you don't have a fundamental right to my attention. If I'm paying someone to sort my messages for me, and they throw out a message that is important to you, but that I don't really want to see... as far as I am concerned, the filtering company has done it's job.

(obviously, if I want that email, it's another matter entirely - see my other response.)

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#124

Post by redahs »

nabla9 wrote: post #59
sjackso wrote: post #16

I've run into similar issues with a similar setup. It's frustrating. You can convince gmail user A to whitelist your messages, and so they'll get through to user A, but gmail user B probably still won't see messages from you unless you tell him to dig them out of the spam trap. And your messages to A might still be classified as spam if they have attachments or hyperlinks in them. (Even if you've been corresponding w…

http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html Internet Mail 2000 IM2000 is a project to design a new Internet mail infrastructure around the following concept: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility.

If mail storage is the sender's responsibility, then perhaps senders should be allowed to seed their outgoing messages directly from their personal and home devices, and rely on others who have included their identity in their web-of-trust\address-book to propagate notifications of changes to their outbox, without relying on their ISP to do so.

If the sender did not have at least one personal device connected to the internet 24/7, then they can perhaps purchase storage and bandwidth from a competitive online market, similar to the seedbox market for torrents, without surrendering their online identity or address to a commercial entity.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#125

Post by lsc »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #102
lsc wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so... your customers were paying a third party to block you, so rather than working with your customers to figure out what the problem was, you threaten to sue the third party.

No. Our customers have email accounts with providers like Comcast. Comcast uses a third-party filtering service to handle spam. So, our customers had no knowledge of the third-party, and some contacted our support staff to question why they weren't receiving our emails. And, of course we attempted to identify the problem with the third party. If you read more carefully, you'll find that in my comment. Only after they…

>And, of course we attempted to identify the problem with the third party. If you read more carefully, you'll find that in my comment. Only after they insisted their classification was correct and refused to remove us from the list did we explore our legal options.

My point here is that the recipients of the email and the senders of the email have very different ideas as to what constitutes a "correct evaluation." - and in this case, it's the recipient who matters, so complaints from senders of email should be simply ignored by spam-filtering companies. Now, if the recipients can't complain, that's a problem, but it's not like people don't have a choice of email providers.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#126

Post by sydney6 »

tacon wrote: post #97

I've managed my own mail server since 1993, and my email address has been the same that entire time. Here are some tips for maintaining sanity: Greylisting still works amazingly well. With a long, long whitelist and greylisting plus DNSBL, I don't even bother running a spam filter, since the little bit of spam and emails from new senders ends up in its own directory as it came from a non-whitelisted sender. Comcast f…

One "could" have a VPS SMTP server transporting inbound mail to a mail server at home and relay outbound mail through e.g. Amazon SES via the same vps-smtp host. But still.. this is bullshit.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#127

Post by ChuckMcM »

tacon wrote: post #97

I've managed my own mail server since 1993, and my email address has been the same that entire time. Here are some tips for maintaining sanity: Greylisting still works amazingly well. With a long, long whitelist and greylisting plus DNSBL, I don't even bother running a spam filter, since the little bit of spam and emails from new senders ends up in its own directory as it came from a non-whitelisted sender. Comcast f…

This one caught me out too, Comcast Business decided to give me an IP6 block, didn't notify me, and my mail server ended up with an IPV6 address. Everything still worked (Yay IP V6 I guess) except that now Google was throwing everything away. The "quick" fix was to tell my mail server not to use IPV6 and the "longer" fix was to update the DNS records according.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#129

Post by bachmeier »

grey-area wrote: post #113

Everyone seems to agree that email is broken (and yet incredibly useful and almost universal in reach). So moving on from there, how do we fix it? Who is currently working on fixing it? What would a new protocol look like?

Chat services such as Slack, and social media like Twitter, are excellent ways to communicate. It's pretty simple. If you implement a request system so that both parties have to agree to let the other send messages, all of the problems are solved. There's no good reason that we need a system that allows anyone to send an arbitrary number of messages to anyone else.
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