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The Hostile Email Landscape

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Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#131

Post by lsc »

staunch wrote: post #119
lsc wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bernstein is an incredibly smart guy. But he's also an example of how the social stuff matters. His software would run the internet if he put a little more effort into the social/political side of things. The big problem with IM2000 is that it doesn't solve the real problems. It's focused on the economics of storage of mail, which, yeah, are a thing for a few mail administrators, but generally is considered less impo…

> ... because it would mean that spammers would need to control the servers they use to send for longer than they do now. This is the reason IM2000 is exciting. Spammers only survive using hit and run tactics. We might see a 99% reduction in total generated spam.

Really? More than 99% of the junk email in my box is from "legitimate" senders who use their own mailservers. The truth of the matter is that it's already pretty easy to block the hit and run spammers. Most of the junk that gets through is sent by people with the resources to bully the spamfilters into accepting it.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#133

Post by pmlnr »

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?

This is the big question I'd like to hear an answer for as well.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#134

Post by redahs »

ams6110 wrote: post #74
nabla9 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because spammers can't afford a couple of TB of disk space?

If storage is the sender's responsibility, then there would most likely be no reason for recipients to ever bother downloading unsolicited messages from addresses originating outside of their web of trust in the first place.

You could push spam blocking to the end user and client, and simply let them not download messages originating from unknown origins (similar to phone + Caller ID), without having to worry about dealing with spam in a centralized manner.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#135

Post by huhtenberg »

teddyh wrote: post #84

I sometimes see similar tales of woe, and I can only say that this does not match my experience. I’ve done this many times, you set up the mail server, configure DNS correctly (including reverse lookup), and that’s it. Never had problems being blacklisted or mail getting classified as spam. I suspect that people having trouble are sending a lot of mail , like “newletters”, etc. But I can’t prove this hypothesis.

Ack. Same here. I had a mail server colo'd with Peer1 in Canada since mid 2000's, which I moved to a European colo few months ago. I use it to periodically send newsletters to few thousand people, so it's not exactly low-volume.

The one and only issue was with some AT&T block list - and judging by their supporting forums they end up with a boatload of false positives - I filed a complain with them and they removed the block few days after.

I suspect that OP ended up getting an IP from a netblock that has lots of transient customers, which included some spammers. It's not his server's reputation that was weak, it's the netblock's rep that was bad.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#136

Post by kodablah »

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.

This is also the crux of the streams concept [1][2] posted here a few months back. I have even started an implementation as a side project.

1 - http://tonsky.me/blog/streams/ 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9829614

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#137

Post by pmlnr »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #29
waynecochran wrote: post #28

Create an email network where is would cost a penny to send email. It would be payed into bitcoin wallet of folks maintaining infrastructure. Every email would be digitally signed and encrypted. Certificate with keys would connected to email address (and bitcoin wallet). Spam would die. Go build it please.

Hashcash?

Botnets won't care :/

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#138

Post by staunch »

lsc wrote: post #131
staunch wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... because it would mean that spammers would need to control the servers they use to send for longer than they do now. This is the reason IM2000 is exciting. Spammers only survive using hit and run tactics. We might see a 99% reduction in total generated spam.

Really? More than 99% of the junk email in my box is from "legitimate" senders who use their own mailservers. The truth of the matter is that it's already pretty easy to block the hit and run spammers. Most of the junk that gets through is sent by people with the resources to bully the spamfilters into accepting it.

Spam is viagra ads and the like (unsolicited commercial email). Promotional emails from companies you have a relationship with are a different thing. Users should be able to easily filter and ignore promotional email, but email hosting companies should never block it as spam.

SMTP is not where email organization should happen. That's what email clients are for. Blocking DoS attacks and spam makes sense. Blocking Amazon Kindle promotions does not.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#139

Post by zokier »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #27
gruez wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

something like EV certificates for smtp servers?

That proves I own the domain to some extent. Don't DKIM records do the same? For the purposes of anti-spam, a cert doesn't do anything except prove that you showed some CA that you own the domain (which can be done and is done in other ways currently).

EV certificates are to be bit more extensive than just proving ownership of domain. Most importantly they should associate the owner with some legal entity. So using EV certs would force spammers to establish shell companies, which typically is bit more expensive than just buying a domain and leaves stronger paper trail.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#140

Post by nabla9 »

ams6110 wrote: post #74
nabla9 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because spammers can't afford a couple of TB of disk space?

Spammers using botnets could not use hit and run tactics. Spammer would need reliable server that stays up long time and receive requests. One way to fight spam would be to actually retrieve it and throw it into trash. It would be equal to DOS-attack.

There would be more time to determine if the message is spam. If enough people mark it as spam and site is blacklisted or taken down, spam would be removed from everyone.

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