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The Hostile Email Landscape

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Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#171

Post by username223 »

rndn wrote: post #121
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.

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

People have tried and failed with fee-based email before (e.g. HashCash). I do wonder if the postal service could do something here: every citizen has an address, people pay some pittance to deliver mail to that address, and it's a federal crime to tamper with that email. Physical junk mail is annoying, but nowhere near as bad as spam.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#172

Post by [deleted] »

bachmeier wrote: post #166
[deleted] wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

> but there is a compelling reason -- this ability to send junk to anyone has allowed some people to make money consistently for decades How is that a compelling reason? Why would I want to open myself up to spam so that others can make money? There is a compelling reason that we use the current email system. We do it because we have to. Nonetheless, communication over the internet without spam is a solved problem, w…

[deleted]

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#173

Post by david_ar »

redahs wrote: post #124
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.

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…

It would probably be possible to build a system like this on top of https://ipfs.io/, see https://github.com/ipfs/apps/issues/10 for example

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#174

Post by Asbostos »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #146
david-given wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right... their email providers, which they are paying to provide email from them . The money chain is still at your recipient's end. Note that I'm not suggesting you did the wrong thing here --- I don't see anything else you could have done. I'm just saying that pinning the entirety of the blame on the third party provider is wrong. ... Having read the rest of the thread: I'm sorry to say but the reason why you're ha…

>* pinning the entirety of the blame on the third party provider is wrong.* We disagree. It's certainly understandable that the third-party might raise false-positives. However, what is wrong is when a business can demonstrate that it is not engaged in such practices, yet the third-party provider still refuses to cease penalizing them. So, who else's fault would it be? Mine? The customer? The customer's e-mail provid…

How about let your members keep missing their emails. If they really want them, encourage them to sort out the problem with their email provider which is apparently failing to do its job? Since the recipients are the ones who choose to receive it, then they're also the ones to be upset when something goes wrong - especially since it's caused by their choice of an unreliable email provider.

I use email for a slightly more spammy purpose (double opt in but mainly to promote sales to existing users) so I wouldn't be able to make this claim if it happened to me - my recipients won't notice if they don't get my email and many won't care. I have to deal with these problems too, usually by manually asking the blacklister to unblacklist me, which they seem to do.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#175

Post by jodrellblank »

redahs wrote: post #134
ams6110 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

If storage is the sender's responsibility, then not only can they potentially get some of your attention, but also your location, what kind of device(s) you use to get email, when you're active, and precisely what kind of content is enticing you to click and what isn't.

A very tight feedback loop for generating content that will trick you, and hosting it for just long enough to see if it works.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#176

Post by hannob »

I have a bit of experience with running email servers. I can't really say that I had similar encounters.

In my experience if you get blocked by big mail providers it's almost always due to some reason. What's tricky is that it may be hard to tell what exactly is wrong, because they won't necessarily tell you (or not in an easy way).

Some advice what I'd do to try to find out what's going on:

1. Take a sent example mail that is like the blocked one (but obviously one that reached its target destination) with all headers and run it through spamassassin. Don't just look if it hit the spam score (then you did something terribly wrong), look at each individual rule that spamassassin hit. They might give you a clue. A proper mail usually shouldn't hit any or very few positive spamassassin rules.

2. Check your IP at a service like valli where you can query multiple DNS black lists. If it is on any blacklist try to find out how you can be delisted. There are some rogue blacklists that make it impossible to be delisted at all, you may ignore them (google for them, their behavior is well documented), but these shouldn't be more than 1 or 2. As already said by other commenters, don't forget IPv6.

3. Read whatever error message you can get your hands on. If you're blocked on the SMTP level read the error message. If your message got sorted into a spam folder look at all the headers. If the provider blocking you has some online docs about their spam filtering read that. If they have some sort of service for mail ISPs where you can sign up to get warnings sign up there.

Of course also the obvious stuff. If you do anything that is mass mailing you are in extra danger. Make sure that you allow people to unsubscribe easily, don't ignore manual attempts by them to unsubscribe ("I want to get off this mailing list") and delete invalid mail addresses.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#177

Post by joveian »

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…

What kind of bandwith usage do you see? I'm not sure I'd be brave enough to try this anyway, but one thing I worry about is exceeding bandwith quotas and ending up with a large bill.

Also, do you just have one server or a backup as well?

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#178

Post by SHIT_TALKER »

I see lots of threads shitting on the guy for doing it wrong vis-a-vis his configuration whilst ignoring his actual problem: An IP address without a reputation score. I've had the same problem and reached the same conclusion. The address can't just be clean, as in not on a blacklist, but has to essentially already be whitelisted via a "known good" reputation score or mail automatically gets blackholed. How do I get my VPS provider of choice to give me an IP address with a good reputation score?

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#179

Post by lsc »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #164
lsc wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What does that mean? They sign up for our service and expect to get e-mails from us, which they don't receive. We have the same "idea", but the third-party is interfering with that "idea". That's not quite how it works from the end-user's perspective. Say I buy a product or service from you. Of course, you send me billing emails, etc. and that's fine. The problem is that companies take this further and start thinkin…

Thanks for the advice. I know you mean well, but none of it applies. I do agree with you on principle. We've been doing this for over a decade and have learned best practices. We also know what our customers appreciate and are very mindful of content, frequency, etc. But, you seem to be overlooking a key point, so I will state it for at least the third time: the problem was NOT the content, and it was NOT being marke…

>But, what you really don't seem to be getting is that they do have a responsibility not to harm us. That's why there is a legal cause of action known as "tortious interference". I sincerely don't know how to make that point any clearer. Perhaps researching that term a bit might help.

Yes, yes, reading up on that is probably a good idea. I am not a lawyer... but in the case of a mail-filtering company blocking emails that their customers have asked them to block, they are harming the senders of those mails. That is a direct result of what their customers are paying them to do.

Or ad-block programs- really, it's exactly the same thing; what the ad-blocker does for the user does harm the advertisers. There's many, many places in the free market where helping one side of a transaction hurts the other.

That probably means that "tortious interference" is more complex than you are making it out to be. There are a lot of situations where helping one party necessarily hurts another, and helping one party over the other is generally not illegal.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#180

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

I use a private email provider (privateemail.com, via Namecheap), which doesn't seem to stop others receiving my emails, but sites sometimes have trouble emailing me, oddly enough.

Though that might just be because I have a 6-character domain (ajf.me).

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