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The Hostile Email Landscape

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Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#191

Post by jschwartzi »

staunch wrote: post #138
lsc wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Amaz…

If it's all the same to you, it seems to me that everybody and their mother has a daily or bi-daily newsletter advertising things I don't care about. I think maybe 15 companies are responsible for the vast majority of mail arriving in my inbox, and I care for none of it. Marketing routinely mistakes quantity for quality, as if yelling your message louder is sufficient for mindshare.

I'm really glad that gmail sorts these emails into a place where I don't have to ignore them, because I used to flag them as spam whether or not I might have accidentally given consent 10 years ago by buying something once. It was making email as useful as physical mail(read: not at all).

Just because I bought something from you once does not mean we have a relationship, just as a one-night stand does not entitle you to ask me to help you move.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#192

Post by berkay »

lsc wrote: post #118
cgriswald wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> That's a rather glib and obtuse way to put it. Glib, yes. Obtuse? less so. >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? If your free email address doesn't receive mail you want, I expect you might move to a different mail service. I think that if you want anything but automated support out of…

You may be right in theory but way off in practice. MS for example accepts the emails and dumps them. It does not even make it to users' spam folders. So they don't know and we don't know. We only send emails that customers pay us to receive yet email no longer works. This is not how internet supposed to work. Spam is a major problem and as it is often the case the defensive measures cause just as much, if not more, problems.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#193

Post by eridius »

notatoad wrote: post #185
eridius wrote: post #94

I feel like this is a solvable problem without making any changes to email whatsoever. The problem is the email recipient hosts are suspicious of the sender (as opposed to the message itself being suspicious). So the solution is to have a standardized way for senders to acquire an instantaneous reputation by tying their real-world identity to it (which lets them be held accountable if they do spam), and perhaps by th…

The core problem to this is that reputation is valuable. Google or Twitter or Facebook or any of the other big web presences could offer a method to determine "reputation" of any of their users, and a way to canonically tie your identity to that reputation, but they'd be undermining their own business model. They want you to stay in their network, because the safety of interacting with only reputable users is the big…

What do you mean by "stay in their network", when it comes to sending emails? Google is not in the business of being a paid mass email sender for businesses. What business email they handle is specifically for being the email host for a business's internal email, not sending their newsletter / marketing / account notifications / whatever else.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#194

Post by GauntletWizard »

degenerate wrote: post #189
schoen wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> suddenly Gmail was connecting to my mail server over an IPv6 interface, and I had never bothered to put the IPv6 block into the SPF record Whoa, I think you just solved the problem I've been having with my outbound e-mail for the last two months! Thanks so much!

To confirm: If my server is ipv4 only, there is nothing special I need to add to my SPF record regarding ipv6 addresses, correct?

You probably should add the v6 representation of your V4 address, in case your ISP adds a 4to6 gateway in front of you at some point down the line.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#195

Post by [deleted] »

jcrites wrote: post #148
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…

> suddenly Gmail was connecting to my mail server over an IPv6 interface Nitpick: when sending email, the sending mail server establishes a connection to the receiving server, not vice versa. The sender is responsible for looking up the domain name's MX record, choosing a hostname from those listed, initiating a connection, establishing an SMTP conversation, and negotiating protocol enhancements like SSL. That said,…

[deleted]

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#196

Post by 9248 »

joveian wrote: post #177
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?

I setup my own server recently and could share my experience.

Using postfix + dovecot(imap) + thunderbird. 1 user, set to check mail every 9 minutes. Not even sure if I have IDLE on my server (unless it's on by default).

The SolusVM control panel shows 15-30 bytes/second (in+out) when it's idling. Now add how much your email weights and you got your bandwidth.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#197

Post by dredmorbius »

gaius wrote: post #77
dredmorbius wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Howso? The X protocols have typically struck me as grossly overdesigned and complicated.

More overcomplicated than the complex system of headers and whitelists trying to bolt some basic security and authenticity features onto SMTP? The latter didn't win because it was "better" just because it was easier to implement. Like a car with no brakes or seatbelts.

NB: that doesn't answer my question at all. I didn't ask what the deficiencies of X protocol alternatives were. But for the specific advantages of X.400 and related standards.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#198

Post by kang »

lsc wrote: post #85
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.

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…

You might like http://the.mailman.ninja/

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#199

Post by redahs »

jwatte wrote: post #186
redahs wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem is not the few kilobytes of body. The problem is the slot that the notification takes up in my inbox and attention, which IM2000 does nothing to solve.

Well none of this is happening unless we are using a new mail protocol, and if we are using a new protocol we might as well throw in the kitchen sink and give you a new mail transfer agent and mail client application as well.

And in the new application: Address == Public Key, Address book == web of trust.

Your mail agent probably doesn't even bother to check or propagate incoming message notifications from addresses you haven't manually added to your address book (100% trust), or addresses within a certain number of hops from someone you manually added to your address book (friends of friend, boss's employees, etc.). And the mail client could further hide and ignore all of the notifications from below a certain user customizable trust score as well.

Re: The Hostile Email Landscape

#200

Post by c22 »

jschwartzi wrote: post #191
staunch wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Amaz…

If it's all the same to you, it seems to me that everybody and their mother has a daily or bi-daily newsletter advertising things I don't care about. I think maybe 15 companies are responsible for the vast majority of mail arriving in my inbox, and I care for none of it. Marketing routinely mistakes quantity for quality, as if yelling your message louder is sufficient for mindshare. I'm really glad that gmail sorts t…

I used to have your problem, then I clicked on the "unsubscribe" link in those 15 company's emails and now I mostly just get email from real people and robots I need information from.
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