Spam blacklisting is out of control • Hacker News Board

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#191

Post by Silhouette » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 10:52 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #140

Silhouette wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I am happy for you that you have found a solution, the solution you found is symptomatic of a very dangerous situation: it is increasingly impossible for individuals or SMEs to use essential online facilities like sending messages or transferring money reliably unless they use a broker service as an intermediary. We are allowing small numbers of tech firms to take control of vital functionality that should be u…

This is just the internet moving to match the real world. In the real world, reputation matters and some people don't want to talk to you unless someone can vouch for you. For areas where the general public needs to interact, third party intermediary services spring up to fill this need. This is why for any store over the size of a mom and pop operation in a neighborhood, you can't just tell the owner who you know by…

In the real world, reputation matters and some people don't want to talk to you unless someone can vouch for you.

This has absolutely nothing to do with someone not wanting to talk to someone else. It has everything to do with some third party having the power to decide whether the other two may communicate.

These days it's all so centralized in a few very large players that they really likely just talk to each other.

And thus the single most important method of remote communication in the world today, the method that is frequently akin to root access to our online lives, became subject to arbitrary monitoring and interference by huge, powerful organisations with their own interests and negligible regulatory oversight, legal safeguards or accountability to anyone but their shareholders.

Do you really not see why this is a problem? You talk about the internet matching the real world, but in the real world we've had laws against monitoring and interference with things like postal mail and telephone calls for a very long time almost everywhere.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#192

Post by jasonhansel » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 10:53 PM UTC

> If my understanding of the law is correct, spamming is legal, albeit immoral.

It's illegal in the US: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#193

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 10:53 PM UTC

mjrpes wrote: post #34

I fought the battle to keep my SMTP server IP off blacklists, and lost. You can do everything possible, have a perfectly clean IP, have a good amount of outbound email traffic, only send transactional email, etc. Still, there will be edge cases where email does not go through. AT&T email servers would constantly blacklist me and not respond to requests to remove me, gmail/yahoo/outlook would silently put emails in th…

[deleted]

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#194

Post by ohyeshedid » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 10:54 PM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #156

vorpalhex wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always login and re-enable an email on the service. The service is allowed to request information needed to process the unsubscribe. I get emails for some dude's Chevy when it needs servicing. I can't unsubscribe. I am stuck getting emails about a car I have never owned from some dealer in Pittsburg. I need an opt out that lets me communocate "hey, some dumbass fatfingered his email, stop spamming me."

Genuine question: your comment and a bunch of others make me wonder why people seem unable to filter email by sender. That used to be a pretty standard part of having an inbox. Are you using a mail client or service that doesn't have filtering built in? Do you find it difficult to set up a filter rule? Are you unfamiliar with filter rules? Do you use filters but just ideologically object to any unwanted email? I'm ho…

The conversations about spam are usually incredibly nebulous, as there's different perceptions and perspectives.

I think what you're picking up on, is that some folks don't differentiate between commercial email filtering services, and personal spam filters.

There's conflation of email 'I don't care about and don't want', bulk UCE, shifty list operators with shifty 40 page terms, etc.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#195

Post by jgerrish » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 10:54 PM UTC

phishersfritz wrote: post #161

tyingq wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think "Tortious interference" is the most likely legal basis to complain about it. "Tortious interference is a common law tort allowing a claim for damages against a defendant who wrongfully interferes with the plaintiff's contractual or business relationships"

Safe your 500 bucks per hour. A lawyer will not do anything. A blacklist is not directly interfering with your business. They just provide a list that contains IPs, your IP, and say we have seen spam traffic from it in the last x hours. The mail receiver, who trusts and uses the list might be interfering, but it is his right to pick and choose who he is accepting email from. Same right you have to pick and choose who…

  Safe your 500 bucks per hour. A lawyer will not do anything

Sigh, I think I understand this statement. A warning to patent holders or a call to let it all burn down. A clever appeal to class divisions. I can't work through all the implications.

But I do know the "enemy" of my "enemy" is not necessarily my "friend".

I've seen the nightmare of the next Internet. Whether it's micropayments for digital stamps, or slowly refilling quotas, or hard hierarchical controls, it's more power to central authority.

I know I'll never win this argument.

The Internet will keep fracturing and normal citizens will get more frustrated. There will be a change. But just like the hatred of social media, lurking underneath it is an insatiable thirst for power.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#196

Post by mjrpes » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 11:00 PM UTC

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #165

mjrpes wrote: post #34

I fought the battle to keep my SMTP server IP off blacklists, and lost. You can do everything possible, have a perfectly clean IP, have a good amount of outbound email traffic, only send transactional email, etc. Still, there will be edge cases where email does not go through. AT&T email servers would constantly blacklist me and not respond to requests to remove me, gmail/yahoo/outlook would silently put emails in th…

I did not even know services like Postmark and Mailgun solved this problem. Thank you!

To be clear, Postfix is the Open Source Linux software for sending email. In a perfect world, Postfix would be all you need for sending.

Providers like Postmark and Mailgun let you forward and send email through them. Essentially, you are paying these companies to deal with IP address reputation management and ensure high deliverability.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#197

Post by Brian_K_White » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 11:01 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #184

Brian_K_White wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rationale for involving legal is to place some accountability and consequences where they belong. Currently, countless people essentially commit countless abuses for free because the actor is hidden behind a machine or a process. But somewhere it's a humans decision to institute an abusive protocol, and it seems pretty fair fo me to make that human accountable for their action. Not just email but all kinds of thi…

I'm a dick? I question whether you or what other percentage of the commenters in this thread represent any specific ASN with its own IP space that it cares about keeping clean, and have bgp relationships with other ISPs. Or whether they're actually end users only. Have you actually encountered this problem as a service provider in the past and implemented solutions to it, or are you just sharing your opinion as a pos…

I avoided the problem by only ever sending email on behalf of customers, not receiving. IE, saas app can send out quotes and invoices and things but any replies go to the end users own address not any of our servers, and didn't host our own email.

What I didn't do was ignore the problem or think there was no problem. Things still got blocked elsewhere but I (personally or my company) didn't do it.

I recognized that handling someone elses correspondence is a non-trivial responsibility. Yes the job is hard, and so you either decide that is your whole job, or you outsource it to someone whos whole job it is. You don't just do a poor job because it's hard and not your all day every day job.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#198

Post by knutix » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 11:02 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #178

What would be nice is if there could be whitelists as well, or a blacklist that additionally keeps count of positive interactions. I've had an IP for about a decade that never once sent spam, but has ended up on blacklists from time to time (hosting EICAR on a web server apparently gets your mail server banned, 15-year-old me found out). SPF nicely says that this IP is supposed to be sending email for this domain. I…

You should check dnswl.org That is the biggest whitelist there is.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#199

Post by Silhouette » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 11:02 PM UTC

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #183

Silhouette wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spam has largely been a solved problem for decades IME. You don't need some big-data-crunching mega-mail-host to block it successfully. For my personal mail, I use a small provider that isn't configured to block anything automatically and the built-in tools in my mail software. For my businesses, we have a pretty standard SpamAssassin-style setup. Either way, I see hardly any spam in my inbox despite receiving mail t…

Sure for you, but all of these other mailservers still obviously find value in applying spam filters or they wouldn't keep filtering. The problem is that it's much easier to send email than it is to receive it. This puts the onus of spam filtering on the recipient. I'm sad that HashCash or some other PoW scheme was never adopted as a way to force rate limiting of mailers.

Sure for you, but all of these other mailservers still obviously find value in applying spam filters or they wouldn't keep filtering.

But since they have no accountability, their incentive is to eliminate anything potentially hostile regardless of the collateral damage from false positives. What are their users going to do? Take their business to another big provider that will probably be doing the same, and in the process lose access to a bunch of online services they like because their accounts on those services are tied to the old address? Move to a small provider, which is being forced out of the network by the giants so can't deliver mail reliably?

We are rapidly heading for a world where email is no longer a reliable communications medium for genuine messages between friends, family, work colleagues, etc. The giants are killing email through death by 1,000 cuts instead of a shotgun to the face but the end result is the same.

Re: Spam blacklisting is out of control

#200

Post by softwarebeware » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 11:05 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #46

wl wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We were also informed that our normal, business communications with paying customers should have unsubscribe notices appended to them. Which is to say, you're a paying customer of a service and we send you some kind of alert or critical announcement ... and it should have an unsubscribe link. You absolutely should. The amount of junk I get because someone else signed up for something and fat fingered their email ad…

That's a (very legitimate and important) reason to do double opt-in unilaterally for all email communications. Companies should make 100% sure that the person who signed up, and the person receiving the email, are the same person, before they associate the email with the account. Otherwise, malicious people can sign up arbitrary third parties for tons of random crap. But it's not a good reason for adding unsubscribe…

> Otherwise, malicious people can sign up arbitrary third parties for tons of random crap.

In the early days of the internet I was a teenager in a prank war with someone so I signed them up for all kinds of spam and also free trial magazine subscriptions.