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Throttle – Control who can send you email

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Re: Throttle – Control who can send you email

#21

Post by actsasbuffoon »

55acdda48ab5 wrote: post #6

I discovered that when you delete your email address for a week almost all the spam and newsletters disappear. I don't know exactly how it works, but it does. So every couple years I just completely disable my email address for ten days, or whatever, while on vacation.

Everyone who sends email has to be very careful about upsetting email service providers, because they'll mark your messages as spam if they suspect you of misbehavior. Email providers use many metrics, and one of them is the number of bounced emails.

It doesn't take much to be marked as a bad actor, so companies will quickly remove you from their lists if you're jeopardizing their ability to get into the inboxes of their other users.

Source: I've worked at a couple of companies that used email as a significant part of their strategy to keep in touch with users.

Re: Throttle – Control who can send you email

#22

Post by kazinator »

ptype wrote: post #16

To achieve the same cheaply and without lockin, simply have your own domain with a catch-all email forwarding to your real email address. Then always give out your email address for a specific site as @yourdomain.com.

Yes, but this is a pain to administer. Do you have some nice tools for generating these addresses and putting them into effect in the back-end which underlies your domain, without having to whip out an SSH client, logging in to some server, editing files and re-starting services?

I have my own "yourdomain.com". I pay to keep it registered and keep a server running also. Most people don't have this; their mail domain is "gmail.com" or whatever. Sure, a lot of problems could be solved if everyone just had their own domain!

Speaking of "gmail.com"; I'm surprised Google doesn't just make this a feature of gmail. It would be fairly trivial for them to implement for the benefit of all gmail users.

Re: Throttle – Control who can send you email

#23

Post by misthop »

kazinator wrote: post #22
ptype wrote: post #16

To achieve the same cheaply and without lockin, simply have your own domain with a catch-all email forwarding to your real email address. Then always give out your email address for a specific site as @yourdomain.com.

Yes, but this is a pain to administer. Do you have some nice tools for generating these addresses and putting them into effect in the back-end which underlies your domain, without having to whip out an SSH client, logging in to some server, editing files and re-starting services? I have my own "yourdomain.com". I pay to keep it registered and keep a server running also. Most people don't have this; their mail domain…

gmail actually is set up to handle this. You can append + to an address to create a targeted one-off (so if your address is me@gmail.com, you could do me+site1spam@gmail.com) Of course you then have to set up a filter on the gmail side to label it/send it to spam if intrusive.

The problem with this solution is that many email harvesting widgets incorrectly see +xyz as invalid, even though it satisfies the rfc just fine.

Re: Throttle – Control who can send you email

#24

Post by hornbaker »

kazinator wrote: post #22
ptype wrote: post #16

To achieve the same cheaply and without lockin, simply have your own domain with a catch-all email forwarding to your real email address. Then always give out your email address for a specific site as @yourdomain.com.

Yes, but this is a pain to administer. Do you have some nice tools for generating these addresses and putting them into effect in the back-end which underlies your domain, without having to whip out an SSH client, logging in to some server, editing files and re-starting services? I have my own "yourdomain.com". I pay to keep it registered and keep a server running also. Most people don't have this; their mail domain…

It's already a feature of gmail. Just add "+whatever" to the username and it will still route to you, e.g. use "john+sketchysite.com@gmail.com" when you sign up at sketchysite.com.

Occasionally you'll run into a form with broken email validation that won't let you use a + character, but I've been doing this for years and it works the vast majority of the time.

Re: Throttle – Control who can send you email

#25

Post by gt565k »

actsasbuffoon wrote: post #21
55acdda48ab5 wrote: post #6

I discovered that when you delete your email address for a week almost all the spam and newsletters disappear. I don't know exactly how it works, but it does. So every couple years I just completely disable my email address for ten days, or whatever, while on vacation.

Everyone who sends email has to be very careful about upsetting email service providers, because they'll mark your messages as spam if they suspect you of misbehavior. Email providers use many metrics, and one of them is the number of bounced emails. It doesn't take much to be marked as a bad actor, so companies will quickly remove you from their lists if you're jeopardizing their ability to get into the inboxes of t…

Very true. I've used SendGrid and Mandrill for transactional email services and bounces count against your account's reputation.

Most of them will require warming up the account/IP you're sending the emails from in order to increase the quota of emails you can send per hour/day.

Re: Throttle – Control who can send you email

#26

Post by ptype »

kazinator wrote: post #22
ptype wrote: post #16

To achieve the same cheaply and without lockin, simply have your own domain with a catch-all email forwarding to your real email address. Then always give out your email address for a specific site as @yourdomain.com.

Yes, but this is a pain to administer. Do you have some nice tools for generating these addresses and putting them into effect in the back-end which underlies your domain, without having to whip out an SSH client, logging in to some server, editing files and re-starting services? I have my own "yourdomain.com". I pay to keep it registered and keep a server running also. Most people don't have this; their mail domain…

I have been running this setup for years without any administration. Email forwarding tends to be included from your domain registrar so no server is necessary. You don't need a tool to generate the addresses as you can make them up as you go along.

Re: Throttle – Control who can send you email

#27

Post by hawski »

I was thinking about similar service. What would be different is that I would give user subdomain and redirect all incoming traffic on SMTP SSL port to connected client. I would give access for user to get SSL cert from Let's Encrypt.

All this would give something better than promise that I would not look at private emails, but I would have to build client application that would be SMTP server inside. Handling LE automatically and all other seemingly unrelated things.

Main use would be to use generated by application unique addresses for registration purposes.

Re: Throttle – Control who can send you email

#28

Post by kazinator »

hornbaker wrote: post #24
kazinator wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but this is a pain to administer. Do you have some nice tools for generating these addresses and putting them into effect in the back-end which underlies your domain, without having to whip out an SSH client, logging in to some server, editing files and re-starting services? I have my own "yourdomain.com". I pay to keep it registered and keep a server running also. Most people don't have this; their mail domain…

It's already a feature of gmail. Just add "+whatever" to the username and it will still route to you, e.g. use "john+sketchysite.com@gmail.com" when you sign up at sketchysite.com. Occasionally you'll run into a form with broken email validation that won't let you use a + character, but I've been doing this for years and it works the vast majority of the time.

Because this is implemented by a major, very popular e-mail provider, it effectively reveals your real e-mail address to spammers, who can just look for this pattern in any address in the '@gmail.com' domain and strip away the + part. It will keep only the "honest" bulk mailers out of your inbox, not hard-core spammers.

This type of thing can work, but only for a small-time service provider whose plaintext encoding scheme is not widely known. (Security thorugh obscurity.) Even the hard-core spammers won't sift through millions of e-mail addresses to crack some plain text scheme that is used by two or three of them.

Also, you need the option to permanently destroy one of these, so that you never see mail from it again. No filtering bullshit. Google should control the exact set of anonymized addressees attached to your account. When you destroy any one of them, any further attempt to send to it should result in a non-delivery notice (SMTP bounce).

Re: Throttle – Control who can send you email

#29

Post by kazinator »

ptype wrote: post #26
kazinator wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but this is a pain to administer. Do you have some nice tools for generating these addresses and putting them into effect in the back-end which underlies your domain, without having to whip out an SSH client, logging in to some server, editing files and re-starting services? I have my own "yourdomain.com". I pay to keep it registered and keep a server running also. Most people don't have this; their mail domain…

I have been running this setup for years without any administration. Email forwarding tends to be included from your domain registrar so no server is necessary. You don't need a tool to generate the addresses as you can make them up as you go along.

What do you mean you can just make them up as you go along?

Suppose I have two users in my domain: bob@mydomain, alice@mydomain.

How can alice just make up a new @mydomain address which goes to alice@mydomain? Okay, that part is simple: we can have an entire space of these generated by a rule, like gmail's addr+whatever@gmail.com.

But then how does alice invalidate such an address that is misused?

I want it so that any address that is not valid generates an SMTP bounce; I don't want an infinite space of aliases that map to an address to all be considered valid, but a specific set, controlled by the user. When an element is removed from that set, then further attempts to send to it generate SMTP bounces.

Furthermore, I want it to be completely anonymized, just like Throttle are doing, as in:

   @mydomain -> alice@mydomain
The text "alice" doesn't appear in the plaintext anywhere, and cannot be reversed out of the local part.

EDIT:

To solve one of these problems, what we can do is assign to each user some random identifier of fixed length, from which further addresses can be generated. For instance alice@mydomain also gets "xZa3f@mydomain" when the account is created. To this local part, arbitrary characters can be appended: "xZa3f4abPspamming.dickheads.com@mydomain" such that this still routes to alice@mydomain. Doesn't handle the SMTP-level invalidation requirement though.

Re: Throttle – Control who can send you email

#30

Post by jkldotio »

The video on the landing page doesn't play properly and surprise surprise it's Vimeo. People need to stop using Vimeo, they have incredibly bad service.

I have had problems with Vimeo for years now across multiple desktops, multiple browsers, multiple mobile devices in multiple locations (across Europe and Australia). It happens on both popular videos and videos in the long tail which aren't being linked to at that moment by popular sites. It happens on free Vimeo accounts and on premium Vimeo accounts. I give Vimeo a pass when YouTube HD videos aren't working either but most of the time YouTube HD videos are working just fine on these connections and it's just Vimeo can't stream video reliably.

In this case the video wasn't even full motion, the background is static and the keyframes and audio should have been a large slice of the bandwidth. But it was stuttering at the start and now even after letting it load in the background on a 70Mbps connection while typing this comment it's still stalling near the end of the video. What are the Vimeo alternatives besides YouTube?

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