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Blackholing My Email

johnsto.co.uk

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Re: Blackholing My Email

#21

Post by WorldMaker »

dmd wrote: post #11

I'm always stunned at how good GMail's spam filtering is, at least for me. I've been using the same email address since 1996 - that's 30 years now - and posting it with absolutely no thought to spam protection all over the place. I get ~1000 spams per day. About 1-2 end up in inbox. Every so often I do go through my spam, and while it's possible I've missed something, I generally find less than 1 false positive a mon…

I've started to question if GMail's spam folder is marketing more than substance. I've used the same primary email address for nearly the same number of decades. The time I saw the "most" spam in a spam folder was only while it was hosted on Google Workspace. Actually trying to skim through those "1000s per day" a lot of them seemed suspect in strange ways (why was this even delivered anywhere?) and some of them even seemed like Google just dumping random ad copy from legitimate search ads into the folder.

(Also it says a lot that right now my two biggest sources of daily spam are Google Calendar Notifications and Random Firebase Accounts. Both of those further leave me questioning if Google's approach to spam filtering is sincere.)

Re: Blackholing My Email

#22

Post by jnettome »

3form wrote: post #6

To me, the fact that the author of the article is the author of de_dust2 is the real highlight! For those who don't know, it's the most popular map ever in Counter Strike, and I expect so it remains to this day. This is funny, as I always imagined these things to be made by some nameless author of good old Internet, and never bothered to check and look it up. Further less I expected to stumble upon it by said author'…

I love your work! Thanks for the huuuuge work on de_dust2!

Re: Blackholing My Email

#23

Post by kumardeepanshu »

BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #13
riverforest wrote: post #3

Email is the one thing everyone complains about and almost nobody actually fixes. Curious how long this lasts before something important falls through.

Do you have any suggestions on how to fix email? From my perspective all attempts at fixing anything broke something for smaller senders. Today if you want to host a mail server you can set up everything correctly (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and your email still lands in the spam folder because you have not enough reputation. There are whole IP address segments that a flat out prohibited from participating. Email is designed…

[dead]

Re: Blackholing My Email

#24

Post by pizzafeelsright »

riverforest wrote: post #3

Email is the one thing everyone complains about and almost nobody actually fixes. Curious how long this lasts before something important falls through.

Email is fixed by avoiding the usage. I only check my email for password resets and bank notifications. I never send email. Every other channel of communication with anyone outside of work is a text message.

Re: Blackholing My Email

#25

Post by dhosek »

Oh man, the ILOVEYOU worm—I remember getting that from a former co-worker (who I was pretty sure was not secretly in love with me) and asking him who he got it from that he opened the attachment and he sheepishly identified a female co-worker who as it turned out had been interested in dating me but I was already dating someone at the time. I look back at how stuff was set up in 1999–2000 and man, we were so trusting of the world then.

Re: Blackholing My Email

#26

Post by dhosek »

WorldMaker wrote: post #21
dmd wrote: post #11

I'm always stunned at how good GMail's spam filtering is, at least for me. I've been using the same email address since 1996 - that's 30 years now - and posting it with absolutely no thought to spam protection all over the place. I get ~1000 spams per day. About 1-2 end up in inbox. Every so often I do go through my spam, and while it's possible I've missed something, I generally find less than 1 false positive a mon…

I've started to question if GMail's spam folder is marketing more than substance. I've used the same primary email address for nearly the same number of decades. The time I saw the "most" spam in a spam folder was only while it was hosted on Google Workspace. Actually trying to skim through those "1000s per day" a lot of them seemed suspect in strange ways (why was this even delivered anywhere?) and some of them even…

I’ve had the same gmail address since it was first announced. It also gets email forwarded to it from another ancient email address that I used to self-host and that still gets occasional real mails. Most of the spam is addressed to that other address.

Just took a peek at my spam folder: 207 messages going back to March 18th, two false positives (both from mailing lists), but nothing critical. I think maybe I’ve seen one spam message across all my accounts in my inbox. Their filters benefit from a huge set of trainers on their data.

(As an aside, I would note that some newer addresses that I publish naked on some websites that I maintain get very little spam (14 messages between the two accounts in the same timeframe, most of which are from a single sender who decided that they should send me their press releases without any means of opting out.)

Re: Blackholing My Email

#27

Post by nozzlegear »

simgoh wrote: post #17
nozzlegear wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a Fastmail customer for years and have been pretty happy with their spam filtering too. Anything that does get through either gets a custom rule to send it to the shadow realm, or gets sent to a special "Learn spam" folder that I set up which will train the spam filter on that message.

Have you noticed decreases over time by sending thigns to the "Learn Spam" folder? I'm a relatively new Fastmail customer - I setup a domain for some family accounts that I can manage on behalf of my aging family members so it's not receiving a lot of email _yet_ but I expect it to in the future.

I have noticed it for sure. The default spam filter catches most of what I'd consider spam, but the Learn Spam feature is needed for things that get through because they look legitimate. For example, I get a lot of those weird "You're an American, I'm from [China, India, etc.], we can make a lot of money if you go to all the interviews/meetings and then let me do all the work" kind of emails. They look like normal correspondence (maybe they are) so they occasionally end up in my inbox. When they do, I send them to the "Learn Spam" folder, and the next time I check my actual Spam folder I'll find that Fastmail caught several more just like it and sent them straight there.

Re: Blackholing My Email

#28

Post by siruwastaken »

I'm probably showing my age here, but did these email worms largely die out due to spam filtering, or did the email programs just get better protections against viruses that made it more difficult to exploit? The only email "viruses" I have come accross today are actual humans accidentally replying "reply all" to a legitimate email.

Re: Blackholing My Email

#29

Post by buserror »

I got fired off pair.com because I had a wildcard email, and was receiving (and to my credit, discarding) millions of emails... a day... on my personal domain. Whoops.

I still use my super optimized c++ email filter to this day, 25 years later. Beats anything else I ever tried.

Re: Blackholing My Email

#30

Post by sonofhans »

freediddy wrote: post #12

de_dust... such good times! A perfectly designed map where everyone knew what the chokepoints were and what the best strategies were but the outcomes between equal opponents was never guaranteed. That's what makes a perfect playing field! I recently got my older kid and his friends hooked on CS2 via steam. I'm considering having a "dads vs kids" tourney because we're at that cross section where all the dads have play…

Careful. The crossover from “I’m showing my kid CS2” to “I’m getting easily deleted by my kid in CS2” is pretty fast :)
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