201–210 of 261 posts
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I tried that a long time ago and the problem with it was that it produced a lot of false positives for me because I subscribe to a lot of Google Groups.
Can you make a negative condition also, X but not Y?
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Someone posted on X advice that really helped me clean up my inbox Add a filter looking for the word "Unsubscribe" and automatically put them in "Promotional" category or something similar. Also apply the filter to existing emails, and let it run for a minute. Try it now! And comment if it reduced your inbox to like 2% of what it was :)
I've commented here before that it is obvious to me that gmail makes no effort to combat spam anymore given that unsubscribe links are legally required and generally present for spam in the US and are an obvious heuristic that aren't used. I would expect basically any trained filter to pick up on it, so my assumption is that they actually intentionally have rules to allow spam. I get emails that literally say "This i…
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Ive got a server hosting a number of things, amd monitoring setup for a lot of stats. Got tired of seeing blips because various countries were beating on my server, not a DoS, but enough requests to notice, and sometimes generate an alert. I blocked 7 countries, in full, and the impact was fantastic. No more 2gb of logs generated every day by countries that have no business accessing my server. Unless you own a globa…
just close the tcp sockets and you wont even notice them trying to connect and failing do you also log everyone who looks at your house? it's a self inflicted problem
I have now sent messages to 3 companies that I am a customer of where their SPF, DKIM, and/or DMARC were failing - for things like initial signup emails. 3/3 responded. 2/3 told me to f'off.
My biggest problem with SPF, DKIM, DMARC is when you go to test this crap there's really only commercial apps. So people who are setting up things for a non-profit or a personal project are either forced to pay after doing 3 or 4 test emails or you wait like 24 hours or some crap. And all that just for the privilege of being able to send email to some gmail accounts. Trying to get email to properly encrypt is pulling…
I built a free DMARC/DKIM/SPF checker: https://dmarcchecker.app/ . No usage limits, no ads—just a small footer link to one of my other projects. Made it for the exact reason you mentioned.
I've been trying the google one, for example, and it doesn't even work. "request timed out." Fishy, because yours works great.
much appreciated!
For me, as someone with their own mail server, these technologies mostly serve to inform me that Russian IP addresses are still trying to send email in the name of my domain for some stupid reason. It makes sense that people whose business is sending email know how to set up email correctly. I'm mostly surprised at how many legitimate sysadmins struggle with getting the basics correct. Surely those dozens of DMARC em…
The problems I noticed were, it doesn't matter what the SPF and DKIM look like. If Google or Microsoft refuse to relay your email based on secret internal factors then you're out of business.
The issue here generally boils down to the defining difference between a generalist Admin and a Messaging Admin. The generalist can follow instructions, and nearly all the instructions out there stop at the point where SPF/DKIM/DMARC are successfully implemented. A generalist worth their salt will then fill in the gaps if they can', and knows this isn't where you stop when you want mail deliverability. There's a higher bar.
If you follow instructions written by non-professionals blindly you don't ever reach the point where you get to quality work.
Google, Microsoft, and the other large ESPs don't refuse to relay your email based on secret internal factors. This is what the non-professional people say to falsely justify why they can't do something.
Google and Microsoft publish the internal factors they use in the form of whitepapers at the industry working group. Its not ready made, and there are a lot of them, and they may not release their specific implementation details, but the metrics are there and often are based in weighted form (reputation-based systems).
If you follow them correctly, and set up the appropriate reporting accounts, and maintain those accounts, you won't have these problems. You generally only have problems once you've violated guidelines continuously, which happens when you rely on, or are unable to discern between qualified and unqualified help.
The factors are published at https://www.m3aawg.org/
Every professional that specializes in email or messaging that I know of is well aware of this.
People don't have the same vitriol when it comes to comparing Generalist Admins to DBAs, and this is the same with any specialized niche.
If you need email and messaging to work in a complex environment, you hire a person that specializes in it.
How is DKIM "deeply flawed"?
SPF/DKIM is really about mail server reputation. So it mostly benefits larger servers like the ones run by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Unfortunately, that means that attempts by those larger providers to combat spam using such reputation will naturally hurt smaller providers. So the actual effects of SPF/DKIM are on the whole negative. The root problem is that we don't actually need to keep track of email server rep…
>SPF/DKIM is really about mail server reputation. So it mostly benefits larger servers like the ones run by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Unfortunately, that means that attempts by those larger providers to combat span using such reputation will naturally hurt smaller providers. So the actual effects of SPF/DKIM are on the whole negative. That paragraph is incorrect. SPF/DKIM is not about reputation. The main purpose…
For me, as someone with their own mail server, these technologies mostly serve to inform me that Russian IP addresses are still trying to send email in the name of my domain for some stupid reason. It makes sense that people whose business is sending email know how to set up email correctly. I'm mostly surprised at how many legitimate sysadmins struggle with getting the basics correct. Surely those dozens of DMARC em…
As a non-email guy, I can tell you that if a system that boils down to having an (optionally certified?) key requires much more than just putting it into a folder with a domain name and running a service, it’s badly designed and has unnecessary complexity. Which will result into abusers having more expertise than legitimate users. The fact that you can “get” DMARC SPF DKIM wrong, while it’s basically a hard requireme…
The reasoning you provide doesn't differentiate, and speaks more of frustration which naturally comes with any area you aren't steeped in, or knowledgeable about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ive got a server hosting a number of things, amd monitoring setup for a lot of stats. Got tired of seeing blips because various countries were beating on my server, not a DoS, but enough requests to notice, and sometimes generate an alert. I blocked 7 countries, in full, and the impact was fantastic. No more 2gb of logs generated every day by countries that have no business accessing my server. Unless you own a globa…
I'm the CTO of a US-based insurance company. Apart from some reinsurers in London and Bermuda, and a couple contractors in Canada, we don't do business outside the US. We've blocked all countries except those, and it has cut down massively on the folks attacking us.
You never see or collect the information by blocking everything at the outset.
In a world where you can proxy past these blocks fairly trivially, that's information you don't have for attribution later.
Defense in depth, or layered defenses are a best approach, but not if they blind you equally.