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The Perils of an .xyz Domain

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Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#261

Post by GoblinSlayer »

skrtskrt wrote: post #255
honkdaddy wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting. I definitely get phishing SMS messages from time to time, but I didn't realize these were some of the very few which actually made it through. Any idea how these bad actors are able to send out these massive batches of spam SMS? My naiive guess would be bulk purchasing disposable SIMs but I imagine it's more sophisticated?

It's whack-a-mole where game is skewed wildly towards the moles. Basically there are tons of VOIP companies, with varying levels of give-a-shit and spam detection capabilities. Generally they are incentivized to let people self-serve on their platform - spin up quickly and start running traffic, or blasting spam, whatever. Especially if you're a small company, you're probably more likely to look the other way for a b…

A simple solution: forward suspicious messages to a configured email address and let it be handled there.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#262

Post by GoblinSlayer »

iconjack wrote: post #43
humanistbot wrote: post #2

> One surprising side effect of having a .xyz domain is that the mere inclusion of .xyz inside of a text message will result in a silent delivery failure for many providers. This is wild to me. Tested it out myself and I couldn't send an SMS with a spot.xyz link to/from Google Voice T-Mobile. And no "failed delivery" notice either, just a silent failure. And yet I still get so many texts that are obviously spam or ph…

It was wild to me too. I have an .xyz domain, which seemed appropriate for a non-commercial math site. I'd try to send links of math experiments to friends and colleagues via SMS, so they could tell me if they worked right on their phones or not. Can't tell you how much confusion and frustration it caused that the links were simply not being delivered, though all the conversation around the links went through just fi…

SMS has a delivery confirmation feature, my phone indicates delivered and undelivered messages, so you can tell what wasn't delivered.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#263

Post by mtVessel »

lmm wrote: post #206
pasc1878 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was no filtering how many spammessages would you receive? I suspect any more than you see

I deliberately set GMail to the lowest level of spam filtering they'll allow, and still only receive a couple of spam messages per month at most. They need to adjust their levels.

There are levels?

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#264

Post by blowski »

mindslight wrote: post #257
blowski wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever thought you might be wrong? Go and talk to the nearest non-technical person you can find and ask them whether they’d consider it censorship. It seems you’re in for a surprise.

I don't see the relevance of how the average person might respond. People associate the term "censorship" with badness, and thus react with cognitive dissonance when an idea that they like is characterized by an appropriate technical term that has negative connotations. I suspect this is exactly what's happening here - I've basically made some pretty dry analysis based on a straightforward definition, while you've re…

Cambridge Dictionary:

> censor: to prevent part or the whole of a book, film, work of art, document, or other kind of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because it is considered to be offensive or harmful, or because it contains information that someone wishes to keep secret, often for political reasons.

Miriam Webster definition:

> to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable

If I automatically delete content merely because I think you won’t be interested in it, I don’t see how that counts as censorship under the standard dictionary definition.

That said, you are of course entitled to your own opinion of what the word means. But please don’t be surprised if I think you sound a bit melodramatic suggesting that Google is carrying out censorship by automatically deleting emails offering me cheap viagra, especially when I can still see these emails by clicking on a link or reconfiguring the rules.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#265

Post by mindslight »

blowski wrote: post #264
mindslight wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the relevance of how the average person might respond. People associate the term "censorship" with badness, and thus react with cognitive dissonance when an idea that they like is characterized by an appropriate technical term that has negative connotations. I suspect this is exactly what's happening here - I've basically made some pretty dry analysis based on a straightforward definition, while you've re…

Cambridge Dictionary: > censor: to prevent part or the whole of a book, film, work of art, document, or other kind of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because it is considered to be offensive or harmful, or because it contains information that someone wishes to keep secret, often for political reasons. Miriam Webster definition: > to examine in order to suppress or delete anything consid…

Your second definition doesn't even invoke a third party (it claims even more than mine), and your first definition only differs in that it references some motives. But motives are a bit of a red herring in the day of probability-based filtering.

I've never claimed "Google is carrying out censorship by automatically deleting emails offering me cheap viagra". You're the one that keeps invoking such hyperbolic strawmen - the original topic was the surprise blocking of text messages.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#266

Post by blowski »

mindslight wrote: post #265
blowski wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cambridge Dictionary: > censor: to prevent part or the whole of a book, film, work of art, document, or other kind of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because it is considered to be offensive or harmful, or because it contains information that someone wishes to keep secret, often for political reasons. Miriam Webster definition: > to examine in order to suppress or delete anything consid…

Your second definition doesn't even invoke a third party (it claims even more than mine), and your first definition only differs in that it references some motives. But motives are a bit of a red herring in the day of probability-based filtering. I've never claimed " Google is carrying out censorship by automatically deleting emails offering me cheap viagra ". You're the one that keeps invoking such hyperbolic strawm…

Honestly, I have no idea what you _are_ trying to say at this point. Something something censorship is all I'm getting. And long words like cognitive dissonance.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#267

Post by rsync »

mdavis6890 wrote: post #216
krono wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocking of messages/emails and blanket email server/domain/extension blacklisting is the same as a postal service not delivering mail to or from a particular entity/street/town. Doing so silently and without a valid and case-specific reason should not be legally allowed. Edit: Added "street/town" to analogy, and "case-specific" before reason

The problem is that just receiving the message is in-and-of itself bad for the end user. It's not the volume you think (assuming the other poster is accurate about relative volumes) - it's far, far more. Imagine getting 1000 SMS/day that all have a "spam" warning attached, or worse, no warning at all. You'd just stop getting any value from SMS at all, and ignore it. I mean, going back to the postal service - even the…

"I'm grateful for the silent block in this case."

That's not the issue - the issue is not alerting the sender that the message has failed.

It's not a big deal if the receiver never receives the message - we can find a different way of reaching out or fix the content problem or whatever. But we never find out. As far as the sender is concerned, the message succeeded.

This is a problem and the very bad spam heuristics employed by even the most competent actors (gmail, for instance) mean that anyone can be impacted by this.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#268

Post by rsync »

cookiengineer wrote: post #229

- uses googlemail as TXT entries but privateemail.com MX entries for spot.xyz domain - no DKIM/DMARC verification headers that make sense, just a default ~all - wonders why emails are classified as spam Well, yeah. Maybe use an email spam rating tool next time, like mail tester [1]? [1] https://www.mail-tester.com

mail-tester.com is great and I use it frequently to check (and recheck) the mail servers that I run.

However, your (correct) evaluation of their weird DKIM/DMARC/MX values notwithstanding, I currently have 10/10 totally perfect score from mail-tester.com and gmail marks my email to my wife as spam.

As in, a 15 year history of my email address having multi conversations per day to her email address and some of my emails (which are responses to her emails) get marked as spam by gmail.

I think I am going to sue google.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#269

Post by Scoundreller »

drampelt wrote: post #125
Scoundreller wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re in Canada, and send an SMS containing the string “special message” to or from a Telus customer (or one of their sub-brands), it will be silently dropped. Telus is one of the big3 telecoms here.

I just tried on Koodo which is part of Telus, no issues sending/receiving

Make sure it wasn’t iMessage

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#270

Post by kafkaIncarnate »

Spare_account wrote: post #224
ceejayoz wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We get a lot of spam from those" would fall well within a vaguely defined "valid reason", I'd think. (Most of my SMS spam comes from .info domains.)

> Most of my SMS spam comes from .info domains Do you mean that the SMS messages contain links to .info domains?

I've personally noticed a lot of phone text spam being FROM email addresses recently. I think they are just abusing some feature in MMS, though, not SMS. It's weird seeing a list of phone numbers (usually SMS two-factor), some contacts' names that I have entered in, then a ton of random email addresses on my texting app (standard Android Messages app).
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