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Protonmail was identified as spam in Gmail

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Re: Protonmail was identified as spam in Gmail

#41
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave up on my domain registered back when an ISDN 64k channel was a viable internet connection, partly because the amount of inbound email spam was absurd. The spammers ruined email long before Gmail was a thing.

One vital thing is to not put your email address in clear-text online, especially heavily indexed sites. The moment I had a real email address end up in the AUTHORS file of nodejs, that address is now a spamhole. Domain is otherwise fine. Another can be buying a new domain that (perhaps purely coincidentally) that has already made the rounds into spammers dbs.

Oh for sure but although I got a fair amount my domain owner email address was just swimming in it. As others have said thousands of emails a day.

Re: Protonmail was identified as spam in Gmail

#42

It’s a sad situation, email today. I ran my own self hosted email for close to a decade but finally gave up on it because mail that I send gets flagged as spam every now and then and I also received a ton of spam. Those two things were eating away my time. And either way, basically everyone who I correspond with use third party mail hosting so it’s not like it did much good that I was self hosting it anyway. Email as…

move to the next thing, and then the next thing, and then the next thing

staying ahead of each Eternal September means getting up and moving :)

Discord/SMS/WhatApp/Signal... so many competitors trying to ferry our ASCII...

maybe its not the tech that's broken?

Re: Protonmail was identified as spam in Gmail

#43

It’s a sad situation, email today. I ran my own self hosted email for close to a decade but finally gave up on it because mail that I send gets flagged as spam every now and then and I also received a ton of spam. Those two things were eating away my time. And either way, basically everyone who I correspond with use third party mail hosting so it’s not like it did much good that I was self hosting it anyway. Email as…

I feel like the problem is that people got too touchy about spam delivery.

This gave large email providers license to nuke everyone but other large providers or impose various performative-dance "standards" like SPF/DKIM which seem to just be footgun factories for non-experts.

The other problem was some very black-and-white models of mailer behaviour. Back when ISPs actually published delivery guidance, it was either "you're an individual sending 10 messages a year" or "You're sending a mailing list of 500,000 per day." The guidance was usually limited to nonsensical for things like transactional email or notifications, and I suspect smaller "regular mail services" hit similar corner-cases.

I have to wonder if these conditions eventually became a perverse incentive: oh, deliverability sucks for your small business? We'll happily host your domain and emails and make sure they get through. It's now in their best business interest to be as balky and hostile as possible.

To me, spam filtering rules should be entirely at the USER level. The provider can offer an array of tools, but they have no business blocking unless there's a distinct "the user checked this specific box and this is why the message was denied" paper trail available.

Maybe I'm an outlier -- I'm far more worried about false positives than false negatives. My work email gets negligible spam, but I've definitely seen the "can't be fully disabled" filters chuck actual time sensitive business-related messages into the spam folder repeatedly, and had to patch together anti-filtering rules for it.

Re: Protonmail was identified as spam in Gmail

#44

It’s a sad situation, email today. I ran my own self hosted email for close to a decade but finally gave up on it because mail that I send gets flagged as spam every now and then and I also received a ton of spam. Those two things were eating away my time. And either way, basically everyone who I correspond with use third party mail hosting so it’s not like it did much good that I was self hosting it anyway. Email as…

Payment. Every emailed sent needs a payment token. Maybe like a few cents similar to postage. If your reputations got screwed because doing spamish activities, rates go up cost say 1 dollar per email. Each sender must have verified account just like FB that maps to your national IDs. Over night spam will plunge. Of course getting this implemented across the world would be impossible. We could wage war with any countr…

So instead of hacking servers to mine crypto, we hack them to send paid spam and possibly collect the delivery fees too for some double dipping.

I had this same idea as you, and I simply don’t see why people would pay to send emails when they’re already nearly free for most personal use cases. Businesses already pay to send email via third parties usually. Wouldn’t fake email signups get spammed to receive the sending fees from compromised email servers?

I could foresee a sending fee in the form of attention, with captchas for email sending, possibly attached to the outgoing email as metadata.

Re: Protonmail was identified as spam in Gmail

#45
post #28
post #20

One problem is that Spam is not a well-defined concept. There is criminal activity using harvested or generated addresses. And there is annoying marketing from perfectly legal organizations I have given my address to. I would prefer a spam filter that just handles the first case. I can handle the second case by filter rules or unsubscribing. The problem is that Gmail tries to solve both problems with one solution and…

> The problem is that Gmail tries to solve both problems with one solution and the result just doesn't work even close to reliably. Does it? My understanding is that gmail's spam filter only tried to catch the first kind of mail? I guess if you mark stuff you've signed up to as spam then it will put those in spam for you, but that's a user choice.

> Does it?

I am pretty sure it does. Doesn't it even say "Why is this message in spam: Because similar messages have been marked as spam before"? (Don't recall the exact wording). I hardly get any false negatives, so I don't mark much as spam. but I get regularly false positives and I mark them as "not spam". Still the behavior does not seem to improve. So I assume others marking newsletters and marketing as spam will also affect how the spam filter works for me.

Re: Protonmail was identified as spam in Gmail

#46
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't click not spam on a message you never see.

Checking the email spam folder, should be part of the email routine nowadays.

At least Gmail has a reputation for silently discarding mail that it thinks is spam

Re: Protonmail was identified as spam in Gmail

#47

It’s a sad situation, email today. I ran my own self hosted email for close to a decade but finally gave up on it because mail that I send gets flagged as spam every now and then and I also received a ton of spam. Those two things were eating away my time. And either way, basically everyone who I correspond with use third party mail hosting so it’s not like it did much good that I was self hosting it anyway. Email as…

Why not just do things like instant messaging? Everyone signs their email and you only accept email from people you know. Define an introduction message format that would get run through a spam filter and be put in a separate folder. If you want to interact with the entity that sent the introduction then you add them to your keys.

Can be done entirely with stuff available in the fundamentally broken model. I mean, if you want to accept email from just anyone, how can you complain when just anyone sends you email? Not a technical problem, it is a people problem.

Re: Protonmail was identified as spam in Gmail

#48
post #9

The problem comes from the giants using close source algorithms for mail filtering... yes, they are very efficient at filtering spam, but you have no way to align on their close source filtering process to make sure your email goes through/not marked as spam. Ironically, I once in a while receive a spam from a gmail account, and it is not marked as spam. I would also add we are the problem, we picked the giants becau…

> The problem comes from the giants using close source algorithms for mail filtering The root cause is that email is an open messaging network without moderation and sending cost. Other open network is SMS, but because of the sending cost the spam problem is much smaller, albeit still exists.

I'm not much into the whole cryptocurrency hoopla but I've always thought that a digital currency would be the solution to email spam.

$.25 fee to send an email and receiver gets the entire fee (or the bulk of it, after what pays for the network)

Send more emails than you receive? Send a little bit of emails but get a few replies? It's break even.

Re: Protonmail was identified as spam in Gmail

#49
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One vital thing is to not put your email address in clear-text online, especially heavily indexed sites. The moment I had a real email address end up in the AUTHORS file of nodejs, that address is now a spamhole. Domain is otherwise fine. Another can be buying a new domain that (perhaps purely coincidentally) that has already made the rounds into spammers dbs.

Oh for sure but although I got a fair amount my domain owner email address was just swimming in it. As others have said thousands of emails a day.

Oh yeah, these days I hope it’s common practice to use separate email addresses for separate prurposes for individuals too.

So yeah, domain owner is a tough one but shouldn’t really receive legitimate inbound contacts as long as you have some other contact method on the/a associated website. Personally I just black hole that one.

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