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> My best advice is to choose a reputable host. This sucks big time. We should be able to send email from fucking home, not beg an external, bigger guy to eit

> My best advice is to choose a reputable host. This sucks big time. We should be able to send email from fucking home, not beg an external, bigger guy to either do it for us (one's ISP, google…), or lend us a machine so we can do it from there (Amazon, OVH…). Email providing is so concentrated right now it is starting so show signs of network effects —just like more recent (anti)social networks. This is not right.

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
We should be able to send spam from home. But if we can send email from random dynamic IP addresses, so can spammers. And spammers do. I run an MTA (postfix) on a couple of Linodes and I get more hacky spam-wannabe traffic than I get actual mail. Postfix is configured to kill it all, so I never see any of it. But the logs are spam carnage. My domains are hardly famous, so if you're running a high profile site I can imagine the problem would be a lot worse.
- loup-vaillant 10y ago
  What I mean is, the originating IP address should not be such an overwhelming criterion of spamminess. When I receive spam, my most important criterion for filtering it is pure content. I have a hard time believing spam is such a huge problem we have to use simplistic filters such as IP bans to deal with them. My email address is written without obfuscation in the open web (my own website), and my email clients' filters (Thunderbird or Evolution, depending) are more than enough once I have trained them a little. (My domain is probably even less famous, but I do receive cold, non-spammy email from time to time regarding my blog articles.)
agildehaus 10y ago
I tried to think of network effects in email and could not think of any. To what do you refer?
- loup-vaillant 10y ago
  I am referring to how the big players (Google with Gmail, Microsoft with Hotmail, and I suspect many others) tend to flag as spam, or even outright reject your email, as soon as the IP comes from a "little player", such as residential IP, or even virtual private hosting IPs. Sending an email to a user of such networks has become difficult —at least, more difficult than it should be. Unless of course you come from one of those huge networks. And of course, the users themselves don't see any problem with this: they assume that if you can't send an email to them, the problem must be on your end —not, say, Gmail's spam filter. On the other hand, if everyone had a little box that send email directly from home, nobody would ever dare to block them.

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago

We should be able to send spam from home. But if we can send email from random dynamic IP addresses, so can spammers. And spammers do. I run an MTA (postfix) on a couple of Linodes and I get more hacky spam-wannabe traffic than I get actual mail. Postfix is configured to kill it all, so I never see any of it. But the logs are spam carnage. My domains are hardly famous, so if you're running a high profile site I can imagine the problem would be a lot worse.

loup-vaillant 10y ago
What I mean is, the originating IP address should not be such an overwhelming criterion of spamminess. When I receive spam, my most important criterion for filtering it is pure content. I have a hard time believing spam is such a huge problem we have to use simplistic filters such as IP bans to deal with them. My email address is written without obfuscation in the open web (my own website), and my email clients' filters (Thunderbird or Evolution, depending) are more than enough once I have trained them a little. (My domain is probably even less famous, but I do receive cold, non-spammy email from time to time regarding my blog articles.)

agildehaus 10y ago

I tried to think of network effects in email and could not think of any. To what do you refer?

loup-vaillant 10y ago
I am referring to how the big players (Google with Gmail, Microsoft with Hotmail, and I suspect many others) tend to flag as spam, or even outright reject your email, as soon as the IP comes from a "little player", such as residential IP, or even virtual private hosting IPs. Sending an email to a user of such networks has become difficult —at least, more difficult than it should be. Unless of course you come from one of those huge networks. And of course, the users themselves don't see any problem with this: they assume that if you can't send an email to them, the problem must be on your end —not, say, Gmail's spam filter. On the other hand, if everyone had a little box that send email directly from home, nobody would ever dare to block them.