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good luck? with that attitude you deserve shitty centralized systems that spy on you. decentralization and ease of use aren't contradictory anyway. remember bit

by xj9 10y ago

good luck? with that attitude you deserve shitty centralized systems that spy on you. decentralization and ease of use aren't contradictory anyway. remember bit torrent? used to be very popular, even among less technical users. great UX too. click a magnet link and you have your content in a flash. the problem is that there isn't a multi-billion dollar business case for decentralized user systems. a lot of server/dc tech is both decentralized and distributed because it is a more robust architecture. again, the reason this doesn't extend to the consumer is because it give them too much control and clogs up the revenue stream. this isn't a technical or usability problem, as you claim. this is 100% economic.

dpark 10y ago
Spam blocking is a problem that's very difficult to solve without massive scale. Decentralized email used to suck for filtering spam because they simply didn't have the scale needed to recognize spam reliably. WordPress solved the spam issue for decentralized blog comments by centralizing it, which gives them the scale to solve it well but also gives them the ability to read probably half the blog comments on the web in real time.
- grincho 10y ago
  No, it really isn't. Download a copy of SpamAssassin, train it on 400 hand-picked spams from your own mailbox, train it on 400 arbitrary hams as well, and you will have very accurate spam filtering. I was shocked how well it worked; I run my own mail personally and use GMail at work, and the results are (subjectively) indistinguishable. A Dovecot plugin that keeps the Bayesian numbers up to date as I move messages in and out of the Spam and Archive (for ham) folder completes the picture. To go deeper, it turns out that Bayesian filtering is remarkably resilient. Even attacks which try to poison your filters by including ham-like content in spams are ineffective, because spammers cannot very accurately predict what your own particular flavor of ham is like. (People don't often mail me passages from out-of-copyright Victorian romance novels.) I find that a few botnet-reducing SMTP heuristics plus Bayesian is sufficient; I dallied with some of the fanciness that compares known-spam hashes with other people, but it turned out not to be necessary.
  - dpark 10y ago
    Maybe it has changed but I have vivid memories of training lots of spam a decade or so ago and still getting half-assed results. Google was the first email provider that really did a good job blocking spam.
    - grincho 10y ago
      There is one setting, underdocumented, which makes a big difference these days. spamc has a default ceiling of 10K, messages larger than which it passes unchecked. Spammers have started routinely including images just over that threshold to defeat default installs. Bump that up a bit, and your accuracy will go way up.

by xj9 10y ago

dpark 10y ago

Spam blocking is a problem that's very difficult to solve without massive scale. Decentralized email used to suck for filtering spam because they simply didn't have the scale needed to recognize spam reliably. WordPress solved the spam issue for decentralized blog comments by centralizing it, which gives them the scale to solve it well but also gives them the ability to read probably half the blog comments on the web in real time.

grincho 10y ago
No, it really isn't. Download a copy of SpamAssassin, train it on 400 hand-picked spams from your own mailbox, train it on 400 arbitrary hams as well, and you will have very accurate spam filtering. I was shocked how well it worked; I run my own mail personally and use GMail at work, and the results are (subjectively) indistinguishable. A Dovecot plugin that keeps the Bayesian numbers up to date as I move messages in and out of the Spam and Archive (for ham) folder completes the picture. To go deeper, it turns out that Bayesian filtering is remarkably resilient. Even attacks which try to poison your filters by including ham-like content in spams are ineffective, because spammers cannot very accurately predict what your own particular flavor of ham is like. (People don't often mail me passages from out-of-copyright Victorian romance novels.) I find that a few botnet-reducing SMTP heuristics plus Bayesian is sufficient; I dallied with some of the fanciness that compares known-spam hashes with other people, but it turned out not to be necessary.
- dpark 10y ago
  Maybe it has changed but I have vivid memories of training lots of spam a decade or so ago and still getting half-assed results. Google was the first email provider that really did a good job blocking spam.
  - grincho 10y ago
    There is one setting, underdocumented, which makes a big difference these days. spamc has a default ceiling of 10K, messages larger than which it passes unchecked. Spammers have started routinely including images just over that threshold to defeat default installs. Bump that up a bit, and your accuracy will go way up.