5 ms·

The spam problem has never been solved, no matter how good spam filters may have become in the recent years. It's still an arms race, with a front that is movin

The spam problem has never been solved, no matter how good spam filters may have become in the recent years. It's still an arms race, with a front that is moving one way or another every few months. Even today, a spam filter is a piece of software that you trust to throw away e-mails without letting you read them, based on its own decision that you don't want to read them. It seems insane to me that people would willingly let a program decide to throw away inbound mail based on unspecified rules. And I nearly start frothing at the mouth when someone suggests that, since their software decided to throw away my e-mail, it is somehow my responsibility to fix that. It isn't. If there were thousands of different anti-spam solutions, and one of them behaved badly, then senders wouldn't care, and users would vote with their feet (or wallet, or app store) until the behaviour was fixed. But since Google has a near-monopoly on e-mail, it's now up to the senders to do the work and jump through the badly-documented ever-changing hoops.

draw_down 9y ago
Do they really have a "near monopoly" on email? How near are we talking here?
- mikl 9y ago
  In the younger, private mail account demographic, I’ve seen as much as 80% of some e-mail lists being Gmail accounts. For business, Exchange is still king, but Gmail is gaining on them.
- saul_goodman 9y ago
  It's scarey stupid how much the "big 3" own email now. Google, Yahoo, Hotmail. When any of them change up their spam fighting techniques it causes ripple effects across the entire email ecosystem now. Have Yahoo mail subscribers on a Mailman mailing list? Not if you're not running the latest Mailman which has a new workaround just for them. Yahoo started bouncing legitimate mail a couple years ago due to the normal way mailing lists have ALWAYS handled sender addresses, since before Yahoo existed. I get it, sometimes desparate times call for desparate measures (for fighting spam). But jeeze, it's super annoying to have to break your package manager to get an upstream mail server to support one user who uses one certain mail hosting service.
- petercooper 9y ago
  I send newsletters (that people double opt in to and want to receive) to about 360k developers each week and a good 90% are on Gmail or have their domain on Gmail. This is very specifically developers, however.
throwanem 9y ago
> It seems insane to me that people would willingly let a program decide to throw away inbound mail based on unspecified rules. See, you say that, and until a few days ago I'd have felt the same. But that was before I registered the first .com domain I've ever owned, and oh boy has that brought them out of the woodwork - I've gotten more spam in the last week than in any of the past ten years prior! Not just email, but phone calls, too; I even heard from one of those tech support scams, and it's been so long since the last time that happened that I couldn't even tell you when it was. It seems to be settling down in the last day or so, which is nice. But if it picks up again, I'll absolutely be installing SpamAssassin on my MTA host, for the first time in the going on two decades I've been running my own mail. To be clear, I totally agree with your point about Gmail - it's far too centralized and unaccountable for my own comfort, too, which is part of why I don't use it for any mail I care about. But a lot of my correspondents do, which means I'm nonetheless in the position of either taking assiduous care to maximize my deliverability, or risking my mail landing in spam folders that nobody ever really looks through. Not a good situation, but at least until someone comes up with a plausible means of addressing it from the outside, here we are.
- kuon 9y ago
  I don't know where you registered your domain, but I have like 100 domains, and I've never been contacted about them (except by the registrar of course). Most of them have valid and router MX.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    GoDaddy, and maybe that's my problem. On the other hand, I've been doing business with them for many years, and never had anything remotely resembling this happen before. I also didn't use whois privacy, but, again, I've made that choice on many domains before, and likewise never seen anything like this result from it.
    - rtx 9y ago
      This is due to a new business model. Where companies scrape ICANN data base for newly registered domains and then sell it to service providers.
TomMarius 9y ago
I get more than 3 hundred spam emails daily. My inbox would be absolutely unusable of it wasn't for spam filters.
- stevekemp 9y ago
  I don't want to turn it into a contest, but across my domains I receive in excess of 3000 spam emails a day.
Mystrl 9y ago
At least personally as far as I can tell the spam problem has been solved by gmail. I can't even remember the last time I saw a spam message in my inbox and can count on one hand the number of times I've had to go into the spam folder to find a legitimate email.
CaptSpify 9y ago
> Even today, a spam filter is a piece of software that you trust to throw away e-mails without letting you read them, based on its own decision that you don't want to read them. The way I set up rules on my mail server, they all just go into a spam folder that I browse every once in a while. If anyone is going to delete my shit, it's me.

draw_down 9y ago

Do they really have a "near monopoly" on email? How near are we talking here?

mikl 9y ago
In the younger, private mail account demographic, I’ve seen as much as 80% of some e-mail lists being Gmail accounts. For business, Exchange is still king, but Gmail is gaining on them.
saul_goodman 9y ago
It's scarey stupid how much the "big 3" own email now. Google, Yahoo, Hotmail. When any of them change up their spam fighting techniques it causes ripple effects across the entire email ecosystem now. Have Yahoo mail subscribers on a Mailman mailing list? Not if you're not running the latest Mailman which has a new workaround just for them. Yahoo started bouncing legitimate mail a couple years ago due to the normal way mailing lists have ALWAYS handled sender addresses, since before Yahoo existed. I get it, sometimes desparate times call for desparate measures (for fighting spam). But jeeze, it's super annoying to have to break your package manager to get an upstream mail server to support one user who uses one certain mail hosting service.
petercooper 9y ago
I send newsletters (that people double opt in to and want to receive) to about 360k developers each week and a good 90% are on Gmail or have their domain on Gmail. This is very specifically developers, however.

throwanem 9y ago

> It seems insane to me that people would willingly let a program decide to throw away inbound mail based on unspecified rules. See, you say that, and until a few days ago I'd have felt the same. But that was before I registered the first .com domain I've ever owned, and oh boy has that brought them out of the woodwork - I've gotten more spam in the last week than in any of the past ten years prior! Not just email, but phone calls, too; I even heard from one of those tech support scams, and it's been so long since the last time that happened that I couldn't even tell you when it was. It seems to be settling down in the last day or so, which is nice. But if it picks up again, I'll absolutely be installing SpamAssassin on my MTA host, for the first time in the going on two decades I've been running my own mail. To be clear, I totally agree with your point about Gmail - it's far too centralized and unaccountable for my own comfort, too, which is part of why I don't use it for any mail I care about. But a lot of my correspondents do, which means I'm nonetheless in the position of either taking assiduous care to maximize my deliverability, or risking my mail landing in spam folders that nobody ever really looks through. Not a good situation, but at least until someone comes up with a plausible means of addressing it from the outside, here we are.

kuon 9y ago
I don't know where you registered your domain, but I have like 100 domains, and I've never been contacted about them (except by the registrar of course). Most of them have valid and router MX.
- throwanem 9y ago
  GoDaddy, and maybe that's my problem. On the other hand, I've been doing business with them for many years, and never had anything remotely resembling this happen before. I also didn't use whois privacy, but, again, I've made that choice on many domains before, and likewise never seen anything like this result from it.
  - rtx 9y ago
    This is due to a new business model. Where companies scrape ICANN data base for newly registered domains and then sell it to service providers.

TomMarius 9y ago

I get more than 3 hundred spam emails daily. My inbox would be absolutely unusable of it wasn't for spam filters.

stevekemp 9y ago
I don't want to turn it into a contest, but across my domains I receive in excess of 3000 spam emails a day.

Mystrl 9y ago

At least personally as far as I can tell the spam problem has been solved by gmail. I can't even remember the last time I saw a spam message in my inbox and can count on one hand the number of times I've had to go into the spam folder to find a legitimate email.

CaptSpify 9y ago

> Even today, a spam filter is a piece of software that you trust to throw away e-mails without letting you read them, based on its own decision that you don't want to read them. The way I set up rules on my mail server, they all just go into a spam folder that I browse every once in a while. If anyone is going to delete my shit, it's me.