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It looks like this is a policy on the FREE DNS, which IMHO, is fair game. Free services needs to be much more heavily scrutinized for potential abuse. I spent

It looks like this is a policy on the FREE DNS, which IMHO, is fair game. Free services needs to be much more heavily scrutinized for potential abuse. I spent a lot of time dealing with phishing and fraud prevention. By far the biggest source that I had to deal with was free service abuse and near non-response from those service providers abuse teams.

saurik 9y ago
So you are saying that your opinion changes if the user pays some token amount for the service? If they upgraded their plan to whatever the cheapest level is, then this would be no longer be a good thing for Cloudflare to do? Let us not forget that these emails aren't even being sent by or through Cloudflare: Cloudflare is not an email provider. Their interest in this is simply that they provide DNS. I find the ways that cloudflare thinks about how we should stop Internet abuse--such as their plea that all ISPs turn on packet logging to help find the sources of denial of service attacks--extremely concerning from a surveillance perspective :/.
- brightball 9y ago
  I'm saying that free services are easily abused because of the lack of up front cost and ease of forging contact info. You abuse a service, the service is terminated, you got to utilize it for a while and suffered no penalty aside from having to sign up for a new account. You use a stolen credit card, the service will be terminated and now that stolen credit card can be reported for abuse as well. A legitimate account that is paying for service and has legitimate contact information can actually make contact and rectify the issue, clear up a misunderstanding or be made aware that their domain is being abused in some way. I signed up for Sendgrid a few years ago for a company that I worked for and we used it to send the company's first newsletter to 300,000 users in about 14 years. About 70,000 of those bounced and somewhere shortly into delivery process, Sendgrid halted it and called us demanding to know where we got our email list and insisting that we verify user information for multiple addresses that had bounced. Once we explained the situation and verified everything, they released the halt and that first volley continued creating records for which email addresses we shouldn't be sending to again. Everything was fine from that point forward...but even with a paid account they were actively working at fraud prevention...and as long as there was a legitimate contact on the account it was perfectly reasonable to get resolved.
  - shrimp_emoji 9y ago
    >Once we explained the situation and verified everything, they released the halt and that first volley continued creating records for which email addresses we shouldn't be sending to again. I have little confidence in this working in the defense of an ideology that gives the host bad PR or the deplatforming of which would give it good PR, like in the case of The Daily Stormer. Recent history should make it abundantly clear that private entities feel no obligation to defend noble ideals like freedom of speech, nor should they, being private entities. Paying for their services shouldn't change this meaningfully, especially where even Western governments like Germany's and the UK's are similarly illiberal (in the traditional sense of the word) and pressure those companies to remove "hate speech".
  - yorwba 9y ago
    Where did you get your email list? Were those entered by the users themselves, but with typos? It seems like a pretty high percentage to be caused only by that.
    - scsh 9y ago
      They said it was the first send to their ~14 year old list, so a ton of those addresses probably didn't even exist anymore.
    - brightball 9y ago
      14 years worth of users. Plus a lot of fraudulent accounts in that time period. It was a very unique situation, in all honesty.

saurik 9y ago

So you are saying that your opinion changes if the user pays some token amount for the service? If they upgraded their plan to whatever the cheapest level is, then this would be no longer be a good thing for Cloudflare to do? Let us not forget that these emails aren't even being sent by or through Cloudflare: Cloudflare is not an email provider. Their interest in this is simply that they provide DNS. I find the ways that cloudflare thinks about how we should stop Internet abuse--such as their plea that all ISPs turn on packet logging to help find the sources of denial of service attacks--extremely concerning from a surveillance perspective :/.

brightball 9y ago
I'm saying that free services are easily abused because of the lack of up front cost and ease of forging contact info. You abuse a service, the service is terminated, you got to utilize it for a while and suffered no penalty aside from having to sign up for a new account. You use a stolen credit card, the service will be terminated and now that stolen credit card can be reported for abuse as well. A legitimate account that is paying for service and has legitimate contact information can actually make contact and rectify the issue, clear up a misunderstanding or be made aware that their domain is being abused in some way. I signed up for Sendgrid a few years ago for a company that I worked for and we used it to send the company's first newsletter to 300,000 users in about 14 years. About 70,000 of those bounced and somewhere shortly into delivery process, Sendgrid halted it and called us demanding to know where we got our email list and insisting that we verify user information for multiple addresses that had bounced. Once we explained the situation and verified everything, they released the halt and that first volley continued creating records for which email addresses we shouldn't be sending to again. Everything was fine from that point forward...but even with a paid account they were actively working at fraud prevention...and as long as there was a legitimate contact on the account it was perfectly reasonable to get resolved.
- shrimp_emoji 9y ago
  >Once we explained the situation and verified everything, they released the halt and that first volley continued creating records for which email addresses we shouldn't be sending to again. I have little confidence in this working in the defense of an ideology that gives the host bad PR or the deplatforming of which would give it good PR, like in the case of The Daily Stormer. Recent history should make it abundantly clear that private entities feel no obligation to defend noble ideals like freedom of speech, nor should they, being private entities. Paying for their services shouldn't change this meaningfully, especially where even Western governments like Germany's and the UK's are similarly illiberal (in the traditional sense of the word) and pressure those companies to remove "hate speech".
- yorwba 9y ago
  Where did you get your email list? Were those entered by the users themselves, but with typos? It seems like a pretty high percentage to be caused only by that.
  - scsh 9y ago
    They said it was the first send to their ~14 year old list, so a ton of those addresses probably didn't even exist anymore.
  - brightball 9y ago
    14 years worth of users. Plus a lot of fraudulent accounts in that time period. It was a very unique situation, in all honesty.