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I found it interesting they highlight the decentralized nature of email. And yet the decentralized design meant spam was basically unsolvable. It wasn’t until G

I found it interesting they highlight the decentralized nature of email. And yet the decentralized design meant spam was basically unsolvable. It wasn’t until Gmail came along that they largely solved the spam problem. There are so many abuse related issues on the web and I’ve seen no decentralized effort that works unfortunately. Cloudflare brought cost effective DDoS protection to the masses.

nialv7 8y ago
Gmail "solved" the spam problem not by making email centralized, they did it by making a good spam filter.
- danso 8y ago
  Which was enabled in large part from their centralization of email.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  Gmail basically took over email through centralization. A lot of companies and people use it because the price is fair and the spam filter works better than almost anything else. I have tried FastMail and I like the company, but the spam filtering is not good. But good luck even trying to replicate FastMail anti-spam if you roll your entire email stack yourself. I have run my own email server even well before Gmail was popular and it was a nightmare, I'll never do it again. If a company asks me to do it, I'll quit. Even if you put Gmail aside, email became reputation based, which is naturally going to mean the larger centralized platforms will succeed over a few independent outliers because they will always have a better reputation and control what is allowed to go out or in. Just like how the United States still has a large role in the internet and what is seen internationally because so much is still centralized within those borders, or the centralized companies that are within those borders control it.
  - siriussidus 8y ago
    I disagree vehemently on the difficulty of running your own email server. I have been running a pretty standard postfix + dovecot email setup for myself and close family for almost a decade now. It definitely is necessary to once set up proper DKIM, SPF, DMARC and TLS by default (thanks to Let's Encrypt), but after that the setup is pretty much hands-off. Spamassassin filters my spam down to at most one mail a day, and that's usually because they have some new type of topic not caught by the previous bayesian filter.
    - eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
      I'm pretty sure FastMail uses Spamassassin, so why is an email company so bad at configuring that software? Their spam filtering is simply not nearly as good as Gmail, it's not even close. I used Spamassassin back in the day and it was effective for a bit, and then pretty much all spammers figured out how to avoid it. Also, I'm not talking about the obvious VIAGRA large caps spam, which I think is fairly easy to solve. But spam has become much more nuanced and Gmail is the best at it, and the false positive rate is still amazing.
- humpydumpy 8y ago
  Gmail's spam filter is one of the worst. About once a month some gmail user tells me that he found my mail in the spam folder. Of course it is easy to keep down spam when you don't care about false positives.
QML 8y ago
I would argue that the problem of ‘spam’ has not been solved, since that would mean an agreement on what constitutes spam—that spam has some inherent properties that subjects it to easy classification, and that spam is not evolving. But that’s beyond the point that I originally wanted to make: spam and email have very similar parallels to security and the Internet. In another universe, it’s possible that the issue of spam and security could’ve been incorporated into the protocols themselves. But for some reason I’m sure is rational, those issues were moved outside, to the hosts — to be left to be solved with middleboxes as firewalls and Google’s spam filter. I would argue that this was the smarter choice and that both of these involve the same problem: spam and security are ill-defined and constantly evolving.
richardw 8y ago
Certificates? That's a pretty decentralized effort. It works because certs whitelist you. You don't claim to get one until you've been whitelisted somewhere, by someone else who has been whitelisted. (Generally). With email we assume the sender is a good actor and then have to run around blacklisting spam. Helped with the network effects but caused untold hassle.

nialv7 8y ago

Gmail "solved" the spam problem not by making email centralized, they did it by making a good spam filter.

danso 8y ago
Which was enabled in large part from their centralization of email.
eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
Gmail basically took over email through centralization. A lot of companies and people use it because the price is fair and the spam filter works better than almost anything else. I have tried FastMail and I like the company, but the spam filtering is not good. But good luck even trying to replicate FastMail anti-spam if you roll your entire email stack yourself. I have run my own email server even well before Gmail was popular and it was a nightmare, I'll never do it again. If a company asks me to do it, I'll quit. Even if you put Gmail aside, email became reputation based, which is naturally going to mean the larger centralized platforms will succeed over a few independent outliers because they will always have a better reputation and control what is allowed to go out or in. Just like how the United States still has a large role in the internet and what is seen internationally because so much is still centralized within those borders, or the centralized companies that are within those borders control it.
- siriussidus 8y ago
  I disagree vehemently on the difficulty of running your own email server. I have been running a pretty standard postfix + dovecot email setup for myself and close family for almost a decade now. It definitely is necessary to once set up proper DKIM, SPF, DMARC and TLS by default (thanks to Let's Encrypt), but after that the setup is pretty much hands-off. Spamassassin filters my spam down to at most one mail a day, and that's usually because they have some new type of topic not caught by the previous bayesian filter.
  - eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure FastMail uses Spamassassin, so why is an email company so bad at configuring that software? Their spam filtering is simply not nearly as good as Gmail, it's not even close. I used Spamassassin back in the day and it was effective for a bit, and then pretty much all spammers figured out how to avoid it. Also, I'm not talking about the obvious VIAGRA large caps spam, which I think is fairly easy to solve. But spam has become much more nuanced and Gmail is the best at it, and the false positive rate is still amazing.
humpydumpy 8y ago
Gmail's spam filter is one of the worst. About once a month some gmail user tells me that he found my mail in the spam folder. Of course it is easy to keep down spam when you don't care about false positives.

QML 8y ago

I would argue that the problem of ‘spam’ has not been solved, since that would mean an agreement on what constitutes spam—that spam has some inherent properties that subjects it to easy classification, and that spam is not evolving. But that’s beyond the point that I originally wanted to make: spam and email have very similar parallels to security and the Internet. In another universe, it’s possible that the issue of spam and security could’ve been incorporated into the protocols themselves. But for some reason I’m sure is rational, those issues were moved outside, to the hosts — to be left to be solved with middleboxes as firewalls and Google’s spam filter. I would argue that this was the smarter choice and that both of these involve the same problem: spam and security are ill-defined and constantly evolving.

richardw 8y ago

Certificates? That's a pretty decentralized effort. It works because certs whitelist you. You don't claim to get one until you've been whitelisted somewhere, by someone else who has been whitelisted. (Generally). With email we assume the sender is a good actor and then have to run around blacklisting spam. Helped with the network effects but caused untold hassle.