5 ms·

> Email only is simply not reliable enough. That is because implementations, especially gmail, ignore the specifications: (EDIT) there are specific error codes

by pmlnr 8y ago

> Email only is simply not reliable enough. That is because implementations, especially gmail, ignore the specifications: (EDIT) there are specific error codes and messages should be sent back to the originator. The reasons to ignore it is, in theory, not to give spammers ideas how to avoid it. Email is incredibly reliable, it can tolerate outages, configuration errors, delays, etc, by specification, but ever since "modern" spam filtering, gmail (and those who follow their practices) it became a nightmare, because everyone ignores how it _should_ work. It was done in a time when connections were slow and prone to errors; it had to be flexible. Yes, I know spam was bad I was there. But I'd rather have spam, than actually important mails getting dropped because of false positive, paranoid spamfilters.

lostlogin 8y ago
You’ve just explained why it’s become unreliable. It might have been great once, but fixing it when it’s broken is a complete nightmare now.
mikeash 8y ago
When there’s too much spam, your important mails are effectively dropped as they’re buried in the noise. Modern spam filtering is what saved email. Without it, you’d never see those important messages, because new spam would come in faster than you could delete it.
- jstanley 8y ago
  I don't have any content-based spam filtering (but I do use the spamhaus sbl-xbl list). It doesn't take very long to manually delete spam from the inbox. And if your spam filter is putting legitimate emails in your spam folder, you need to manually filter them anyway.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    At the peak of my spam experience, I was getting hundreds a day. That was ages ago when the internet was much slower and more expensive than it is today, and bad people online were much less sophisticated. I wouldn’t be surprised if a totally open email system today generated enough spam that even deleting one message per second you’d fall behind. I haven’t checked my spam folder on a routine basis in many years.
    - jstanley 8y ago
      What I'm saying is that "modern spam filtering" (by which I assume we mean GMail-style highly-aggressive spam filtering that puts lots of legitimate email in the spam folder) is not what saved email. Rudimentary spam filtering saved email. There's no need to ever have a legitimate email go to the spam folder.
      - efaref 8y ago
        Spam filtering is an arms race. Spammers know how to download all the existing spam filtering software and tweak their emails to make sure it gets past it.
        joveian 8y ago
        My experience matches jstanley's: with basic ISP filtering and disabling as much filtering as they let me disable my ISP reports blocking 181 messages in the past month mostly via some list (they don't say which one). I see a few spam messages per day and generally get half a dozen or more copies the first time I see a new one, conveniently making them easy to delete (and very few have confusing subjects). I'm fairly sure I see less than half as many as the ISP blocks. This is with an address that has been public for over a decade. It doesn't seem like much of an arms race to me and it is a trivial effort to delete them. The only things I can think of that I do differently than many people that might make a difference is that I have my mail client set up to not show remote images ever and I never dirctly click any link from email no matter the source. Possibly things might be much worse otherwise, but from my perspective it doesn't seem like spam is a huge issue these days with basic filtering.
        mikeash 8y ago
        You're still benefitting from everybody else's more sophisticated spam filtering. The fact that most users have good filtering means that the cost/benefit ratio of sending spam is much worse than it otherwise would be. This naturally decreases the activity significantly. Saying that you get by with just basic blocking is the e-mail equivalent of saying that you don't need a measles vaccine. It may be true but it doesn't tell us much about what the world would look like without those measures.
  - krageon 8y ago
    > It doesn't take very long to manually delete spam from the inbox. I have tuned the spam filters for a fairly major email provider for a while and while you are right for a lot of people, there's a significant fraction of them that receives hundreds or even thousands of spam emails per day. For them, it is not practical - and everyone needs to be able to use it.
anitil 8y ago
I have subscribed to more email lists these days than ever before. Why? Because trust in the system has increased. I know that I can easily subscribe/unsubscribe and that decision will be respected (or punished if ignored). So while gmail has made life harder for people who want to email me, it have made life much easier for me as an email user - which makes me more willing to give out my email.

by pmlnr 8y ago

lostlogin 8y ago

You’ve just explained why it’s become unreliable. It might have been great once, but fixing it when it’s broken is a complete nightmare now.

mikeash 8y ago

When there’s too much spam, your important mails are effectively dropped as they’re buried in the noise. Modern spam filtering is what saved email. Without it, you’d never see those important messages, because new spam would come in faster than you could delete it.

jstanley 8y ago
I don't have any content-based spam filtering (but I do use the spamhaus sbl-xbl list). It doesn't take very long to manually delete spam from the inbox. And if your spam filter is putting legitimate emails in your spam folder, you need to manually filter them anyway.
- mikeash 8y ago
  At the peak of my spam experience, I was getting hundreds a day. That was ages ago when the internet was much slower and more expensive than it is today, and bad people online were much less sophisticated. I wouldn’t be surprised if a totally open email system today generated enough spam that even deleting one message per second you’d fall behind. I haven’t checked my spam folder on a routine basis in many years.
  - jstanley 8y ago
    What I'm saying is that "modern spam filtering" (by which I assume we mean GMail-style highly-aggressive spam filtering that puts lots of legitimate email in the spam folder) is not what saved email. Rudimentary spam filtering saved email. There's no need to ever have a legitimate email go to the spam folder.
    - efaref 8y ago
      Spam filtering is an arms race. Spammers know how to download all the existing spam filtering software and tweak their emails to make sure it gets past it.
      - joveian 8y ago
        My experience matches jstanley's: with basic ISP filtering and disabling as much filtering as they let me disable my ISP reports blocking 181 messages in the past month mostly via some list (they don't say which one). I see a few spam messages per day and generally get half a dozen or more copies the first time I see a new one, conveniently making them easy to delete (and very few have confusing subjects). I'm fairly sure I see less than half as many as the ISP blocks. This is with an address that has been public for over a decade. It doesn't seem like much of an arms race to me and it is a trivial effort to delete them. The only things I can think of that I do differently than many people that might make a difference is that I have my mail client set up to not show remote images ever and I never dirctly click any link from email no matter the source. Possibly things might be much worse otherwise, but from my perspective it doesn't seem like spam is a huge issue these days with basic filtering.
        mikeash 8y ago
        You're still benefitting from everybody else's more sophisticated spam filtering. The fact that most users have good filtering means that the cost/benefit ratio of sending spam is much worse than it otherwise would be. This naturally decreases the activity significantly. Saying that you get by with just basic blocking is the e-mail equivalent of saying that you don't need a measles vaccine. It may be true but it doesn't tell us much about what the world would look like without those measures.
- krageon 8y ago
  > It doesn't take very long to manually delete spam from the inbox. I have tuned the spam filters for a fairly major email provider for a while and while you are right for a lot of people, there's a significant fraction of them that receives hundreds or even thousands of spam emails per day. For them, it is not practical - and everyone needs to be able to use it.

anitil 8y ago

I have subscribed to more email lists these days than ever before. Why? Because trust in the system has increased. I know that I can easily subscribe/unsubscribe and that decision will be respected (or punished if ignored). So while gmail has made life harder for people who want to email me, it have made life much easier for me as an email user - which makes me more willing to give out my email.