6 ms·
You can fight spam by refusing to federate with servers which are often spamming. That acts as a deterrent for servers to host spam since they'll lose participa
by ilammy 6y ago
You can fight spam by refusing to federate with servers which are often spamming. That acts as a deterrent for servers to host spam since they'll lose participation. However, this only works if there are enough of other servers to federate with so that you can actually choose your peers.
The status quo with email is not like that, unfortunately. Either you federate with GMail and accept the possible spam, or you disrupt significant part of communications of your users by refusing to accept email from Google's mail servers, with Google not losing basically anything (and having no intrinsic reason to fight spam). So it becomes a loss-meh situation instead of win-loss.
- fragmede 6y agoAlmost - intrinsic to offering modern webmail, (and not simply selling SMTP as a service) is fighting spam. Empowered users aren't going to put up with receiving spam and can and will go elsewhere.
- nemothekid 6y ago>You can fight spam by refusing to federate with servers which are often spamming Awesome, so users will naturally gravitate to the servers that spent the most $$$ money fighting spam. You end up with Gmail all over again. I don't know why you are using Gmail as the spammer in this situation. Arguably the 2nd biggest reason Gmail got so big is at the time their spam detection was lightyears ahead of everyone else. Then as they got larger they killed off smaller servers that didn't do the magic song and dance, and those users couldn't talk to most people as everyone was on Gmail. There's nothing stopping this from happening again on some new federation platform. This is my biggest gripe with federated services. They all start from the point where "the Internet is centralized" and offer some proto-Internet to undo it. The Internet started federalized and the easiest solution to many of the problems that came with it was centralization. It's always unclear how you prevent this from happening again.
- wmf 6y agousers will naturally gravitate to the servers that spent the most $$$ money fighting spam Or hopefully all servers have good enough open-source anti-spam built in so that it isn't a centralizing force.
- gpm 6y agoFrom what I've seen anti spam works almost entirely by two methods. Only accepting messages from trusted servers (which rules out having too many small servers), and information asymmetry where the spam artists don't know what signals you are looking for (which rules out open source).
- sellyme 6y ago> information asymmetry where the spam artists don't know what signals you are looking for (which rules out open source). Machine learning mitigates this somewhat - doesn't really matter if the code's open source if even the people who wrote it have no idea what's actually happening in the black box. Of course, that method of anti-spam has an entirely separate set of problems. But we've got those either way.
- gpm 6y agoIf the model weights are available you have the same problem. If the model weights aren't available you won't get many instances of the server running.
- anticensor 6y agoWhat about open-source infrastructure with a closed-source antispam plug-in?
- gpm 6y agoClosed source probably isn't enough, you probably need to not widely distribute the binary either. At which point you can't have many server instances to federate.