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This is just the internet moving to match the real world. In the real world, reputation matters and some people don't want to talk to you unless someone can vo

This is just the internet moving to match the real world. In the real world, reputation matters and some people don't want to talk to you unless someone can vouch for you. For areas where the general public needs to interact, third party intermediary services spring up to fill this need. This is why for any store over the size of a mom and pop operation in a neighborhood, you can't just tell the owner who you know by name to put it on your account, and instead for credit purchases you use a credit card company which acts as an intermediary and smooths problems over on both sides, and refuses to work with stores and people that are untrustworthy. This is why there are mailing list (mass email) services and why mail servers allow them. They keep their customers working within the accepted bounds (they ensure removal works and fire clients that abuse), and this allows mass email for accepted reasons while still being able to come down hard in random exploited servers/accounts. This is why big email services are very selective about what servers they talk to. I work at an ISP where our main outbound mail servers are on IPs that we try not to change because they've got decades of reputation attached. Even so, we recently brought up two new servers for email forwards, and shifted a small percentage of our mail queue traffic to them and ramped it up over a couple weeks, and that seemed to work "warming them up" to the likes of Gmail and yahoo, etc. It used to be there were lists of mail operators you could be part of and you could use reputation within that to get them to be lenient with you when you started. These days it's all so centralized in a few very large players that they really likely just talk to each other.

lytefm 5y ago
> and that seemed to work "warming them up" to the likes of Gmail and yahoo, etc Yes, warming up a "fresh" IP definely works. If you suddenly send thousands of mails from a new server - sure, you'll be labeled as Spam. If you slowly increase the volume over time, have a good domain and recipients that interact with the email, things should be fine. GMail has quite helpful guidelines [1]. 1: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Silhouette 5y ago
In the real world, reputation matters and some people don't want to talk to you unless someone can vouch for you. This has absolutely nothing to do with someone not wanting to talk to someone else. It has everything to do with some third party having the power to decide whether the other two may communicate. These days it's all so centralized in a few very large players that they really likely just talk to each other. And thus the single most important method of remote communication in the world today, the method that is frequently akin to root access to our online lives, became subject to arbitrary monitoring and interference by huge, powerful organisations with their own interests and negligible regulatory oversight, legal safeguards or accountability to anyone but their shareholders. Do you really not see why this is a problem? You talk about the internet matching the real world, but in the real world we've had laws against monitoring and interference with things like postal mail and telephone calls for a very long time almost everywhere.
- kbenson 5y ago
  > This has absolutely nothing to do with someone not wanting to talk to someone else. It has everything to do with some third party having the power to decide whether the other two may communicate. They have that power specifically people people outsource vetting of whether someone's worth dealing with. I'll repeat, this is all about reputation, and how without reputation you're subject to every anonymous person's abuse. That's not an issue when the total number of people you're dealing with is manageable. It is when the number of people you expect to have to deal with is the population of a small country or the entire world. > And thus the single most important method of remote communication in the world today, the method that is frequently akin to root access to our online lives, became subject to arbitrary monitoring and interference by huge, powerful organisations with their own interests and negligible regulatory oversight, legal safeguards or accountability to anyone but their shareholders. Only for those that opted into that system. Gmail does not dictate what mail servers accept your mail, they dictate whether they themselves accept your mail. They just happen to have a userbase in hundreds of millions billions, so a large percent of the people you might want to contact use it. You can blame Gmail all you want, but they're just doing what their users want, which is reliable email without much spam, and that's how they've achieved it. You're not going to get far telling people when you send stuff to them they're required to accept it. The system only worked the way you wanted it when it was small and offenders weren't as anonymous and social punishments worked against them. When everyone's mostly anonymous, that no longer works. > Do you really not see why this is a problem? It is a problem, but it's a problem of people choosing to use them. And there's been ways to keep people from reading your emails for decades at this point with GPG, and if you can't trust the other side to buy into that, or to not use a web based email client, then there's nothing you can do about communication with those people anyway. Should they be monitoring email? No. Would we be better with laws preventing that? Yes. Is that really the same issue as them being so large that by dictating who they will talk with and how they are effectively dictating rules for running a public mail server? No. Separate issues.
cge 5y ago
>This is why for any store over the size of a mom and pop operation in a neighborhood, you can't just tell the owner who you know by name to put it on your account, and instead for credit purchases you use a credit card company which acts as an intermediary and smooths problems over on both sides, and refuses to work with stores and people that are untrustworthy. Yet, if that store knows you, and wants to extend credit to you, they can. A difficulty with email is that it seems to be increasingly difficult for the recipients to have much control over the email they receive. I know of numerous instances where people are unable to get specific emails they want or need to receive to not be spam-foldered, or to be received at all. They may have no understanding of why this is the case, and even if they do, may have no ability to change it. The systems are often opaque and unchangeable, and involve organization- or provider-level choices before emails ever reach their accounts.

lytefm 5y ago

> and that seemed to work "warming them up" to the likes of Gmail and yahoo, etc Yes, warming up a "fresh" IP definely works. If you suddenly send thousands of mails from a new server - sure, you'll be labeled as Spam. If you slowly increase the volume over time, have a good domain and recipients that interact with the email, things should be fine. GMail has quite helpful guidelines [1]. 1: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Silhouette 5y ago

In the real world, reputation matters and some people don't want to talk to you unless someone can vouch for you. This has absolutely nothing to do with someone not wanting to talk to someone else. It has everything to do with some third party having the power to decide whether the other two may communicate. These days it's all so centralized in a few very large players that they really likely just talk to each other. And thus the single most important method of remote communication in the world today, the method that is frequently akin to root access to our online lives, became subject to arbitrary monitoring and interference by huge, powerful organisations with their own interests and negligible regulatory oversight, legal safeguards or accountability to anyone but their shareholders. Do you really not see why this is a problem? You talk about the internet matching the real world, but in the real world we've had laws against monitoring and interference with things like postal mail and telephone calls for a very long time almost everywhere.

kbenson 5y ago
> This has absolutely nothing to do with someone not wanting to talk to someone else. It has everything to do with some third party having the power to decide whether the other two may communicate. They have that power specifically people people outsource vetting of whether someone's worth dealing with. I'll repeat, this is all about reputation, and how without reputation you're subject to every anonymous person's abuse. That's not an issue when the total number of people you're dealing with is manageable. It is when the number of people you expect to have to deal with is the population of a small country or the entire world. > And thus the single most important method of remote communication in the world today, the method that is frequently akin to root access to our online lives, became subject to arbitrary monitoring and interference by huge, powerful organisations with their own interests and negligible regulatory oversight, legal safeguards or accountability to anyone but their shareholders. Only for those that opted into that system. Gmail does not dictate what mail servers accept your mail, they dictate whether they themselves accept your mail. They just happen to have a userbase in hundreds of millions billions, so a large percent of the people you might want to contact use it. You can blame Gmail all you want, but they're just doing what their users want, which is reliable email without much spam, and that's how they've achieved it. You're not going to get far telling people when you send stuff to them they're required to accept it. The system only worked the way you wanted it when it was small and offenders weren't as anonymous and social punishments worked against them. When everyone's mostly anonymous, that no longer works. > Do you really not see why this is a problem? It is a problem, but it's a problem of people choosing to use them. And there's been ways to keep people from reading your emails for decades at this point with GPG, and if you can't trust the other side to buy into that, or to not use a web based email client, then there's nothing you can do about communication with those people anyway. Should they be monitoring email? No. Would we be better with laws preventing that? Yes. Is that really the same issue as them being so large that by dictating who they will talk with and how they are effectively dictating rules for running a public mail server? No. Separate issues.

cge 5y ago

>This is why for any store over the size of a mom and pop operation in a neighborhood, you can't just tell the owner who you know by name to put it on your account, and instead for credit purchases you use a credit card company which acts as an intermediary and smooths problems over on both sides, and refuses to work with stores and people that are untrustworthy. Yet, if that store knows you, and wants to extend credit to you, they can. A difficulty with email is that it seems to be increasingly difficult for the recipients to have much control over the email they receive. I know of numerous instances where people are unable to get specific emails they want or need to receive to not be spam-foldered, or to be received at all. They may have no understanding of why this is the case, and even if they do, may have no ability to change it. The systems are often opaque and unchangeable, and involve organization- or provider-level choices before emails ever reach their accounts.