5 ms·

This was an interesting proposal at the time, but the problems it's trying to solve (storage, bounces) are very different from the problems we ended up having (

by jefftk 5y ago

This was an interesting proposal at the time, but the problems it's trying to solve (storage, bounces) are very different from the problems we ended up having (spam, spam, spam).

quesera 5y ago
Spam is a non-issue in 2022. Also in 2012. The available solutions all work extremely well, from rspamd to Gmail, and have for many years. We can thank Paul Graham for popularizing the solution, in fact. Thanks Paul! The only real issue for email today is deliverability. That's getting worse, according to reports from people who have not had a stable verified public IP address for decades.
- BeetleB 5y ago
  > The available solutions all work extremely well, from rspamd to Gmail, and have for many years. When the "Unsubscribe" feature fails (about 10% of the time in my experience), then those emails are legitimately spam. None of the spam solutions work for those emails.
  - quesera 5y ago
    I see one or two messages per week, and I guarantee that my email addresses are on every spam list in the English-speaking world. (Also Chinese and Russian -- at a minimum) If spam is a problem for you in 2022, you have a crappy email provider.
    - BeetleB 5y ago
      You didn't understand the point of my comment. If you sign up for something (e.g. by purchasing goods from a legitimate store), those will virtually never be classified as spam. The reality is that it is hard to get off those lists - a lot of them have an "Unsubscribe" link that purports to get you off their list, but do not actually do so. If you have a provider that is classifying them as spam, then you have a crappy provider.
      - josephg 5y ago
        The modern definition of spam, used by gmail & other providers is “email the receiver does not want to receive”. I consider the unsubscribe button a courtesy, but the “mark spam” button is the real unsubscribe link. I wish modern email systems had a button which did both - “unsubscribe, and mark any future email from this domain as spam”.
        andylynch 5y ago
        Not that I normally use it, but at least on iOS the gmail app’s ‘report spam’ button gives just this; ‘unsubscribe and report spam’ as the first option.
    - josephg 5y ago
      I declared bankruptcy on an old email address (josephg@gmail) in part because of the quantity of junk that address receives. About 10-20 junk emails per day make it through to my inbox. In my case, it’s because there’s at least 3 different people who regularly misspell their email address and type mine instead. The emails tell their story - first through account creation emails, and then a series of emails with password reset codes. And I get a flood of attempts to reset my Facebook / Google / apple / etc account passwords. All mixed with genuine spam, phishing emails, pay stubs (!!), Indian cell phone bills, and all sorts of other cruft. The spam has now filled up my Google storage quota, and I can’t use Google docs with that account any more. (I’ll probably just backup & delete all email in that mail box soon to restore the account) If gmail’s spam detection is “crappy”, I’m very curious who you consider “good”.
      - jandrese 5y ago
        For me my gmail was not in bad shape until a particular social network leak, now it gets signed up for every single website with a weak CAPCHA. Probably 4 or 5 websites and mailing lists a week now. I have learned which sites will let you sign up multiple times with the same email address. Some dating websites apparently don't check at all and I now have dozens of accounts on them. Hooray.
        josephg 5y ago
        Plenty of websites also seem to consider email confirmations optional in their sign-up flow. Which is to say, if you never confirm your email address, plenty of websites will still consider your account active enough to spam you.
      - ghostly_s 5y ago
        lol, exact same story for me. my 'crappy' new email gets several spam messages a day + regular false-positives but that's nothing compared to gmail.
      - quesera 5y ago
        Well, I'm disappointed to learn that Gmail is also crappy. My understanding was that they did this part well, at least. To be fair, legit emails to misspelled addresses are not spam, per se -- just a consequence of being @gmail.com (with a humane name). FWIW, I run rspamd for half a dozen users. It correctly classifies upwards of 6000 spam messages, and ~300 non-spam messages per day. A dozen or so false positives get through per week, and I haven't seen a false negative in at least a year. I'm probably more annoyed by spam than most people are, but it has barely occupied any part of my brain in a decade. I guess my original comment should have been more specific. Spam detection is a solved problem in 2022, and has been for many years. That some providers implement it poorly is, well, crappy.
- manholio 5y ago
  > Spam is a non-issue in 2022.... only real issue for email today is deliverability. Well, that train of thought went downhill pretty fast. Could it be perhaps that mail is becoming undeliverable precisely because effective anti-spam is so burdensome that only major players can eat the cost, while pushing massive externalities to every other mail provider?
  - behringer 5y ago
    Nope. I run a mail server and do not have many problems. All the problems I have had the IT of the destination in question was courteous enough to resolve.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  "Spam is a non-issue in 2022." Except when spam filtering effects deliverability and results in mail the recipient wants to receive going to a spam folder, with no way for the recipient to change the filter. For example, I have a friend who has his own domain based on his surname and his mail from that domain goes to Gmail's spam folder even when the recipient marks it as "Not spam".
  - mct 5y ago
    I have a domain I've been using for some 20 years as my primary email address. There are some gmail users I can send mail to without any problems at all. For other gmail users, my messages appear to go into a black hole, not even showing up in their spam folder. Looking at my postfix logs, I can see gmail's SMTP servers don't report any problems at delivery time. It's frustrating.
- NegativeLatency 5y ago
  I actually get lots of spam in my gmail account’s inbox
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  Speak for yourself. I deal with both false negatives and false positives not even on an everyday basis, but every day.
- suction 5y ago
  I agree for Gmail, but I know people who can't or don't want to use it, and spam is still a huge problem for them. Most "Freemail" Providers are not able to create a product like Google did with Gmail.
slim 5y ago
would'n't that solve spam ? I imagine spammers would go overquota very fast
- rbanffy 5y ago
  You can store a lot of spam in a $200 hard disk.
  - nix23 5y ago
    But how long can you keep your host deliverable?
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      I'd imagine at least until the disk fills up. If it's spam we are talking about, it can even be rendered at delivery time, it could be more than the useful lifespan of the device.
      - nix23 5y ago
        >I'd imagine at least until the disk fills up No, until every spam-filter knows your host is a spamer, that is 30min-2h normally.
- kevincox 5y ago
  No, because you don't don't actually need to store one messgae per sent message. You just need to be able to recreate the message upon request. Die to the nature of spam being identical or slightly modified messages it is trivial to just generate the messgae on the fly.
  - jefftk 5y ago
    This is solvable: when the recipient client accepts the senders notification, they return a nonce. Later, when they look up the message in the sender's inbox, they reject the message if the sender can't include the nonce. On the other hand, disk space is so cheap this doesn't help very much.

by jefftk 5y ago

This was an interesting proposal at the time, but the problems it's trying to solve (storage, bounces) are very different from the problems we ended up having (spam, spam, spam).

quesera 5y ago

Spam is a non-issue in 2022. Also in 2012. The available solutions all work extremely well, from rspamd to Gmail, and have for many years. We can thank Paul Graham for popularizing the solution, in fact. Thanks Paul! The only real issue for email today is deliverability. That's getting worse, according to reports from people who have not had a stable verified public IP address for decades.

BeetleB 5y ago
> The available solutions all work extremely well, from rspamd to Gmail, and have for many years. When the "Unsubscribe" feature fails (about 10% of the time in my experience), then those emails are legitimately spam. None of the spam solutions work for those emails.
- quesera 5y ago
  I see one or two messages per week, and I guarantee that my email addresses are on every spam list in the English-speaking world. (Also Chinese and Russian -- at a minimum) If spam is a problem for you in 2022, you have a crappy email provider.
  - BeetleB 5y ago
    You didn't understand the point of my comment. If you sign up for something (e.g. by purchasing goods from a legitimate store), those will virtually never be classified as spam. The reality is that it is hard to get off those lists - a lot of them have an "Unsubscribe" link that purports to get you off their list, but do not actually do so. If you have a provider that is classifying them as spam, then you have a crappy provider.
    - josephg 5y ago
      The modern definition of spam, used by gmail & other providers is “email the receiver does not want to receive”. I consider the unsubscribe button a courtesy, but the “mark spam” button is the real unsubscribe link. I wish modern email systems had a button which did both - “unsubscribe, and mark any future email from this domain as spam”.
      - andylynch 5y ago
        Not that I normally use it, but at least on iOS the gmail app’s ‘report spam’ button gives just this; ‘unsubscribe and report spam’ as the first option.
  - josephg 5y ago
    I declared bankruptcy on an old email address (josephg@gmail) in part because of the quantity of junk that address receives. About 10-20 junk emails per day make it through to my inbox. In my case, it’s because there’s at least 3 different people who regularly misspell their email address and type mine instead. The emails tell their story - first through account creation emails, and then a series of emails with password reset codes. And I get a flood of attempts to reset my Facebook / Google / apple / etc account passwords. All mixed with genuine spam, phishing emails, pay stubs (!!), Indian cell phone bills, and all sorts of other cruft. The spam has now filled up my Google storage quota, and I can’t use Google docs with that account any more. (I’ll probably just backup & delete all email in that mail box soon to restore the account) If gmail’s spam detection is “crappy”, I’m very curious who you consider “good”.
    - jandrese 5y ago
      For me my gmail was not in bad shape until a particular social network leak, now it gets signed up for every single website with a weak CAPCHA. Probably 4 or 5 websites and mailing lists a week now. I have learned which sites will let you sign up multiple times with the same email address. Some dating websites apparently don't check at all and I now have dozens of accounts on them. Hooray.
      - josephg 5y ago
        Plenty of websites also seem to consider email confirmations optional in their sign-up flow. Which is to say, if you never confirm your email address, plenty of websites will still consider your account active enough to spam you.
    - ghostly_s 5y ago
      lol, exact same story for me. my 'crappy' new email gets several spam messages a day + regular false-positives but that's nothing compared to gmail.
    - quesera 5y ago
      Well, I'm disappointed to learn that Gmail is also crappy. My understanding was that they did this part well, at least. To be fair, legit emails to misspelled addresses are not spam, per se -- just a consequence of being @gmail.com (with a humane name). FWIW, I run rspamd for half a dozen users. It correctly classifies upwards of 6000 spam messages, and ~300 non-spam messages per day. A dozen or so false positives get through per week, and I haven't seen a false negative in at least a year. I'm probably more annoyed by spam than most people are, but it has barely occupied any part of my brain in a decade. I guess my original comment should have been more specific. Spam detection is a solved problem in 2022, and has been for many years. That some providers implement it poorly is, well, crappy.
manholio 5y ago
> Spam is a non-issue in 2022.... only real issue for email today is deliverability. Well, that train of thought went downhill pretty fast. Could it be perhaps that mail is becoming undeliverable precisely because effective anti-spam is so burdensome that only major players can eat the cost, while pushing massive externalities to every other mail provider?
- behringer 5y ago
  Nope. I run a mail server and do not have many problems. All the problems I have had the IT of the destination in question was courteous enough to resolve.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"Spam is a non-issue in 2022." Except when spam filtering effects deliverability and results in mail the recipient wants to receive going to a spam folder, with no way for the recipient to change the filter. For example, I have a friend who has his own domain based on his surname and his mail from that domain goes to Gmail's spam folder even when the recipient marks it as "Not spam".
- mct 5y ago
  I have a domain I've been using for some 20 years as my primary email address. There are some gmail users I can send mail to without any problems at all. For other gmail users, my messages appear to go into a black hole, not even showing up in their spam folder. Looking at my postfix logs, I can see gmail's SMTP servers don't report any problems at delivery time. It's frustrating.
NegativeLatency 5y ago
I actually get lots of spam in my gmail account’s inbox
forgotmypw17 5y ago
Speak for yourself. I deal with both false negatives and false positives not even on an everyday basis, but every day.
suction 5y ago
I agree for Gmail, but I know people who can't or don't want to use it, and spam is still a huge problem for them. Most "Freemail" Providers are not able to create a product like Google did with Gmail.

slim 5y ago

would'n't that solve spam ? I imagine spammers would go overquota very fast

rbanffy 5y ago
You can store a lot of spam in a $200 hard disk.
- nix23 5y ago
  But how long can you keep your host deliverable?
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    I'd imagine at least until the disk fills up. If it's spam we are talking about, it can even be rendered at delivery time, it could be more than the useful lifespan of the device.
    - nix23 5y ago
      >I'd imagine at least until the disk fills up No, until every spam-filter knows your host is a spamer, that is 30min-2h normally.
kevincox 5y ago
No, because you don't don't actually need to store one messgae per sent message. You just need to be able to recreate the message upon request. Die to the nature of spam being identical or slightly modified messages it is trivial to just generate the messgae on the fly.
- jefftk 5y ago
  This is solvable: when the recipient client accepts the senders notification, they return a nonce. Later, when they look up the message in the sender's inbox, they reject the message if the sender can't include the nonce. On the other hand, disk space is so cheap this doesn't help very much.