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> More directly: spammers are killing independent email. Disagree. In the early 00s, spam was killing email. I was getting thousands of spams per minute to my
by jjav 4y ago
> More directly: spammers are killing independent email.
Disagree.
In the early 00s, spam was killing email. I was getting thousands of spams per minute to my personal email domain (same one I still have and have had since the mid 90s). It was real bad back then.
Doing aggressive sanity checking on incoming email back then was problematic since nearly all legitimate senders also has badly misconfigured email servers.
Those days are gone. Legitimate senders have well-configured email now, one can do a lot of sanity checking on the SMTP connection and that alone cuts out most of the would-be spam before it is ever sent and none of the real email is impacted.
Sprinkle a bit of bayesian filtering on what remains and spam is mostly a non-issue anymore.
So what it the problem these days? Part of it is a legacy cultural problem. A lot of email admins wear so many scars from the early 00s that they still operate on a mental model that they are willing to throw away a lot of legitimate email just to prevent even one in a million spam to go through. That's highly counterproductive and causes a lot of harm to interoperability.
The other big factor of course is that the very deep pocket email providers (gmail, microsoft) have a strong vested interest in strenghtening their monopoly even further so they are happy to go along anything that decreases interoperability.
That all said, I strongly encourage everyone who can to run their own email. Interoperability can only be saved by exercising it as much as possible. And it still works fine despite the naysayers. I've been running my email infrastructure for a long time and have no deliverability problems anywhere that I've run into.
- ymolodtsov 4y agoThe article literally says that setting up proper records is easy and spammers do it as well. So there's no simple solutions.
- megous 4y agoI assume badly misconfigured servers meant something like open relay setup. Not DMARC and dependent technologies, which are not protection against spam at all, anyway. They are protection against various kinds of spoofing. And I concur with the original commenter. I do zero filtering on my SMTP server (no reverse DNS lookups, no blacklists, no nothing), in order to be sure I receive every single email, and SPAM looks like it would not be an issue even if I disabled the bayes classification client side, these days. I mostly rely on providing unique random addresses to each service. My oldest 18 year old address gets quite a bit of spam so I blocked it and switched to different one, but newer addresses that I use for the last 5 years didn't accumulate much spam, despite being public and crawlable on the web.
- richardfey 4y agoFinally someone who read TFA!
- pseudalopex 4y ago> The article literally says that setting up proper records is easy and spammers do it as well. The article said people said so on HN.
- jimnotgym 4y ago>they are willing to throw away a lot of legitimate email just to prevent even one in a million spam to go through. Or they work at a company that demands it...literally demanding IT remove all spam... and also demanding that nothing important ever gets blocked.
- tjoff 4y agoWell then they for sure can't use gmail. If you still do use gmail, please consider moving to something else. And until you actually do, make sure to keep a close eye on the spam folder because you've most probably lost important mails.
- romusha 4y agoGmail is actually better than the competitors at filtering spam
- tjoff 4y agoThat's hardly impressive and a small comfort when they are better than their competitors at filtering real and important mails as spam.
- smcleod 4y agoI couldn't disagree more. I have several email accounts and the gmail one by FAR lets through the most spam, a lot more than my Fastmail emails which despite being more published have far less spam than Google.
- CRConrad 4y agoBut do you know for a fact that it lets through a larger proportion of the spam sent to it, or are you just noticing that it gets a larger total volume of spam than the others? Because if it's the latter, that could be an effect of more spam being sent to your gmail than to your other accounts.
- baby 4y agoIMO email is dead and spam killed it. Who uses email anymore? It’s basically business communication (but all the biz communication I’ve done in the past years has been through telegram / signal / whatsapp / etc.) and registering to websites. Once we figure out a way to handle website registration that’s not tied to email (whatever that means) I’m not sure email will be useful for anything. Most useful conversations have moved to messaging apps.
- dorfsmay 4y agoNome of the service you mention have the async nature of email. If I want you to be aware of a long article I'll send it to you in an email because if I message it, most people will open it, see it takes more than 2 minutes to read and close it and never go back to it.
- eska 4y agoI don’t know what your company’s policies are, but mine would rightfully not allow me to discuss company secrets via WhatsApp
- baby 4y agoReally? WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted unlike something like email or slack. If your company doesn't understand that they should hire a security team.
- kelnos 4y ago> That all said, I strongly encourage everyone who can to run their own email. Interoperability can only be saved by exercising it as much as possible. While I have no doubt that doing this is a lot easier and more hands-off than the last time I did this (for a few years during the mid '00s), I just don't have the time or energy for it. Also, email is a critical service, something where I don't want to have to deal with downtime, especially if I'm away traveling or something like that. I think as a decent alternative for people like myself, it's at least helpful to use an alternative hosted email provider (other than GMail or Microsoft) to help keep the ecosystem open.
- jjav 4y ago> Also, email is a critical service, something where I don't want to have to deal with downtime, especially if I'm away traveling or something like that. I have to say that as the most critical service of all, that's one of the reasons I do host email myself! I can't and won't take the risk of being locked out by the whims of some third party misconfiguration (we've all surely seen the endless stream of misfortunes by those getting locked out of gmail/etc).