3 ms·

The alternative is a spam and scam mess that would kill email.

pmlnr 4y ago
BS. There are and were (I lament dspam) excellent spam filters, plus if you enforce greylisting barely any spam gets through.
- elric 4y ago
  Indeed. And if we hit spammers with half the hammer that pirates have been hit with, it'd be a much smaller problem ... but for some reason, spam seems to be immune to legal action.
  - BowBun 4y ago
    Spam inflates numbers and ends up benefiting nearly everyone except the end user in the short-term: - Platforms benefit from larger activity volume, thus increasing their numbers and $$$ - FTC and other regulatory bodies get to take low-effort actions and tout the massive effects, ignoring the fact that they're slapping the ocean with a stick. - All the systems in between are charging each other for artificial traffic, resulting in a convenient ponzi-like situation. I wouldn't be surprised if large chunks of vendor (SendgridTwilio, cloud providers, etc.) revenues are from illegitimate business.
    - wpm 4y ago
      I imagine a similar thing is happening in the phone space too. Scam calls are 99% of the calls I get on my cell phone now, and probably close to that for "revenue from calls" that the providers are raking in. If I could spin up my own cell network like I could an email server and a domain, you bet that the big cell/telecom players would "blacklist" my domain for "spam" the moment they caught whiff and instantly make it almost useless, same as Gmail does.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  What about non-technical users? For my parents and siblings, using "free" online email from a major provider, like Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo certainly keeps them safer than old school POP3 (download to your PC). Email can get lost, scanning attachments was poor, and spam filtering was terrible, even by major Internet providers.
  - pmlnr 4y ago
    Dude... IMAP is decades old. I used Squirrelmail webmail when gmail came out.
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      In my pre-webmail experience, many ISPs did not offer IMAP as it requires them to keep email stored on their servers long term. The advantage of POP3: They force you to download it.
rcme 4y ago
You can run an LLM in your browser now. Pretty sure even a low parameter LLM is more than capable of detecting spam. And thats not even considering more specialized approaches.
renewiltord 4y ago
It is true that opt-in has bad UX. You can't easily "never send to spam".

BS. There are and were (I lament dspam) excellent spam filters, plus if you enforce greylisting barely any spam gets through.

elric 4y ago
Indeed. And if we hit spammers with half the hammer that pirates have been hit with, it'd be a much smaller problem ... but for some reason, spam seems to be immune to legal action.
- BowBun 4y ago
  Spam inflates numbers and ends up benefiting nearly everyone except the end user in the short-term: - Platforms benefit from larger activity volume, thus increasing their numbers and $$$ - FTC and other regulatory bodies get to take low-effort actions and tout the massive effects, ignoring the fact that they're slapping the ocean with a stick. - All the systems in between are charging each other for artificial traffic, resulting in a convenient ponzi-like situation. I wouldn't be surprised if large chunks of vendor (SendgridTwilio, cloud providers, etc.) revenues are from illegitimate business.
  - wpm 4y ago
    I imagine a similar thing is happening in the phone space too. Scam calls are 99% of the calls I get on my cell phone now, and probably close to that for "revenue from calls" that the providers are raking in. If I could spin up my own cell network like I could an email server and a domain, you bet that the big cell/telecom players would "blacklist" my domain for "spam" the moment they caught whiff and instantly make it almost useless, same as Gmail does.
throwaway2037 4y ago
What about non-technical users? For my parents and siblings, using "free" online email from a major provider, like Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo certainly keeps them safer than old school POP3 (download to your PC). Email can get lost, scanning attachments was poor, and spam filtering was terrible, even by major Internet providers.
- pmlnr 4y ago
  Dude... IMAP is decades old. I used Squirrelmail webmail when gmail came out.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    In my pre-webmail experience, many ISPs did not offer IMAP as it requires them to keep email stored on their servers long term. The advantage of POP3: They force you to download it.

rcme 4y ago

You can run an LLM in your browser now. Pretty sure even a low parameter LLM is more than capable of detecting spam. And thats not even considering more specialized approaches.

renewiltord 4y ago

It is true that opt-in has bad UX. You can't easily "never send to spam".