I think techniques like HashCash by Adam Back should be revisited.
My self-hosted email filters too little spam, while GMail etc filter too much (e.g. important company correspondence leading to orders almost being lost because they landed in our GMail spam).
Edit: typo
I hate LLM writing, but the economics checks out.
I've done it for decades, but I don't know much beyond the basics of email hosting tbh, however my understanding is that these days email coming from self-hosted servers carries a much higher spam/junk risk and so often automatically marked as spam.
Maybe there are ways to avoid this happening, but when a few clients all reported that they were not receiving my emails I didn't have much of a choice but to switch.
I've self-hosted for about 2 months, and promptly switched to iCloud. Just because I've been spending too much time calling people and telling them to check their spam folders.
Recently our business moved to another domain. We had a guy who has spent over a month "warming up" traffic, so our new domain won't be tagged as spam by default.
I have been running Postfix for 22 years, from a big corporate installation to my own on a Raspberry Pi Zero. It just does its job.
The only way around this seems to be hosting with Google, Microsoft, or maybe Proton. Any other ideas?
Email spam has made self hosting untenable.
Unfortunately this only talks about what DMARC policies are published by domains. I was hoping they will go into some analysis of how many mailboxes actually hard-enforce DMARC rules on ingress (as in, respect the DMARC policy as published by the sender's domain, p=reject or whatever else it might be)
I have been hesitant to enforce DMARC rules on my server. Partly because maintaining it was a pain (see opendmarc - maybe better with rspamd now), but also because on my test runs I saw plenty of legitimate incoming mail that simply would get rejected if I were to enforce DMARC on ingress.
I suspect big players like gmail have some kind of soft enforcement/reputation/machine learning approach to DMARC, but this is way too much work for a small time admin like me.
The problem lies with the big e-mail providers marking your e-mail as spam, even if you have everything configured right (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc.) and you're not on any blacklists. They use their mysterious opaque algo to determine that your e-mail is spam and you have no idea what you could do to not get in peoples junk boxes.
And that’s not hard?
Running a modern mail server, a spam filter, a self-hosted webmail, and learning just enough about DNS and networking to get mail through: this is what’s not that hard.
Figuring out how to stay whitelisted, or accept ending up in people’s filters, asking them to whitelist you while your public IP gradually gains trust, is a job.
I just wish these big parties would give you a more formal way to make clear you're not a spammer.
You should self-host, so you can do the experiment for yourself. You might be surprised. You can always stop self-hosting if you don't like it.
They should also deal with the individual accounts etc, but thats the difficult problem.
Ironic given the amount of crypto spam that exists.
But I self-host email for ~20 years, and I have not managed to get rid of Spam without not also getting false positives.
I first used SpamAssistant, in later years Rspamd, but I feel like they are just not good enough. Also I find Rspamd config pretty incomprehensible.
Hosted email like also does not solve this, e.g. GMail filters way much (e.g. important company correspondence leading to orders almost being lost because they landed in our GMail spam, so I had to turn off the spam filter entirely).
I stopped reading at this point. I cannot emphasize how much I HATE this AI writing style.
Everyone should aim to be this lazy. Everyone is trying to maximize their time. This is what software has always done. It helps people be lazy in some respect, and then, so far, we have always found new stuff to do with the time we freed up.
LLMs got decent at writing, and before long they will be better at write-ups than the average human writer and we won't look back.
Of course, this is contingent on your current goal: If you want to get better at writing, you should do the writing, just like you want to do the math, if you want to learn multiplication. Writing is fine as a tool just to get information across. It needn't be more than that for everyone.
Delegating this task to automation serves to undermine all the masters and indeed strengthen the servants.
Short term this offload is good for people; long term it’ll lead to mental rot where people are hard pressed to put their ideas forward and give up in exasperation when they don’t have the assistance of their servants. Their ability to even make the proper requests to the servants may deteriorate enough that their existence may come to rely on the benevolence of their servants.
Judging by people's response, that doesn't seem to be the case.
> and before long they will be better at write-ups than the average human writer and we won't look back.
I'll read articles written by them if and when that happens, but not before.
bell-cot•56m ago
thelastgallon•46m ago
inigyou•40m ago
If your email is Google or Microsoft, there are other people with self-hosted email who feel pressured to use their Google or Microsoft accounts to send email to you.
mrngld•20m ago
TBH, I blame IT leadership. The easy choice is Google or Microsoft. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" is now "No one ever got fired for subbing to Office." Someone needs to bite the bullet and stitch together an alternative array of services. They've cultivated their own monoculture by hitting the easy-button and forking over for Office365, etc.
Which if we're being honest, Microsoft and Google products are rarely best-in-class at any one thing that they do. Teams, SharePoint, Google Docs, someone somewhere is doing those things much better. Those competitors just don't necessarily have a whole ecosystem that makes it a big Easy Button for corporate IT to smash. And they sometimes charge as much by themselves as Office365 costs in whole. But I know one problem my own employers IT team struggles with a bit is putting out the constant fire of different teams deciding the Microsoft tool we pay for sucks and going rogue and trying to subscribe to something else. Dropbox was a big one, but Teams and Planner alternatives come up a lot too.
Not pretending to have all the answers but it doesn't seem to be a completely intractable problem.
avian•44m ago
I remember when Gmail came around and everyone was more than happy to hand off their email to Google. No spam and ability to send and receive huge (for the time) attachments I think were the main things people wanted.
Not sure if that was before or after everyone was happy to hand off their web browser to Google.
inigyou•41m ago
palata•12m ago
herrherrmann•42m ago
leonidasrup•22m ago
"PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies. The program is also known by the SIGAD US-984XN. PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google and Apple under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_program
"Section 702 permits the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to jointly authorize targeting of non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.
By targeting, it is meant that US persons or persons located in the United States may not be the intended targets of the collection. The targeting must have as its object the acquisition of foreign intelligence information, as this is defined by FISA."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FISA_Amendments_Act_of_2008