Interesting history and analysis of SMTP’s history. How can we prevent fedi and other open protocols from suffering the same fates?
Defederating bad actors/spammers should in theory be good enough? Domains aren’t free and I don’t think it’s worth it for them to buy a new domain to just be able to spam for a short time again.
Domains aren’t free and I don’t think it’s worth it for them to buy a new domain to just be able to spam for a short time again.
Literally what e-mail spammers do.
Agreed defederating can help solve obviously malicious instances, it doesn’t solve spammers abusing good instances. E-mail and AP are very similar at a protocol structure level.
Is it though? Don’t email spammers just spoof the domain or send without a domain? I’m not entirely sure if that’s different from how the fediverse works. I’m not too knowledgeable about this topic.
Don’t email spammers just spoof the domain or send without a domain?
They do both, depending on the spammer and the type of spam they send. In e-mail, you have an e-mail server, you can use it to send mail to users on other e-mail servers. Each e-mail server can choose to accept or reject email from other e-mail servers based on whatever reason they want. AP/Lemmy/Mastodon is basically identical to this. I’m not sure how exactly bluesky is setup but I get the impression it’s similar. In Nostr, servers aren’t federated (each relay is seperate, if you want to send/recieve content to another user on a different relays you just talk to that relay directly instead of having “your relay” act as an intermediary), but the structure is still pretty similar.
Nostr does have this hashcash type system (requiring proof-of-work to weed out spam), but I haven’t come across any relays that actually enforce it, it will be interesting to see if that changes in time. I also saw a GitHub issue about adding something similar to AP but I think they chose not to implement it.
But most people don’t pay for software, especially if there are “free” and legal alternatives.
I’m not sure what you mean with that or how it relates to what I said, could you elaborate?
As I understood you said that we should make email paid to stop spammers.
(This is as much an answer to some of the comments already raised, as to the article - which like most such personal pieces has pros and cons.)
As part of a previous job I used to host email for a small business - this was about 15 years ago. I ended up spending several hours to a day a week working on it; apologising to users, tracing and diagnosing missing sent email and the endless, ENDLESS arms war against incoming spam (phishing was much less of a problem then). The trust from the company in our email operation was very poor and you’d regularly hear someone apologising to a customer because we hadn’t contacted them, or answered their email. The truth is much was going astray and staff were relying more on the phone than email because they knew it worked. You might guess from this that I’m terrible at running an email system but I don’t think I am. I started moving email back in the late 80s when Fidonet was the thing, so I have some miles travelled. Tools have improved a bit since then, but so have those used by the bad guys.
I still consider one of the best things I did for that company was move our company email onto Gmail Business (which was free for us as a charity) Every single one of those problems went away immediately and suddenly I had a lot more time to do more important stuff. I would never self-host email again despite running several personal servers.
Plenty of people say they self-host just fine, and great for you if that’s so. But the truth is you won’t always know if your outbound mail silently gets dropped and you have a far higher chance of it arriving if it comes from a reputable source. There are a huge number of variables outside of your control. (ISP, your country, your region, your software, even the latency of your MX or DKIM responses factor into your reputation)
You take the decision on whether any perceieved risks of privacy through using a third party outweighs the deliverability and filtering issues of self hosting, but please don’t say it’s simple or reliable for everyone. If it’s simple for you, you’re either incredibly lucky or just not appreciating the problem.
And threads will be the death of decentralized lemmy. But we still have mailing lists, and most of my mails go to decentralized users on those lists. You just gotta know where to look, and you’ll find gold.
I never run a mail server but Google already placing my mail sent via my xyz domain hosted on proton to spam folder silently.
I guess running my own will be a lot worst.
P.S. I know that’s a bad TLD choice, and I’m planning to migrate, but that will take a lots of time and work to the point I wonders if that worth it as I don’t sent many anyways.
