Is spam email still a big deal

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15525287

by chrodobert • 9 years ago

4 13 9 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Is spam email still a big deal? Does it really consume that much bandwidth? I can imagine in the past when computers were slower that spam was more of a resource hog than it is now.

TaylorGood2• 9 years ago

It's a mental resource hog if nothing else. Just changed a setting on my moms phone and noticed she had 108k unread emails between two accounts. All spam.

deusum• 9 years ago

I got locked out of a Yahoo account years ago that I used solely as a spam account for signups. It was getting hundreds a day and I just looked for that one email confirmation as necessary. Sometimes I wonder if it's still active. It might have a million emails waiting (were Yahoo to allow unlimited messages).

TaylorGood2• 9 years ago

One of the two is Yahoo.

dredmorbius3• 9 years ago

It's a complexity brake of multiple dimensions.

Much of the email I now receive is spam. This is both because of and a reason why I've abandoned using email -- it's too painful and too low-reward to even open my inbox. Privacy, surveillance, and other concerns are leading me to largely abandon email (and most other private electronic comms) in any regard.

If you want to set up your own email service, addressing span, and proving you're not a spammer yourself is a major hassle. There are hoops to jump through on both ends, reducing the incoming flow, and ensuring that outbound peers will pick up your mail.

If you're engaged in any large-scale outreach (think: accounts-based services, notifications, etc.), then dealing with spam accusations on your own service are an issue. Those might or might not be legitimate -- in many cases, users will, with a high degree of legitimacy, not try to unsubscribe or opt out of email but instead simply flag it as spam. As accounts die or are closed, simply continuing to email them may mark you as a spammer (a periodic re-validation process is a good way to avoid this). I've seen decade-plus old services with hundreds of thousands or millions of questionable addresses. The devs may not care about that, but as ops, and as the point person for ensuring that notifications and alerts do get out, I do.

The noise alone of spam, outbound or inbound, causes logistical problems.

TL;DR: Yes.

chrodobert• 9 years ago

Thanks for your thoughtful response. What is the future of email? How will person to person text communications evolve so that they are more secure, in your opinion.

dredmorbius3• 9 years ago

That's hard to call, though I see a few dynamics affecting the outcome.

1. Cost matters. In communications, a low- or zero-marginal-cost solution almost always has an advantage overy any marginally-priced solution. I'm quite confident in predicting that micropayments will not be the solution here, though some time-based all-you-can-eat solution might work, more likely at an annual or decadal scale than a monthly (or shorter) one.

2. New media tend to be adopted based on attractive founding cohorts. People are drawn to communities that are selective, exclusive, and/or generally represent a higher socio-economic-political status than they have. If you look at the history of communications, going back to speech and writing themselves, those with facilities in spoken or written language were seen as attractive and appealing.

Early Usenet, and later Facebook, both developed among selective-admissions research/prestige universities. I don't think this is at all a coincidence, and each network could be contrasted with more general, less-selective emerging or extant networks of the time, say, BBSes, Prodigy, AOL, or MySpace. See dana boyd who's also pointed this out.

(Corollary: do you want to create a Facebook killer? Create a billion-dollar fund and and seed $10m to each of 100 new networks within an aspirational community, reserving the right to merge any successful networks emerging from those into an aggregate, aspirational community. Google came close to this formula for G+, but erred, contrary to a great deal of commentary, in opening up the network too soon, and most especially, to the kiss-of-death native Google community of marketers, SEO, and advertising. If it had stuck to tech and STEM for a few years, it might have created that vital community. In my opinion.)

3. The directory is a critical element. In SMTP email, this includes DNS and local elements. DNS itself is a stumbling block for many people to self-hosting services, and it really wasn't meant to scale to billions of individual domains. There are hierarchical structers that could do this, including DNS hierarchies (domain, subdomain(s), host, user), or X-500 or LDAP, but which have not been widely adopted. Microsoft's Active Directory (an LDAP variant) exists, but is proprietary. I'm not sure what the solution here looks like, but it's actually among the key sticking points.

4. Support and privacy of metadata. The history of the standard RFC 822 message header structure is an interesting one, and dates to the early-20th century development of the inter-office memo. See Kathy Yates, "The Memorandum as Management Genre" (http://www.ismlab.usf.edu/dcom/Ch6_YatesMemoMgtCommQtly1989....). Among the surprises I found there, "In-reply-to" actually pre-dates" the "From", "To", and "Subject" fields -- creating chains of referenceable communications matters.* A key problem of current SMTP messaging is that these metadata are among the most useful to any surveillance system, capitalist or state, and yet are not protected by extant content-encryption systems. At the same time, some access to metadata may be critical for filtering purposes.

5. Various forms of trust and graduated trust-delegation. This applies at various levels. There's a level of trust which must generally be granted to message transport systems -- software, hardware, channels, protocols. Filtering against spam or unwanted email may involve some level of disclosure of either identity or contents. (It's likely that spam won't generally be (strongly) encrypted making filtering of it more viable, but this remains to be seen.) The ability to layer trust and encryption such that access, approval, and/or vouching may occur at various levels in a limited fashion could help.

(1/ cont)

bradknowles• 9 years ago

Yes.

Network bandwidth is not the problem.

The problem is disruption of effective communications channels.

I have three layers of anti-spam technology on my e-mail addresses, and still much of the traffic I get is spam.

thediff2• 9 years ago

I setup a solution for spam that lets in 0 (zero) spam emails a month. Without having a spam filter :)

If anyone would like to try give me an email address.

aryamaan• 9 years ago

I am not sure if you are being sarcastic and tricking people to let know that's how they end up getting spams.

But if you are serious, I would like to know more what you are doing- filtering out all the emails is also one way to get 0 spam mails.

thediff2• 9 years ago

I'm not being sarcastic. It's a kind of anti-filter with proof of work.

muzani• 9 years ago

Outlook/Hotmail still hasn't figured it out. It seems to get it 50% wrong, putting important email in junk, and highlighting phishing mail.

twobyfour• 9 years ago

Probably for many people. I haven't even had to think about it in years except to check my spam folders once a week for ham. And that's for 8 email addresses including two catch-alls.

Is spam email still a big deal

Related Stories