Blackholing My Email

https://www.johnsto.co.uk/blog/blackholing-my-email/

by semyonsh • 4 months ago

180 35 4 months ago

johnsto.co.uk

Email is the one thing everyone complains about and almost nobody actually fixes. Curious how long this lasts before something important falls through.

righthand• 4 months ago

There’s nothing to fall through, email fits it’s exact purpose. Email is supposed to have 0 sending/receiving friction. So one idea to fix it is to only accept email from addresses you’ve allowed. No one wants to constantly update their address book though, they just want the email (forgetting to remove the marketing email allowance after you receive the account verification link). So then there’s nothing to fix.

The abuse is by design.

MattTheRealOne• 4 months ago

Email definitely has its issues, but given that every other form of digital communication is getting worse and more locked down, I have no confidence that a replacement would be better. While increasingly difficult to get self-hosted email to be accepted by the big providers like Google and Microsoft, it is still great to at least have the option of hosting a universally accepted form of communication yourself.

BorisMelnik• 4 months ago

my theory is that if rcs keeps advancing we might see "texting" kind of merge with email at some point.

at this point RCS and email are pretty similar on paper.

BadBadJellyBean• 4 months ago

Do you have any suggestions on how to fix email?

From my perspective all attempts at fixing anything broke something for smaller senders. Today if you want to host a mail server you can set up everything correctly (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and your email still lands in the spam folder because you have not enough reputation. There are whole IP address segments that a flat out prohibited from participating.

Email is designed to be a distributed system. That means new standards can not really be added without breaking most of the systems. We still don't have mandatory transport encryption. So I don't see how to fix anything but to improve spam filtering and accept that it will be imperfect.

PurpleRamen• 4 months ago

There have been many fixes over the decades, but it's hard to change the fundamentals of something widely-used.

pizzafeelsright• 4 months ago

Email is fixed by avoiding the usage. I only check my email for password resets and bank notifications. I never send email. Every other channel of communication with anyone outside of work is a text message.

khiguvikohg• 4 months ago

No one is complaining about the email system itself, but how it is abused, and it being abused is simply a byproduct of how simple and efficient the whole concept is. There’s nothing to fix.

3form• 4 months ago

To me, the fact that the author of the article is the author of de_dust2 is the real highlight! For those who don't know, it's the most popular map ever in Counter Strike, and I expect so it remains to this day.

This is funny, as I always imagined these things to be made by some nameless author of good old Internet, and never bothered to check and look it up. Further less I expected to stumble upon it by said author's random blogpost where it's not even the primary topic.

pete5x5• 4 months ago

Dust2 (and Cobble, another map mentioned) is, IMO, both art and genius; most of us will never make anything that brings joy to so many.

It inspires me to work on things that I'm passionate about just for fun. You never know what might come out of it!

rockbruno• 4 months ago

I had seen noclip's documentary about de_dust2 featuring him before but didn't piece the name together. Very happy to find that he has a blog!

timrogers• 4 months ago

It’s an incredible map - so many fun memories!

elmean• 4 months ago

G O A T Youtube doc about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWWhxfGq_yk

pityJuke• 4 months ago

He also had blogs about those maps: https://www.johnsto.co.uk/design/

jnettome• 4 months ago

I love your work! Thanks for the huuuuge work on de_dust2!

Levitating• 4 months ago

Likely the most well known map in all of video gaming, considering to how many other games it was ported

dmd• 4 months ago

I'm always stunned at how good GMail's spam filtering is, at least for me. I've been using the same email address since 1996 - that's 30 years now - and posting it with absolutely no thought to spam protection all over the place.

I get ~1000 spams per day. About 1-2 end up in inbox. Every so often I do go through my spam, and while it's possible I've missed something, I generally find less than 1 false positive a month and it's never anything especially important.

nozzlegear2• 4 months ago

I've been a Fastmail customer for years and have been pretty happy with their spam filtering too. Anything that does get through either gets a custom rule to send it to the shadow realm, or gets sent to a special "Learn spam" folder that I set up which will train the spam filter on that message.

simgoh2• 4 months ago

Have you noticed decreases over time by sending thigns to the "Learn Spam" folder? I'm a relatively new Fastmail customer - I setup a domain for some family accounts that I can manage on behalf of my aging family members so it's not receiving a lot of email _yet_ but I expect it to in the future.

encom2• 4 months ago

Fastmail here too, and my email address is older than Gmail, and probably older than a significant portion of HN posters. Fastmails spam filter just works. I get a few false negatives per month, and some months zero. I've set it to /dev/null the most obvious spam, and I can't recall the last false positive. It's happened, but extremely rarely. Google spam filter is not unique or magical.

And I never liked Gmail the client. It's not as godawful as Outlook, nothing even comes close, but it always gets in my way and does things in weird Googly ways. I'll stick with Kmail, thanks.

freetanga• 4 months ago

Also Fastmail user for many years, with custom domain. I use specific email addresses per service with Bitwarden’s recent feature (by hand before this). My personal address is shared with few people.

I set up specific folders based on aliases. Thanks to GDPR I have found a few companies that have shared / sold my data illegally (the company-assigned address popped up somewhere else) and managed to have them delete my data right away.

I fret losing my domain, and that my recovery addresses are Gmail and Outlook - which could be lost at any time.

I would like to see government issue a lifetime inbox in the same way they issue you a SSN, a passport or driver license so I can have that as last line recovery.

But on the other hand, if we had that politicians would likely enforce mandatory identification across all web services…

WorldMaker2• 4 months ago

I've started to question if GMail's spam folder is marketing more than substance. I've used the same primary email address for nearly the same number of decades. The time I saw the "most" spam in a spam folder was only while it was hosted on Google Workspace. Actually trying to skim through those "1000s per day" a lot of them seemed suspect in strange ways (why was this even delivered anywhere?) and some of them even seemed like Google just dumping random ad copy from legitimate search ads into the folder.

(Also it says a lot that right now my two biggest sources of daily spam are Google Calendar Notifications and Random Firebase Accounts. Both of those further leave me questioning if Google's approach to spam filtering is sincere.)

dhosek2• 4 months ago

I’ve had the same gmail address since it was first announced. It also gets email forwarded to it from another ancient email address that I used to self-host and that still gets occasional real mails. Most of the spam is addressed to that other address.

Just took a peek at my spam folder: 207 messages going back to March 18th, two false positives (both from mailing lists), but nothing critical. I think maybe I’ve seen one spam message across all my accounts in my inbox. Their filters benefit from a huge set of trainers on their data.

(As an aside, I would note that some newer addresses that I publish naked on some websites that I maintain get very little spam (14 messages between the two accounts in the same timeframe, most of which are from a single sender who decided that they should send me their press releases without any means of opting out.)

freediddy2• 4 months ago

de_dust... such good times! A perfectly designed map where everyone knew what the chokepoints were and what the best strategies were but the outcomes between equal opponents was never guaranteed. That's what makes a perfect playing field!

I recently got my older kid and his friends hooked on CS2 via steam. I'm considering having a "dads vs kids" tourney because we're at that cross section where all the dads have played CS2 and now some of the kids are getting old enough and good enough to be competitive.

sonofhans• 4 months ago

Careful. The crossover from “I’m showing my kid CS2” to “I’m getting easily deleted by my kid in CS2” is pretty fast :)

freediddy2• 4 months ago

My nephew who is in his early 20s beat me at Madden so badly that I quit. It wasn't that he just beat me, I couldn't score against him at all, and I consider myself a decent Madden player. I've been playing that game since the times I was changing his diapers and babysitting him. It was so humiliating that I haven't touched the game since.

dhosek2• 4 months ago

Oh man, the ILOVEYOU worm—I remember getting that from a former co-worker (who I was pretty sure was not secretly in love with me) and asking him who he got it from that he opened the attachment and he sheepishly identified a female co-worker who as it turned out had been interested in dating me but I was already dating someone at the time. I look back at how stuff was set up in 1999–2000 and man, we were so trusting of the world then.

siruwastaken• 4 months ago

I'm probably showing my age here, but did these email worms largely die out due to spam filtering, or did the email programs just get better protections against viruses that made it more difficult to exploit? The only email "viruses" I have come accross today are actual humans accidentally replying "reply all" to a legitimate email.

jprjr_2• 4 months ago

The answer is yes, to all of it.

Email providers have better spam filtering, some have strict rules about attaching any kind of executable code to an email (as in - you just can't).

Email clients are always getting updated, stricter about validating content before showing it, etc.

encom2• 4 months ago

And the internet stopped using Outlook Express.

buserror• 4 months ago

I got fired off pair.com because I had a wildcard email, and was receiving (and to my credit, discarding) millions of emails... a day... on my personal domain. Whoops.

I still use my super optimized c++ email filter to this day, 25 years later. Beats anything else I ever tried.

Blackholing My Email

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