Slashdot Mirror
Hotmail vs Goodmail
As you hear words like "Hotmail" and "AOL", you may be tempted to think this doesn't affect you if you've outgrown those companies, but I think that's a mistake. First of all, if you think you might ever run a business that publishes an e-mail newsletter, you'll have to worry that your mail might be blocked unless you pay to unblock it. Second, even if you're only a subscriber to a company's newsletter and you're not worried about filters on your e-mail address, the company publishing the newsletter has to spend time and resources getting their mails unblocked that they send to other people, time that could be otherwise spent improving their services. Third, even if you're not on the Internet at all, in a real sense it affects the kind of world we all live in, if the wealthy are able to communicate with their listeners more easily than everyone else (that gap has always existed, but the Internet narrowed it, and then unblocking-mail fees widened it a little). If the Republican National Committee can get their mail out and MoveOn.org can't, then that could influence elections, and could affect your life even if you're an Iraqi peasant goat farmer who hasn't updated his blog in weeks. And of course what Microsoft and AOL do, sets a precedent for what other companies can get away with -- so every anecdote about boneheaded mail filtering that you hear about, is potentially significant if it could become the norm.
I wasn't thinking about this when I wrote to Hotmail in 2006 about their users missing our e-mails because of the filter blocking them as "spam", as I jumped through some hoops before talking to a human. But the mentality of the people that I talked to seemed to be that "non-paying sender" and "spammer" were more or less equivalent. I explained that we only send mail to people who request it, we verify all new subscriptions, and every message contains an unsubscribe link. Hotmail replied, "The filters are there for the protection of hotmail subscribers. The Junk Mail Reporting program isn't in place to help you circumvent those filters... I recommend you do what you can on your end to educate your subscribers, keep your mailing lists up to date and follow the other guidelines for senders on the postmaster.msn.com site and don't expect our junkmail filters to be modified." Call me a dreamer, but I thought the whole point of having humans in the loop was that if the filter is making a mistake, you can modify it.
(Many people have suggested that I publish via RSS instead of e-mail. For me the problem with that is that our newsletter is used to send out the location of new sites for getting around blocking software, so that by the time the last sites have gotten blocked in most places, the new ones are being mailed out. As long as people can access their e-mail accounts, they can get the new site announcements. But if we used an RSS feed instead of e-mail, then blocking software companies would just block our RSS feed. And besides, even a normal newsletter publisher would lose most of their existing subscribers if they told everybody that they had to switch over to RSS to receive the newsletter in the future. Is it right that they should have to pay that penalty just because an ISP is falsely labeling their mail as spam?)
The $1,400 "fee" that you pay to help get your mail unblocked at Hotmail's servers, is to a third-party company called Sender Score Certified, formerly known as Bonded Sender, whose certifications are used by Hotmail. I didn't think I could get anywhere discussing with them the ethics of charging people to unblock their mail as spam, so instead I asked them, what would happen if someone forked over the cash and then their enemies started filing phony "spam" complaints against them, hoping to get their certification revoked? I think this is an important question for any spam policing system, but unfortunately it usually puts people on the defensive, because there's no real answer -- if you accept spam complaints, then you allow crackpots to do damage, and if you don't accept spam complaints, how do you know if a client is spamming? Bonded Sender's rep replied, "Do you really have that many enemies? If you are running a true 'non-profit', who is that mad at you? Maybe finding this out should be a little higher on the agenda. Where is the 'peace' in Peace Fire?" I asked the same question again, and eventually he said that complaints were based on SpamCop complaints -- a system known for being set up so that anyone could report anyone as a "spammer" without proof -- and that each such complaint would cause $20 to be depleted from your bond, and once it was all gone, you'd lose your certification.
"After reading all of your emails you have sent me," he continued, "it seems that you aren't really trying to find a solution to anything. You are mainly interested in pointing out flaws in programs and letting me know about how people don't like you." Actually I don't think I have enough enemies to cause me serious problems, but I'm working on it! I aspire someday to reach the level of notoriety achieved by groups like MoveOn.org, who does have enough enemies that if systems like Hotmail's were widely deployed, MoveOn would have to worry about militants falsely reporting their mails as spam in order to cost them money and/or get them blacklisted. That's the other basic problem with certification systems: they don't just favor the wealthy, they also favor the non-controversial. Do we really want an Internet where everyone has to be careful about who they offend, because anyone could get them listed as a spammer? I mean, that would be like having a free online encyclopedia where anyone could edit your bio and say that you killed someone!
Is it legal to block someone's mail as spam until they pay you money? Whoah, before I even use the l-word, I'd better insert a disclaimer. No, not that disclaimer. Nobody could possibly think that I was a lawyer after I filed motions in court with the pages stuck together to prove that judges weren't really reading them, unless I had some kind of career death wish. The disclaimer is that at least from my own experiences suing spammers, the law is whatever the judge wants it to be. Some judges say you can sue spammers out-of-state, and some say you can't. Some of them say you can sue in Small Claims only if you've lost money, and some say you can sue for damages even if you haven't lost anything. Some of them say a non-lawyer is allowed to represent their own corporation in court, and some say no. If judges don't even agree on the basic rules, good luck getting a legal consensus on a more abstract issue. Asking objectively if deliberately blocking non-spam e-mail is "legal" is like asking "Do apples taste good?"
But as a general rule, I think courts take a dim view of systematically publishing false statements about someone to try and get them to pay you off in order to stop. Unless you're a spammer, every time Hotmail labels one of your messages as "Junk Mail", they're publishing something untrue about you (at least to everyone who sees the message labeled as junk), and if you've brought it to their attention, then they may agree the statement is untrue but they go on making it anyway. In libel law, liability is partly determined by how much someone has been harmed by the false statements about them; in the case of mail being blocked as "Junk Mail", the harm is about as direct as possible, since because it was falsely labeled as spam, most users will never see it. This is why I think people who say "Hotmail/AOL/Yahoo can do whatever they want with their private network" are missing the point. If I used my own "private network" to publish a subscription service that people use to find out the names of new convicted felons in their neighborhood so that they can avoid doing business with those people, would you have no objection if I "accidentally" included your name on the list, but promised to review your situation for one low fee of $1,400?
There was a time in the late '90's when if Microsoft had said they were going to be blocking non-partner e-mails as "junk mail" unless senders paid a $1,400 "fee" to get unblocked, Congress would have hauled up Bill Gates and given him a good wedgie and told him to cut it out. But these days the Department of Justice doesn't have time to worry about other people's lost e-mail when they can't even lose their own e-mails properly.
All this happened at about the same time Goodmail was first attracting controversy for charging senders a quarter penny per message to bypass AOL's spam filters. When the EFF registered DearAOL.com to call attention to the issue (now defunct, but the Wayback Machine saved a snapshot), I hopefully registered DearHotmail.com in case any anyone wanted to use that example as well, but nothing ever coalesced around that. Meanwhile, some random mis-fire seems to have cancelled out some other random mis-fire, and Hotmail is apparently no longer blocking my mail, at least until this article gets published.
As far as I can tell, the only reason Hotmail got off scott-free and AOL/Goodmail didn't, was that Hotmail snuck their system in quietly, while AOL and Goodmail announced their partnership with great fanfare, apparently overestimating the extent to which e-mail publishers would greet them as liberators. This doesn't reflect very well on the outrage grapevine, people.
But the lesson took -- when Goodmail recently announced their partnership with four more e-mail providers, Goodmail featured a press release on their own site, but of the four ISPs, Verizon was the only one issued their own press release. Apparently the other three saw what happened with AOL/Hotmail and got the message.
You didn't ask, but my own idea for an anti-spam system would be to follow a protocol such that when you reply to a list server to confirm your subscription, the reply goes to an address like:
list-peacefire-confirm-481534893-sender=bennett=peacefire.org@mailserver.com
When you send that reply from your Hotmail account, Hotmail would see the "sender=bennett=peacefire.org" part of the address you're replying to, and recognize that to mean that you want to receive future messages sent from bennett - at - peacefire.org. So future messages from that address would be weighted not to be blocked as spam for that user. It wouldn't do anything to unblock person-to-person messages that get blocked as spam, but those are not mis-blocked as often as legitimate newsletters are, and this method would give newsletter publishers a way to get whitelisted at the same time that the user confirms their subscription. It wouldn't be perfect, since if the user then unsubscribes from the newsletter, but bennett - at - peacefire.org is a jerk and continues to send them mail, that mail would still get through because the Hotmail filter for that user still "remembers" that they confirmed their subscription, and doesn't know that they unsubscribed. However, the vast majority of nuisance spam comes from people you've never heard of, not from people whose newsletters you signed up for and then continued to send you mail after you unsubbed.
Or, suppose you're Amazon and you send mail to millions of users from orders@amazon.com, but you don't want everyone to have that address whitelisted because then a spammer could use the address "orders@amazon.com" to spam millions of people, hoping it would get through the filter of anyone who's an Amazon customer. So in that case people could confirm by replying to:
list-peacefire-confirm-481534893-sender=orders=amazon.com&senderip=72.21.203.1@mailserver.com
When the user sent their reply to that address, Hotmail would parse out the "sender=orders=amazon.com" part and the "senderip=72.21.203.1" part, and whitelist future mails from that address that come only from that IP.
I like this idea because it treats everyone equally, regardless of wealth or popularity, as long as they confirm subscriptions to their newsletter (which is regarded as good mailing list hygiene anyway). On the other hand, if you prefer filtering systems that work better for people who are rich and never offend anybody, then you'll be pleased to know that those seem to be winning.
Use Gmail
When a client complains that his/her site gets suspended due to his/her non receipt of invoice notifier/renewal email in his/her hotmail/dugamail/omegamail/anymail account due to these companies' "policies", i explain the situation in detail and advise them to acquire a more usable and reliable email account from elsewhere.
hotmail lost many users due to that over 4 years.
Read radical news here
Well shit, If your newsletter reads anything like your post, I'd mark that as spam too, champ.
A "tax" of this kind could be a way around spam, but the Hotmail/Goodmail way has one fatal flaw: it's used as a profit center for the mail carrier. If the tax went to recipients of the spam, who are after all the real victims here, there could be an argument for initiating it. As it stands though, this is just another service-provider scam, a kind of subset of the hierarchical Internet.
No. Personally I think it's fraud, since you're telling and selling the customer one thing, then allowing people to bypass their own securty for a profit at the expense of it's end users.
"I find your ideas fascinating, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter"
But GMail has advertisments based on keywords of your email. Thats Evil Capitalism too. Why cant a company just pay millions of dollars to keep a good email service for free with no ways of them making money, just so people can use a non-ISP Email address, so they don't have to tell people that they changed email every couple of years, because I changed ISP, I want to tell people that I have changed Email every couple of years because I decided to move from one email service to an other....
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
All those chain letters I sent to avoid making hotmail a paid service and so many people dismissed them, they even regarded it as a hoax! I am so dissapointed....
and was found slumped dead over a toilet.
Did you even read the first paragraph of the article?
It's not about YOU using it, SOMEONE uses it, maybe they have their account there from before they knew better, or maybe they do it just to piss you off, whatever the cause, if you're sending out a newsletter, or a payment receipt, or responding to a craigslist ad, or use a mialing list, or whatever you're doing, and you're on the "spam" list, your email might never see your customer/client/whatever. If you don't make money online, or if you don't do anything that involves mass mailings, then maybe it doesn't affect you directly, but the precedent is still there. Rights, even customer rights, aren't just about YOU, they're about everybody.
*steps off the soapbox*
Eternity is a time bomb.
I've used hotmail and yahoo since college at least 8 years. In the last year or so I've switched to gmail. Funny for the very reason mentioned (spam) I never use yahoo, nor hotmail for personal mail because there spam filter is iffy at best, not to mention the fact that they produce there own spam in an attempted to advertise their products. So they can choose to propagate spam but where is it going to get them.
Google, OTOH, deliverers everything, and does a 99%+ accurate job of putting spam in the spam folder, and e-mail in my inbox. Once I was able to accurately see all my e-mail, I was able to kill a very old address that wasn't part of my personal domain, but forwarded through it, that was generating up to 500 spam messages a day. I wasn't aware how bad it had gotten due to the first named ISPs hiding the problem, rather than showing me what all my e-mail looked like. Fond as I was of this address, when it becomes this kind of problem, even good memories of my first e-mail and early Internet days has to go. Google makes this possible, all this for free!
All things considered, I'm sure Google would love to take away all of Hotmail's customers, and they'll do it by providing better service at an equal or better price.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Do you still see those adds if you use a POP3 e-mail client such as Outlook/Outlook Express/Thunderbird to receive and handle your e-mails locally?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You just have to learn from the spam pros and randomize your newsletters to make them look legitimate.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
He's still around? Seems this time he's being a whiny little crybaby that a company that provides a service for "free" to customers is allowing spammers to send mail to their accounts so long as said spammers pay for the privilege. Boo fucking Hoo. Other than looking at some ads, the service isn't costing you anything at all. If you don't like the ads, or don't like the company behind the service allowing spammers to pay (which helps pay for the infrastructure) to bypass the spam filters, then don't use the damned services.
It really isn't that hard to comprehend. You are not entitled to free email service. You'll use what is available, roll your own, or fucking deal with it. Whining about it will not solve your problem.
bork bork bork!
You've had problems with Hotmail and MAPS before when you hosted in the same IP range as spammers. You had been offered solutions before (moving IP) but didn't want to. You've sued spammers and have been promoting your anti-spam idea & thoughts for years, but never bothered to implement them.
So frankly this comes off as sour grapes again on your part. The idea that you have some god given right to use space on hotmails (or anyone else's) servers, without ever addressing what causes reporters to think your mail is spam in the first place.
When using Apple Mail I have never seen an ad anywhere.
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum. --Arthur C. Clarke
The ads aren't inserted in the messages, they're part of the Gmail web interface. They're not even overly intrusive, they just hang out in their own ad area and aren't difficult to ignore. So, to answer your question, you won't see the ads if using a local app to handle your mail.
Other 'free' mailing services doesn't have a 'price tag' does not mean they'll do it for free.
Why can't spam filters filter out every permutation of v1@gra, or viagra. I'm surprised what still gets through sometimes.
Instead they should simply refuse to unblock spam, period.
Yes, that means that newsletters like this would not get through.
I have a Phone at home. If some insane lunatic started up the idea of calling all his friends having them call all of their friends, as a means of sending out important news, I would laugh at him.
I also laugh at anyone, even this 'nice' newsletter that actually thinks EMAIL is an apropriate means of obtaining this information.
RSS is one way to go.
ANOTHER way to go is messageboard style.
There are still more ways to send out information. You can take an applet that you give to your subscribers that does something similar to hat phone idea does. While it does not work on a phone, it would work on the internet.
But the IMMENSE problem of spam pretty much means that NO, NEWSLETTERS ARE NOT APPROPRIATE FOR EMAIL.
Find another solution, the one you are trying is causing huge problems for the interent. It is NOT our job to help you perpetuate a BAD idea, no matter how much your personal non-profit benefits from the bad idea.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
A core principle in figuring out any kind of shady shenanigans is to follow the money. The problem with Goodmail, and with Microsoft's pay-to-play fee, is that the money is being paid to the wrong party. Paying the fee to the mailbox-hosting ISP cannot help but create a corrupting conflict of interest, making this a bribe. Nasty spam will be allowed through if the vendor has the $$$ to pay, and legitimate bulk mail that people have opted into will be blocked, if the news letter is not coming from a moneyed source.
Instead, consider a P2P scheme where the postage is paid directly from the sender to the receiver, where the receiver themselves can white-list a sender as not having to pay. It would produce these kinds of effects:
There's a bunch of interesting things that can be done with this model:
Regarding mailing list subscriptions, that's not an entirely unreasonable suggestion, though it's really not much more than auto-whitelisting. However, you'd need to address the:
m @sending.domain.com>
From: "Sexy Chick" <confirm-12312312-from=mailouts=sending.domain.co
Reply for an exciting photo!
issue. People are stupid. Enough spammers are not stupid that they will trick stupid people. People will demand to be protected from their stupidity, and the filters will go back in.
The ability to examine your mailer whitelist and remove things from it would help, mostly because this can be made as easy as clicking the "Junk" button. With a little agreement an un-whitelisting could even generate an automatic unsubscribe.
To actually be useful, such a scheme would have to be combined with a sender verification system like SPF or DomainKeys. Lack of any sending server verification is basically a waste of time (spammers will just start mailbombing with mailing list sender addresses) and IP-based verification is way too inflexible.
Your biggest problem is that it's basically limited to being useful for mailing lists and perhaps regular correspondants. It also doesn't address ensuring that the confirmation message gets there in the first place (good luck figuring out how to do that!). Its limited scope means it's probably harder to get people to implement it, especially when they won't be making $1400 a pop for sender "approval" anymore.
why, yes, I think you did.
Let us say you have a business, and as part of that business, you send emails to your customers that sign up for it. Not spam, this is information your customers want from you.
Some of your customers use hotmail. Not hotmail wants to charge YOU 1400 dollars to get through there system. That's a problem. It's extortion, it's being a bad internet neighbor, and it breaks the basic premise of email;which may be ok, If when someone signs up for the free email gets clear notification that someone might have to pay 1400 dollars to get an email to them.
They no it's wrong and thats why they try to hide this information from everybody but the person the want to extort.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yes they do, but the big difference as I see it is that they are up-front about it.
Google: We give you free e-mail, with spam filtering in exchange for advertisements on the side bar.
Hotmail: ditto, oh, and we let pay for spam through too, but we didn't say that.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
But GMail has advertisments based on keywords of your email.
Not if you use POP to get your GMail rather than their web interface.
Thats Evil Capitalism too.
Despite the impression you could easily get from reading Slashdot, most of us don't actually dislike capitalism (though some of us might not realize as much). In reality, a closer reading of the more well-written Slashrants on the subject reveals that most of us actually object to corporate protectionism and profit-before-humans laws in general.
Hey, I have a good job, my boss lets me read Slashdot, I make enough to afford plenty of toys. I can thank capitalism in general for most of that (as opposed to communism, where I honestly don't even see the point of getting up every morning to go to work). I can't, however, overlook the fact that we have people punished with paying basically their life's savings for sharing music, while companies like the former Union Carbide can kill people and walk away with a slap on the wrist; You or I risk imprisonment for letting a website know it has a security flaw, while Sony distributes rootkits and only basically had to say "oops, sorry, our bad"; We get stiffer sentences for dosing ourselves with THC than Merck gets for falsifying clinical trial data on COX2 inhibitors leading to numerous premature deaths.
Why cant a company just pay millions of dollars to keep a good email service for free
If you think they don't get anything out of "giving" us all those "free" email accounts, I have a bridge for sale...
As the most obvious, they get massive amounts of personal information about us - Even if you give completely fake info to sign up, they can reconstruct a given user's social network better than that user can. And although GMail lets you use POP, as you mention, they do indeed show targetted ads to the webmail-using majority of their viewers. And don't discount "brand loyalty" through laziness. Already at MSN, as your default IE homepage? Well, may as well use Microsoft's search, and get a free Live account.
Your comments are highly subjective. Not everyone respects Google/Gmail (I do, though I don't post my Gmail accounts in public forums). Additionally, you only get an AOL email address with an AOL account which, ostensibly, you pay for, it's not free to sign up. Though if it were, for just an email address, I would still rank it below Hotmail. You do however get a free AIM email account, if I remember correctly.
.NET.
Again, as I said, people have reasons for keeping around Hotmail and Yahoo accounts. Could be business reasons, maybe they're good for site registrations that require a live email address (what I do), there's many reasons, and a blanket statement for an issue clearly affecting people does nothing to solve the problem.
In response to your hypothetical, yes, I'd at least look at the resume, a legacy email account is not a reason to disqualify a perfectly suitable candidate, unless they also code
Eternity is a time bomb.
About the idea of whitelisting based on subscribing through an email reply or what not (and forgetting about at times when the user confirms via a URL link) instead of restricting to a specific email server like so:m azon.com&senderip=72.21.203.1@mailserver.com"
p eacefire.org@mailserver.com"
:)
"list-peacefire-confirm-481534893-sender=orders=a
Why not leave it at your original format of:
"list-peacefire-confirm-481534893-sender=bennett=
And have the receiving email service/network verify where the emails are coming from using SPF and/or similar ideas instead of specificially restricting to an IP address. Because after all we aren't guaranteed IP addresses for life.
This space is not for rent.
As you mention, SPF, DomainKeys, or a similar scheme is the only way to verify header information. The "article" seems to not realize that IP addresses can be spoofed just as easily as e-mail addresses.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Hotmail's blocking people who don't pay. No one's proposed blocking people who don't use goodmail; they've proposed whitelisting people who do.
Hotmail's deliverability is unreliable even when you're "clean", so I'd just write it off; do not use hotmail for business services, and do not accept hotmail addresses for anything where you need reliable delivery.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
My experience is that Bonded Spammer is essentially dead. If you have Spam Assassin set to tag Bonded Spammer mail, you'll get items in X-Spam-Status like "RCVD_IN_BSP_TRUSTED". I have Firefox set to dump all those into the Bonded Spammer folder. The last e-mail to come in with that tag was in January 2007. I used to get more Bonded Spammer e-mails back in 2004 and 2005, but in 2006 it tapered off, and now it seems to be gone.
Is anyone else still seeing that junk?
Hotmail acct that gets (in a 30 day period) 1800 messages delivered to the inbox (all spam, the only reason the account is still around is because of being registered at a specific company's external career site that won't change email addy's) and 8 Spam messages filtered....
Seems it doesn't work no matter how you slice it. Also, of those 8 spam messages, one of them is a newsletter I subscribed to that gets through to the inbox ~50% of the time.
Compare that to my double buffered gmail (one acct to give out, one I actually use with the given out accts inbox forwarded to it). I get all the messages I'm looking for, and for the life of the account I have 2 spam messages (life = 6 months so far).
Answer, hotmail/filtering sucks, esp pay to play. Gmail can somehow magically figure out I'm not interested in p3n1s p!llz
hmm.. just my 2 cents.
My Babylon
I'm not certain but the "Evil Capitalism" might have been sarcasm.
In any case, I agree with your statements more than not. Corporations face much weaker punishments than individuals do, at least in this country.
Google doesn't really hide the fact that it aggregates your data. It makes money off of the statistics your emails contributes to the whole, it all feeds back into their advertising, it's how they built their fortune as a company (advertising, not email).
Eternity is a time bomb.
of charging is a bad idea, is just to think what would happen if everybody used.
I might run a moderately successful newsletter and I find it's blocked by host x.
So I pay host a $10 (I'll pretend this is cheap).
Now all my users will get their newletter - yay.
Then users on host b report their mail isn't showing up - so I pay out another $10.
Then users on host c etc etc.
Compounding this issue is the more hosts you pay, the more the others will want to be paid etc etc
I assume this would eventually lead to a situation where you'd pay off as many hosts as you can afford (in descending order of popularity/cost) until you could still just make a profit.
New users signing up, would be asked to try to use an email account you'd paid protection on, so you know you'd be able to get your mail to them. This I'd assume would lead to a gradual migration of end users to the provider that had collected the most protection money (and therefore you were more likely to get the majority of your email in).
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
This is where I stopped reading. SpamCop requires proof in the form of the spam email itself. What other proof of spamminess could there be?
1/4 cent...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The answer to this is simple... computers are stupid. In order to block every variation of viagra, the creator of the filter has to type in (viagra|v1@gra|vi@gra|\/1@gra|etc|etc|.......) and on and on. There are some shortcuts to make it slightly simpler but, they can't use them to much before it starts marking Virginia as spam. The problem is, spammers read this list and go "Oh, they missed \/.1@gra so, we'll use this. So, the messages get through until the creator of the filter adds that version. Then the spammer reads the new filter, finds another that they missed and change their spam to get through. Repeat until end of time.
The only thing I can see as a solution to this, is for the Internet to change to where every computer has a unique ID that is tied to the hardware and that this is hard wired to sending email. That way, when a computer starts sending spam, it can be blacklisted. If it is the actual spammer, their blacklisted until they buy a new network card, at minimum. The reason that spammers are successful is it's currently so cheap to send spam. If they start having to buy new hardware every day they want to spam, the cost goes up significantly. If it's an infected botnet computer, they remain blacklisted until they confirm their computer has been cleaned of the viruses.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Aside from that, I think it is fair to say that email is pretty much something that is useless for any commercial application and pointless for something like a "newsletter". The spam vs. ham ratio has gotten to about 1000 to 1 these days, even if they aren't directly seeing it. And that is part of the problem.
It is assumed to be acceptable for an ISP to block "spam". It is assumed to be OK for anyone to get in the way of mail to a recipient to save them from receiving the torrent of spam that they would otherwise be subjected to. False positives are considered to be something that just happens. None of the agents preventing delivery of mail offer any notification to the user that mail may be waiting for them in the "bulk" or "spam" folder, nor offer any recourse if the mail is simply deleted without delivery.
With that in mind, email is suitable for something for friends and family only. If you are trying to send a receipt to someone for an online purchase, such email is commonly considered to be "commercial" which equates to "spam" in some people's minds. Outlook by default takes anything from sales@abcdef.com and puts it into the deleted items folder, just confirming the view that anything related to "sales" must be spam.
Email is pointless for any commercial use. Companies trying to resurrect email as a viable communications medium are starting to notice this. Sure, pay to send email and some percentage of your customers won't have your email blocked. What percentage? 10%? This means you need to budget tens of thousands of dollars for "email protection" if you are going to go this way.
Face it, email is pointless and unreliable. You will never know if your email is being blocked. You can't tell a complaining customer that never got their receipt that you will "fix" this somehow. It is broken and you need to figure out a different delivery mechanism.
RSS: Because everyone hates spammy "newsletters" that have a veneer of content and a morass of advertising. A feed is the correct way for a site owner to communicate with users.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Nope. You only see the ads in the web interface.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Or, suppose you're Amazon and you send mail to millions of users from orders@amazon.com, but you don't want everyone to have that address whitelisted because then a spammer could use the address "orders@amazon.com" to spam millions of people, hoping it would get through the filter of anyone who's an Amazon customer.
Spammers can't forge a MAIL FROM of "orders@amazon.com" for recipients that check SPF. Decent spam filters let users whitelist emails/domains. With decent anti-forgery like SPF and DKIM, the problem is solved for the immediate future.
PS. For nitpickers who note that the amazon.com sender policy has a default result of "neutral" instead of "fail", spam filters (like mine) that track reputation of each mailfrom.domain:SPFresult pair independently eventually start rejecting amazon.com:neutral anyway.
It's basically related to upload/download ratios.
It assumes any user with a good u/d gets a white listed.
Doesn't matter who they are, or credentials or anything like that and it's much much cheaper. Although Money is the only motivator against spammers. You need to make it unprofitable. So people need to pay you to receive an email! You pay then back with a reply.
Although things like legitimate Mailing lists have a special white list bypass that the receiver must open up.
Initially I am looking to replace some components in Q Mail or build some POP3 relay that deals with this.
I was thinking of putting it on maildr.com or unmailable.com
Anyone want to help?
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
I've actually spoofed a "from" header myself. :) However, I assume that there are easily accessible systems that allow you to easily spoof the original IP address. All your PC has to do (in theory, I've never tried it) is pretend like it's passing along an e-mail from the IP address you want to spoof. That does mean your IP address will show up in the stream, but it will still look like the "sender" IP address is the one you want it to look like.
I (perhaps obviously) know nothing about "source IP filters". Do they somehow detect that it makes no sense for IP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to be forwarding e-mail from IP yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I wrote to Hotmail in 2006 about their users missing our e-mails because of the filter blocking them as "spam", [...] they said they knew it wasn't spam, but they told me several times they would not even talk about unblocking it unless I paid the $1,400.
That's funny. I contacted Hotmail about an identical filtering issue, also in 2006. There was no mention dollars. They did want to make sure my list was opt-in. They also asked me to join a feedback loop where list messages that hotmail members mark as spam are stripped of their identifying information and returned so I can identify problems with my system where unintended recipients have slipped in.
I did find it difficult to get through to folks who could help, but once I reached those folks I found them to be cordial and helpful.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
First of all, the stakeholders in any organization WANT newsletters. If you had a financial or otherwise stake in some organization you'd want to see what they're up to. You wouldn't want to have to dig for the info either - newsletters deliver the information you want, optimized just for you, on a silver platter.
Secondly, most newsletters are opt-in or double opt-in only. That means people ask for them and go to the trouble of double opting for them. If there is a great abundance of newletters out there then by simple deduction it follows that a great number of people want newsletters.
Billing for service (and for backbone usage) is coming, and coming fast from a thousand different directions.
The question you should be asking is this: How much would email and internet access have to cost for you to stop using it.
Because the answer is scary. And the big corporations know it.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Now if the server in question is such a dick as to demand you, the sender, pay a fee to have the mail delivered to users on said server's system... too bad for the users on that system. You've done your part; you delivered the mail you promised you would send them. It's their e-mail service that screwed up, and they should complain to that service provider or find a new one.
So in summary, is Hotmail a dick for doing this? Absolutely. Is it their right to be a dick? Absolutely. It's also each Hotmail user's right to go elsewhere if they don't like the service (or lack thereof, since not all of their e-mail is being delivered to them) they're receiving.
Truckin like the Doo-Dah man...
So if Microsoft is filtering out spam so aggressively with Hotmail, then how come every time I check my Hotmail account (which is all of about once per month), the address of which I have never publicized or otherwise given out, there is always 4-5 solid pages of spam.
Either they're not filtering as much as they pretend to, or the "fee" isn't deterring spammers at all... either way, it isn't working.
At least Gmail's spam filters work most of the time...
Who are you to tell me what I want to use my email account for? If I want to receive newsletters, are you saying I cannot? The problem is not solved by simply saying, "Oh, no more newsletters."
"I don't care one whit for simplicity on this side of complexity, but would give my life for the simplicity on the far side of complexity."
[Ego]out
You've apparently never worked in an office or had kids in a school/soccer team/cub scout pack/etc that made use of a phone tree then...
Hi, Dr. Smith-
I just wanted to write you to let you know that I really enjoyed the article you wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine about the side effects of Cialis, Viagra, and Levitra. It turns out a patient of mine experienced debilitating nausea while on Levitra, so I prescribed Viagra in its place, as you recommend.
In addition, I thought you might be interested to know that this patient suffers from Raynaud's disease, and he reported a 50% reduction in the frequency of his attacks after switching from Levitra to Viagra. Curious, I found an article in PubMed detailing this phenomenon and I thought I'd pass it along to you.
I hope your knee is healing up nicely, I'm sure you can't wait to get back on the tennis court.
Best Regards,
Dr. Gerald Jones SpamAssassin scored it -0.9, which is what I would expect. This is despite the "DRUGS_ERECTILE" rule firing.
The spam filter that you would design would reject the message, and that would be an obvious false positive.
Better luck next time, my friend.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
This article gave me an idea: A policy service like postgrey but to handle mail quotas per sender's ip. If you set your policy to a default of 10 mails per (unknown) sender by default, on their 11th they get a "45X Daily Mail Quota exceeded, please try again tomorrow".
This service should come with an easy to use interface to tweak quotas per sender's IP so you can allow all these mail-lists or high volume senders.
gotta go, need to call my patent lawyer...
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
I get newsletters all the time that I chose not to opt-in or specifically opt-ed out. Most newsletters aren't worth the paper they're printed on, financial or otherwise. If it is that important to me I check up on it on a regular basis.
But mainly all my parent post was to see if I could pull a negative Karma. I've been getting postive for so long I just want to see how much it'll take to get to drop.
-1 Troll. It's an improvment. I just wait for another Apple Fan boy circle jerk love fest articles and say something mean about Steve Job's mother or how much the iPhone sucks and people that buy it are mindless drones that should get me a lower score.
This is off topic, but I'd like to nominate "read on for more words" as the phrase of the day. I can see this replacing "after the jump" as being the new blog boilerplate.
Nice to know that Hotmail will only accept mail from Windows servers. With specific authorization from the ISP.
Rethinking email
[Disclosure: I work for Boxbe [boxbe.com], a market based solution to spam]
I commented on the previous Goodmail story but I'll say it again, it's all about control. Goodmail and Hotmail control who can and cannot get into your inbox. Not a good thing.
Using payment as a way to ensure messages get through is a viable solution. Most filtering techniques for spam have failed. For every new spam technique anti-spam software developers stop, several new techniques pop up. The financial incentives for spammers to continue doing what they are doing is very high. Thus, the arms race continues. You might have noticed, we're losing badly against spammers.
That said, the incentives for the Goodmail and Hotmail systems are all wrong. As mentioned above, the only people that will pay are big marketers. While this certainly cuts out true spammers (Viagra, Cialis, penny stocks, etc), it also cuts out you and me. The money collected ought to go to me, not my ISP. Worse, my ISP shouldn't control who can reach me and who can't.
To CmdrTaco's point, Boxbe has a very similar methodology for auto-whitelisting mailing list and recipients of mail that I send. We use an individualized code appended in the email sig file, thus ensuring that people that I email won't receive a challenge message. This solution works very well for me.
RandyI'm willing to bet my Karma (what Karma, right?) that Bennett Haselton is, himself, a spammer. I periodically stumble, to my dismay, across his ramblings posted here as front-page material. With most of them overly self-righteous and witchunty in nature, I think he has a little something to hide.
So, to keep things concise I'll simply list facts here:
- He delegitimizes spam-fighting cases by attempting to ridicule judges with his website, judgejokes.com. This is even more instrumental than it seems:
- It is registered by his censor-fighting organization, Peacefire. Because making fun of judges is totally a worthwhile project for an organization as such.
- It documents both his solicitation of other spammers, and lack of understanding of the law.
- He's worked on filter-circumvention software, which made news years ago. A direct quote from that site: "That software, Haselton and the IBB acknowledge, could have other uses here at home".
- He spams Slashdot with countless articles that could be summarized to 1-to-2 lines (and often are by comments shortly after being posted). A few of these are linked as related articles above.
- He takes huge issue any time that any of his emails aren't received. This article is evidence enough.
- And a few other things. I know I'm forgetting many. Anyone else want to step in?
Oh, and do yourself a favor, Bennett. Visit Web Pages That Suck to learn how not to design a webpage. I have yet to see one of your pages look even half-way professional -- which should be important to you if you really want Peacefire to catch on.Now commence the -1, Flamebait if you see fit. =D
Wait... the answer to a rhetorical question gets modded Informative?
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
Don't be too quick in telling your newsletter subscribers to move to Gmail, because while Google doesn't charge the sender on the inbound, they do however sell your customer out to the highest bidder. So, if you're sending a newsletter on custom auto-parts (hoping to possibly attract your reader to your website to purchase product) don't be surprised when Gmail hijacks your customer with a highly targeted ad from one of your competitors placed just to the right or your news letter copy.
Gmail Prediction - I'll tell you something Gmail will introduce someday, paid protection! - per email paid advertisement protection so your competitors ads can't bid on your customers. And I'm sure Google will optimize the fee by basing your protection fee based on the current market price of those bidding on the keywords within your message.
If you don't check your email for a month, they DELETE ALL OF YOUR EMAIL. So if you have an extended holiday, an unfortunate stay in the hospital, or have a broken computer for a month - they delete absolutely everything. Hard to believe, isn't it? Most geeks can't imagine not checking their email for a month, but lots of "normal" people can lose years of communication because of this policy.
Cuban Music MP3's - cuband.com
This story would be so much more interesting if Bennett wasn't an idiot. But then again, if he wasn't an idiot, there wouldn't be any story here.
Disclaimer: I've consulted for Goodmail, so I actually have some clue of what's going on here.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
All you ditto heads missed the point. You can use gmail, but this is about the receiving side not the sending side. It does you no good to have a nice mail client if your outgoing emails are getting blocked by hotmail and you cannot reach your customers or the members of your web-based political organization. So you say that hotmail wouldn't block the whole gmail domain, well they might (it could potentially be a HUGE income stream!). Regardless if you are emailing on behalf of an organization you're gonna want a domain, which gmail could handle for you. But when they start blocking info@society_for_prevention_of_cruelty_to_first_po sters.org until you pony up $1400 to hotmail, and $1400 to AOL, and $1000 to Lycos, and $1800 to bigfreeemailwebsite.com, then you are effectively censored.
so next time a spam article comes up instead of being the first person to say "Use gmail!" or the fourth person to say "ditto!" Try something new and novel. RTFA!!!
Personally I have this radical belief... I believe that I have these inalienable rights. I don't care if the censor is in Washington DC or Redmond, WA it's still censorship.
-- QED
Your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(X) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(X) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Haselton answered the question he asked in the first sentence with the the last sentence in the same paragraph! If Microsoft's misdeeds with Hotmail filtering are a validation of GoodMail's critics, then the obvious answer to his question is:
"No, we're not being too hard on GoodMail. We're not being hard enough on Microsoft and Hotmail."
I don't even need to read the unquoted part of TFA, do I?
...but only if the money collected goes into a fund used to pay out bounties on known spammers.
You're using her as bait, Master!
- we have configure our server with the SPF DNS entry
- we automatically remove email that return error while sending the email
- we do unsubscribe users that ask for it
- we have registered to their snds service: https://postmaster.live.com/snds/data.aspx and we are flaged in the green 95%+ of the time
I still think you can send a fairly large amount of emails without having to pay if you play by the rules.Recently a friend of mine sent me an email. When I replied, her email system blocked my email because it was from a g(oogle)mail address and apparently they believe all g(oogle)mail addresses are spam. In my opinion, if email providers refuse to reliably deliver emails, its time to move on to another email service provider. Not as if there isn't a million under the sun, many quality services are free and provide top of the line spam filters. Throughout the time I've been using g(oogle)mail, only once have I had to remove a trusted email from my spam folder, and never have I received spam in my inbox.
1. hotmail's mail servers are their private property. they get to choose what mail they want to accept, not you and not any other sender. if they want to block your mail or your newsletter, that's your tough luck. you have no say in it whatsoever. their server, their rules.
2. hotmail's customers, however, have a right to complain. if the mail service they are using or paying for is blocking legitimate mail that they want, then they should complain. ultimately, this probably means they should get themselves a mail service provider which doesn't block mail that they want, or at least takes reasonable action to minimise false-positives.
... then I don't want to RTFA - I don't think my life expectancy is that high :)
I run a newsletter for one type of craft that is popular among women over 50.
A lot of them are having a hard time understanding the concept of a double opt-in, let alone adding something to the whitelist. A lot of the users are simply not computer savvy, and there is nothing wrong with that.
On top of that, I run a message board in the same niche.
Last night, I received a spam complaint from Hotmail about a "reply notification" e-mail sent to one board member.
http://www.quiltingboard.com/posts/list/1408.page
That person has been a member of the board for months and posted several hundred messages on the board.
So I seriously doubt she decided that my board is spam all of the sudden, and then changed her mind (about 5 hours after I'd locked the account) and registered a new account so she could as why the old one isn't working.
Why did it happen? It's because she didn't add my sending address to a whitelist and one time Hotmail decided that my e-mail is spam and put it in the junk folder. And when she tried to empty her junk folder, she didn't notice that e-mail among a bunch of real spam. And so now, I have one more registered complaint with Hotmail.
Not a week goes by without me getting spam complaints from large providers via the feedback loop.
Is it my fault? No. Is it her fault? No.
Yet, I'm pretty sure that my deliverabiliy rate to Hotmail will go down because of the complaints.
THe big boys aren't trying to solve the spam problem. They are ty
Something is missing here in the conversations and the fact is that if the amount to circumvent the filters is only $1400, then consider this. The spammers are not going away because there is too much of a financial incentive for them to continue. This being said; assuming the spammer can make probably $5000-$10000 from a single client to send their junk out, this could be factored in as simply a "cost of doing business". Then with that said; your Inbox again becomes populated with the next pharmaceutical offering from another offshore entity. And with the usual careful crafting of the mail, it gets past even the advanced filter in Outlook or Thunderbird, and your left having to delete it anyway. Remember; it doesn't matter how much we talk about it to people, many still patronize these spammers clients and hence this cycle perpetuates. As long as the clients are willing to pay the spammers, that means they're getting a return on investment.
This to me is sort of promoting the spammers that are actually making a living at their chosen trade.
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