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Comment by alfiedotwtf | Hacker News Reader

This.

Can we please kill the idea of "safe email" forever. Email leaks like a sieve. In fact, It would be interesting to see if the Carbon Copy (CC:) feature of email violates GDPR.

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Don't even get me started on domain spoofing.

I get so much junk every day due to bounce backs of people spoofing my domain to send junk.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC have done (and can do) nothing to help.

Email is broken, and this, sadly, is the price we pay for the federation it provides for a technology of its age.

Are you sure your server is correctly configured? I host my own server on a custom domain and while I do receive a non-negligible amount of spam I don't think I've ever noticed my domain being spoofed.

>SPF, DKIM and DMARC have done (and can do) nothing to help.

Isn't that precisely what these technologies are supposed to help? Why do you say that they can't do anything?

Sadly, as the other commenter has pointed out, they rely on the recipient server understanding them.

A lot of the fails I get are due to non-existent recipients, full mailboxes and some that detect it as spam end up replying (to me) just to tell me that they've detected it as spam (which I know already, and would prefer they didn't aggravate the issue by replying).

Bear in mind, I'm not talking about recieving spam directly (I get almost none) I'm talking about "back scatter" from innocent (but perhaps poorly configured) mail servers telling me they couldn't or wouldn't deliver "my" email.

This all goes to randomly generated addresses at my domain (which the spammers using my domain are generating), which I receive at my catch-all and may have to consider disabling, while ensuring my mail server doesn't also notify them that it didn't deliver their bounce back (otherwise I'm perpetuating the issue) all at the risk of losing legitimate emails if they're miss-spelt etc.

You are right that they are designed to prevent spoofing. The problem is that the recipient server needs to be configured to use it and not all servers do, for reasons spanning false positives to ignorance. So if you have a fairly old or known domain you will get non trivial amounts of backscatter from spoofed email being sent to invalid or otherwise rejected addresses.

100% agree. I remember a friend who typed in SMTP commands to send his dad a Christmas email from santa@northpole.com.

There are alternatives, they just haven't caught on as an email replacement. For example, I suspect the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) can do everything email can do, and it supports E2E encryption. XMPP addresses would still be exposed, as any messaging needs the message routing information decryptable by the server, but much better that email.

    > telnet mailserver.com 25
    HELO me
    MAIL FROM: santa@northpole.com
    RCPT TO: friends@dad.com
    DATA
    You've been a good boy.
    Santa
    .

Syntax error.

Good call, needs more colons.

Spoofing email is trivial but it's also usually trivial to detect, at least if the real provider uses modern technologies like SPF, DKIM and DMARC. I can easily forge an SMTP message from sjobs@apple.com and send it from my computer but it'll be considered junk by any mail service worth using.

The feature itself obviously doesn't (there's many uses of it where sharing the information is intended and legal, e.g. CC-ing multiple people involved with the same thing and knowing each other so it is clear everyone has seen it), but using it wrong can be a violation (e.g. CC-ing all your customers, who have no need to know about each other)

Three things:

1. Nothing is ever absolutely safe. Everything can leak at some point or another be it only because someone whipped their phone out and took a picture of the screen.

2. Just because it can not be made 100% safe, doesn't mean no efforts should be undertaken to push things in that direction.

3. Despite being well-spirited, DGPR is a retarded piece of legislation. Bested only by the EU cookie law.

> 3. Despite being well-spirited, DGPR is a retarded piece of legislation.

Why? As someone (currently) in the EU I'm quite happy with it.

In regards to 3. why exactly is not using CC for mailing lists "retarded" (very poor choice of words by the way). Just because I'm on a mailing list doesn't mean everyone in that mailing list should see my mail address and the fact that I'm subscribed. That is exactly what BCC is for so why not use it?

Eh? Nobody mentioned mailing lists except you. The guy who brought up GDPR was suggesting that the CC feature in itself might be a GDPR violation. You, on the other hand, are talking about a specific use of CC that people broadly agree is wrong, but presenting that as if it's the same thing as what the first guy said.

This is like somebody calling for a law that bans all cars, someone else calling that retarded, and you coming along and saying Why exactly is it retarded not to drive on the pavements? That's what roads are for!

Well it clearly depends on how you use the CC feature, most of the complains about CC have been in regards to mailing lists as that's where obviously unwanted information leaks happen.

"the CC feature in itself might be a GDPR violation" is a, to use your words, "retarded" idea. For starters you can still send emails internally, perfectly fine to use CC there. Also I'm sure there are some legitimate interest cases where CC instead of BCC makes sense too.

This is classic GDPR fear mongering and laziness.

> "the CC feature in itself might be a GDPR violation" is a, to use your words, "retarded" idea

Well, yes, I agree.

> This is classic GDPR fear mongering

Well, no. The person who suggested that it's a violation is anti-email, not anti-GDPR; it's implicit that they think it would be a good thing if the CC feature were inherently illegal.

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