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Comment by blendergeek | Hacker News Reader

I have this same problem with "obscure" .net domains. My text messages are silently dropped.

The only work around I found is to not include http://, just use the bare domain.

Personally, I find this behavior of my SMS provider reprehensible.

I ran into this recently even on Facebook Messenger. A friend of mine was hunting for a short domain name and I had a list of some three character .net and .org domains I recently had found that were available.

Cut and pasted the list and the message wouldn't send.

Narrowed it down to one. Typed just the bare domain. Wouldn't go through. (It was something incredibly benign like n17.org)

Couldn't find a history on that domain name for why it would have been filtered.

At least messenger responded with 'couldn't send message' but still no clue as to why... and it took me sending each domain name individually until I found the one that was failing the entire message.

If it was N26, that's a European bank so I could see similar domains being used in phishing scms.

>and it took me sending each domain name individually until I found the one that was failing the entire message.

A true hacker would have used binary search ;)

Or a distributed ElasticSearch

Is it reprehensible only when it impacts you or is it still reprehensible when it's blocking hundreds of spam messages a day you might otherwise be receiving?

Surely there are better ways to reduce spam than blocking entire TLDs? I also think it's the silent, unfixable nature that annoys most people. Email spam goes into your spam box, where you can still access it. You can mark email as not being spam. No such luck here

Email providers absolutely block email, its the edge cases that make your spam folder.

> its the edge cases that make your spam folder.

Well, from their perspective. Not from any reasonable perspective; I have a few obviously-spam emails in my gmail spam folder right now, but I've had plenty of problems with gmail refusing to deliver completely legitimate email to me.

If there was no filtering how many spammessages would you receive?

I suspect any more than you see

Who cares? The only things that make it into my spam folder are obvious spam. Meanwhile, messages from people I know personally aren't even delivered at all. There is no way to characterize this as reasonable or even acceptable. Google is using metrics that are not related to whether an email should be delivered.

They need to tune whatever they're doing down to the point that legitimate personal communication at least shows up in the spam folder. If a lot more spam shows up in the spam folder too, so what? A spam folder that contains mostly spam and also some misclassified personal messages is significantly better than a spam folder that contains nothing but spam because it automatically dropped your misclassified personal messages.

Yeah, there's a lot of spam out there. My employer's spam filtering software used to send out weekly statistics telling us what percentage of incoming e-mails (across the entire company) were spam. The spam percentage was remarkably constant from week to week: about 90% of all incoming e-mail was spam!

I deliberately set GMail to the lowest level of spam filtering they'll allow, and still only receive a couple of spam messages per month at most. They need to adjust their levels.

There are levels?

I run my own mail server and never silently drop any messages. I also have a catcha-all inbox and my primary email address is available publicly in many places (my website, git repos, bug trackers, ...). The amount of spam is really not that bad.

Those aren't silently dropped though, are they? The sending server is notified I think.

I should receive 100% of messages from numbers I message. If my carrier wants to helpfully filter my other messages, I should be able to opt out.

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