We experience a large number of fraudulent ecommerce orders using Tutanota email domains. I'm not shocked to think that this could be an example of an algorithm gone awry based on the signals it received.
Whether ISPs succeed in any way is an entirely different ballgame, but this is absolutely the job of the ISP, especially in their role of email provider. Its ability to properly discriminate and aggressively block or plonk messages isvery much one of the reasons people like gmail.
They aren't providing email in this example, as far as I can tell. They're providing internet access to an email service. Or they should be.
We invented the nanny state.
That said, full credit on the nanny dog, Staffordshire bull terriers are amazing with children.
I think this is talking about 3's adult content filter which is different and has existed for ages and has always been shit (I assume most people disable it).
It is encrypted. By design they have no idea what it is being used for. It would be very easy to set up a ring of pornography distributors using email (at least in the UK, in civilised countries they'd probably be put out of business by the open internet).
Modern legal systems usually limit criminal liability to individuals [1]. Companies engaging in acts of collective punishment (That goes for you too Cloudflare) should at least try to raise their ethical standards to those expected by International Law.
It's not an ISP, it's an email provider.
> Modern legal systems usually limit criminal liability to individuals [1]. Companies engaging in acts of collective punishment (That goes for you too Cloudflare) should at least try to raise their ethical standards to those expected by International Law.
There is no "criminal liability", and blocking malfeasants on the internet has always been a heuristic fight. If a service originates an extremely high rate of fraud versus legitimate uses, it's a good heuristic for fraud. It's a shame for legitimate users, but it's also how it's always worked.
And more generally minor (or self-hosted) MTA have always had that issue, it's not news that they get delivered less reliably than big "trusted" mail hosts, and that they can get blacklisted real fast.
It's a wall of incompetence.
Cloudflare are just technically not able to deliver what they pretend to. They profess to offer protection for vulnerable users of the internet who are service providers. In doing so they harm millions of other vulnerable users who are clients. They rob Peter to pay Paul, and then take a moral stand on Free Speech.
Free Speech is a two sided affair. The freedom to write/speak must be matched by the freedom to read/listen.
Cloudflare trample all over the latter and act like it's nothing... because "if you wanna make an omelet you gotta break some eggs". They simply kick the can down the road and so are hypocritical and grandiose.
Credit card companies have been doing this since day 1
Similar reason lots of US servers used to (? still do ?) block entire IP blocks representing large parts of Asia. If 1% of your legit traffic is coming from those blocks, but 95+% of abuse, brute-force, and exploit attempts, it's a no-brainer to just blackhole them, unless you're at such a huge scale that 1% of legit traffic is still a very large number in absolute terms.
If 90% of tutanota-orginated emails are fraudulent, tutanota is an excellent fraud indicator, even though it will block legitimate emails.
If 10% of gmail-originated emails are fraudulent, gmail is a terrible fraud indicator, even though it will let fraudulent emails pass through, possibly more than the count of fraudulent emails coming from tutanota.
I wonder why so many companies drag their feet when implementing actually useful anti-fraud measures (like supporting Verified-by-Visa) and instead block random email providers.
Most ecommerce merchants are non-technical, and utilise 3rd party platforms (Shopify, Bigcommerce etc) that in combination with their Payment Gateway don't support these systems.
I can safely say that every order my business has received with a Tutanota address has turned out to be fraud. It is a really strong indicator for a fraudulent transaction.
There are many other signals, but for some reason this is a really strong one.
We see a similar trend with Aleeas, and Simplelogin.
We still get fraud from Gmail and Outlook addresses, but it is picked up using other indicators, IP, IP owner, Shipping Address, phone number reachability, carrier, Payment Methods, name, useragent, "for lease" or "for sale" status of the delivery address etc etc...
Yet for some reason they're not already using gmail, meaning as far as frausters are concerned there is a benefit to using tutanota.
> and all you accomplished is that you inconvenienced legit Tutanota users.
No what you've accomplished is reduce tutanota fraud to 0, and inconvenienced frausters.
But that is hardly relevant.
The question is, does blocking Tutanota reduce total fraud, or does it just make fraudsters to move to a different email hoster and you end up with the same total fraud?
You don't just block tutanota, you block a big, long list of high-abuse email sources, periodically updated.
Then again, maybe I am overestimating fraudsters, and by blocking email hosts that make it too easy to sign up you can get rid of a significant chunk of them...
A lot of them are just stuffing stolen credit card numbers to try to find which ones still work, anyway, so they don't care about breaking into your system in particular, they just want to find any system that will let them attempt a charge. If they're finding enough of those using cheap or free anonymous accounts from low-credibility email address providers, they have no reason to spend more time or effort on it.
Blocking these providers doesn't mean you won't still see better-targeted fraud attempts, but it cuts down on a ton of the low-effort but high-volume automated crap—and that stuff can kill a merchant payment processing account in a weekend, if you're not pretty good at blocking it.
I guess marketing works on everyone, even online-fraudsters ;-)