Blackholing My Email
johnsto.co.uk
johnsto.co.uk
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.
It inspires me to work on things that I'm passionate about just for fun. You never know what might come out of it!
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.
Incidentally, those emails are definitely from less-than-reputable (and in some proven cases North Korean) actors trying to get footholds into Western Companies! Crazy!
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.
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…
(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.)
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.)
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.
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.
I still use my super optimized c++ email filter to this day, 25 years later. Beats anything else I ever tried.
The abuse is by design.
at this point RCS and email are pretty similar on paper.
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.