Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by keganunderwood on Friday June 23, 2017 @01:44PM (#14621114)

Using metadata? Headers? Anything other than Tue email body would be nice. We still have blacklisting by IP and stuff like that.

I mean if I write a Nigerian prince email and send it to my mum, it should reach her no matter what the text says, right?

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by softawre on Friday June 23, 2017 @02:15PM (#14621374)

Should it reach her though? What if I hacked your account and sent it via you? Or should metadata detect that?

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by mtgx on Friday June 23, 2017 @02:03PM (#14621286)

https://protonmail.com/blog/encrypted-email-spam-filtering/

I remember there was a recent paper that dealt with this, too, but I can't find it right now. But it basically demolished this argument that it's impossible to stop spam if the email is encrypted.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by jcranmer on Friday June 23, 2017 @02:57PM (#14621768)

That blog post doesn't actually say anything about how they do spam filtering on encrypted emails. Everything they talk about is bog-standard spam filtering, including comparing against known spam and Bayesian filtering, both of which are impossible to do on encrypted emails. It's not clear if they're doing reputation analysis, which is the other big anti-spam measure impossible on encrypted email (I suspect it's the main component of their "we're not telling you what we're doing"). The SPF/DKIM/DMARC and blacklist checks are the only things you can reliably do on encrypted email.

They do say "In future blog posts, we will cover the challenges of preventing ProtonMail from being used by spammers and the challenges of doing spam filtering with end-to-end encrypted emails which we cannot read", but I can't find any such blog posts.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by Propen on Friday June 23, 2017 @04:45PM (#14622626)

WhatsApp also had a session at F8 about e2ee spam filtering...

https://developers.facebook.com/videos/f8-2017/how-whatsapp-...

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by tareqak on Friday June 23, 2017 @01:44PM (#14621110)

You could search and filter after decryption (there are implementation issues with both for sure, but it is technically possible).

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by sebastian on Friday June 23, 2017 @05:20PM (#14622900)

Some type of proof‐of‐work for email addresses that have not been previously white-listed. Similar to what BitMessage does[1].

Sending emails to new/random contacts shouldn't be that easy anyway.

[1] https://bitmessage.org/bitmessage.pdf

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by e12e on Friday June 23, 2017 @06:36PM (#14623282)

Encrypting email to a single recipient is (a weak) proof of work.

There's a big difference between sending 10k copies of a plaintext email, and retrieving a public key and encrypting to 10k recipients - not to mention that filtering out all non signed/not-signed-by-trusted-key should be a decent start for a whitelist/greylist.

I'd be curious if anyone ever got gpg-encrypted spam?

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by sebastian on Friday June 23, 2017 @10:09PM (#14624049)

Another approach would be to have to pay the equivalent of USD 5-10 cents in some email crypto currency in order to allow an unknown sender to put their email on my inbox. If I reply or add the sender to my whitelist the fee is automatically refunded to the original sender and future messages between both parties would won't require a transaction fee any longer.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by ATsch on Friday June 23, 2017 @07:28PM (#14623509)

Well, I doubt anyone gets GPG encrypted spam, because only a small number of people actually know how to decrypt GPG.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by zeep on Friday June 23, 2017 @03:22PM (#14622002)

this could be done locally, it doesn't use that much processing power

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by gruez on Friday June 23, 2017 @03:25PM (#14622025)

It can probabky be done if you're using a email client. Webapp (like gmail)? Probably not feasible because of how much data you need to download every time.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by zeep on Friday June 23, 2017 @06:15PM (#14623183)

if only they would offer that option... at least for the android client

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by CaptSpify on Friday June 23, 2017 @01:46PM (#14621130)

Maybe having e2e is more important to some people than searching or spam filtering.

Personally, I'd like to have the option, but as I don't, I don't use gmail.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by jMyles on Friday June 23, 2017 @01:48PM (#14621144)

Homomorphic encryption is on the way! Right?

(Right?)

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