This is why for any store over the size of a mom and pop operation in a neighborhood, you can't just tell the owner who you know by name to put it on your account, and instead for credit purchases you use a credit card company which acts as an intermediary and smooths problems over on both sides, and refuses to work with stores and people that are untrustworthy.
This is why there are mailing list (mass email) services and why mail servers allow them. They keep their customers working within the accepted bounds (they ensure removal works and fire clients that abuse), and this allows mass email for accepted reasons while still being able to come down hard in random exploited servers/accounts.
This is why big email services are very selective about what servers they talk to. I work at an ISP where our main outbound mail servers are on IPs that we try not to change because they've got decades of reputation attached. Even so, we recently brought up two new servers for email forwards, and shifted a small percentage of our mail queue traffic to them and ramped it up over a couple weeks, and that seemed to work "warming them up" to the likes of Gmail and yahoo, etc. It used to be there were lists of mail operators you could be part of and you could use reputation within that to get them to be lenient with you when you started. These days it's all so centralized in a few very large players that they really likely just talk to each other.
This has absolutely nothing to do with someone not wanting to talk to someone else. It has everything to do with some third party having the power to decide whether the other two may communicate.
These days it's all so centralized in a few very large players that they really likely just talk to each other.
And thus the single most important method of remote communication in the world today, the method that is frequently akin to root access to our online lives, became subject to arbitrary monitoring and interference by huge, powerful organisations with their own interests and negligible regulatory oversight, legal safeguards or accountability to anyone but their shareholders.
Do you really not see why this is a problem? You talk about the internet matching the real world, but in the real world we've had laws against monitoring and interference with things like postal mail and telephone calls for a very long time almost everywhere.
They have that power specifically people people outsource vetting of whether someone's worth dealing with. I'll repeat, this is all about reputation, and how without reputation you're subject to every anonymous person's abuse. That's not an issue when the total number of people you're dealing with is manageable. It is when the number of people you expect to have to deal with is the population of a small country or the entire world.
> And thus the single most important method of remote communication in the world today, the method that is frequently akin to root access to our online lives, became subject to arbitrary monitoring and interference by huge, powerful organisations with their own interests and negligible regulatory oversight, legal safeguards or accountability to anyone but their shareholders.
Only for those that opted into that system. Gmail does not dictate what mail servers accept your mail, they dictate whether they themselves accept your mail. They just happen to have a userbase in hundreds of millions billions, so a large percent of the people you might want to contact use it. You can blame Gmail all you want, but they're just doing what their users want, which is reliable email without much spam, and that's how they've achieved it. You're not going to get far telling people when you send stuff to them they're required to accept it. The system only worked the way you wanted it when it was small and offenders weren't as anonymous and social punishments worked against them. When everyone's mostly anonymous, that no longer works.
> Do you really not see why this is a problem?
It is a problem, but it's a problem of people choosing to use them. And there's been ways to keep people from reading your emails for decades at this point with GPG, and if you can't trust the other side to buy into that, or to not use a web based email client, then there's nothing you can do about communication with those people anyway.
Should they be monitoring email? No. Would we be better with laws preventing that? Yes. Is that really the same issue as them being so large that by dictating who they will talk with and how they are effectively dictating rules for running a public mail server? No. Separate issues.
That's not true. When you use Gmail you don't opt-in to a setting to "automatically send smaller non-commercial providers to the SPAM folder". Gmail is pretty bad at SPAM handling you still receive lots of commercial advertisement from "reputable" sources, you just don't see the non-scammy non-phishy email you were expecting.
In this specific instance, Gmail is not the worst out there. They're very protective but from what i heard you can get allowlisted in a matter of weeks of harassing their tech support. Meanwhile, Microsoft is a lost cause if you want to get your mail through to an Outlook mailbox...
People outsource that vetting? What choice did those people have?
If there is a small cabal of tech giants dominating email distribution, and a user's choices are between some of those giants that are essentially as bad as each other and some smaller competitors that might be better in terms of delivering incoming mail reliably but are frozen out by the cabal in terms of delivering outgoing mail reliably instead, there is no meaningful choice or consent about having this filtering done to their incoming mail. It is a situation imposed upon them by the tech firms.
Yet, if that store knows you, and wants to extend credit to you, they can. A difficulty with email is that it seems to be increasingly difficult for the recipients to have much control over the email they receive. I know of numerous instances where people are unable to get specific emails they want or need to receive to not be spam-foldered, or to be received at all. They may have no understanding of why this is the case, and even if they do, may have no ability to change it. The systems are often opaque and unchangeable, and involve organization- or provider-level choices before emails ever reach their accounts.
Yes, warming up a "fresh" IP definely works. If you suddenly send thousands of mails from a new server - sure, you'll be labeled as Spam. If you slowly increase the volume over time, have a good domain and recipients that interact with the email, things should be fine. GMail has quite helpful guidelines [1].
Meanwhile I've seen people miss events because $BIG_MAIL_PROVIDER decided the invitation was spam, I've seen recruitment go wrong because a CV from an excellent candidate was blocked on its way to the designated email address for applications, and countless other examples where bad spam blocking was throwing baby out with bathwater.
Even a national division of Microsoft got hands on my email and decided to sign me up for invites to developer events (I know I hadn't signed up for it, because they didn't even use my name in the mails, which they certainly would have known if they had gotten it through any legitimate source).
I assume it's bullshit KPIs, or signup schemes. Some poor seller at Microsoft or Walmart who's ranked according to how many people sign up to the opt-out company promotions, and buys harvested addresses to juice their numbers.
I even got some very obvious fraud spam ("Your [expensive product] is waiting for you!", trying to get you to sign up as a "product tester" only paying $$$ per month) with full DKIM signatures from a site hosted at a Danish hosting provider, and Danish business info. You'd think this sort of thing gets shut down quickly, but nope. The only times I've tried to address this sort of thing through the proper channels (domain registrar's abuse accounts, etc.), I've only gotten markedly more spam.
At least DKIM signatures makes it easy to autodelete mail. No need to even go into the spam folder, I'm happy to forbid Walmart from communicating with me by mail forever.
Probably 95% of the spam I receive is automatically filtered to a spam folder, with a negligible false positive rate. Every now and then some new pattern does make it through but once I've flagged a few instances the rest start getting classified as spam automatically.
Gmail's spam filtering is very generous to DKIM-signed mail - it has a tendency to let it trough even if I've flagged exactly that sender before (as I did with walmart). The one on my own domain has received too little spam to tell how good the filter is.
The problem is that it's much easier to send email than it is to receive it. This puts the onus of spam filtering on the recipient. I'm sad that HashCash or some other PoW scheme was never adopted as a way to force rate limiting of mailers.
But since they have no accountability, their incentive is to eliminate anything potentially hostile regardless of the collateral damage from false positives. What are their users going to do? Take their business to another big provider that will probably be doing the same, and in the process lose access to a bunch of online services they like because their accounts on those services are tied to the old address? Move to a small provider, which is being forced out of the network by the giants so can't deliver mail reliably?
We are rapidly heading for a world where email is no longer a reliable communications medium for genuine messages between friends, family, work colleagues, etc. The giants are killing email through death by 1,000 cuts instead of a shotgun to the face but the end result is the same.
I don't accept that. Nothing about defending against those threats requires the kind of guilt-by-association spam blocking we have been discussing.
There will always be bad people in the world but that doesn't mean we allow some random big business to tell us where we may go, what we may do or who we may talk to because it is in that business's interests and (coincidentally or otherwise) it might make us safer.
It is decentralized and has built-in mechanisms to fight spam. Also all messages are end-to-end encrypted.
Despite the name it has nothing to do with bitcoin or cryptocurrency.
edit see this current front-page submission about how Bitcoin fails to provide this despite being centralized in exactly the same way as the decentralized SMTP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30224637
Then it should be only the SMTP server operators who have to handle the crypocurrency side of things, so email users never have to worry about it.
As you say, acquiring and using the cryptocurrency would be about as technically difficult as what the SMTP server operators are already doing, and there are a variety of 3rd party brokers they can choose if they want to simplify things and not run a node themselves.
The system I'm imagining is one where each newly registered domain has to put up a cryptocurrency bond if the registrant wants to send email from it. Existing domains would be grandfathered in (having already built up their reputation) and new domains would have their bonds burned if some N-of-M stakeholders agreed that they were sending (DKIM-signed) spam.
Choosing those stakeholders would be controversial, but hopefully no less controversial than the system we have today where Google can use the threat of a Gmail blacklist to make every SMTP server in the world follow its wishes. Ideally some of the stakeholders would be non-profits like the ISRG and Mozilla Foundation.
They could provide goods or services for it the same way people acquire dollars without going through a 3rd party broker.
cryptocurrencies are not in any way going to solve the problem of people centralizing their MX all onto office365 and gsuite.