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0 pointsFussyZeus9y ago0 comments

The world made it impossible to roll your own server, not Google. The proliferation of spammers in email has necessitated a cottage industry of security and filtering and all manner of mechanisms, automated and otherwise, to deal with the avalanche of bullshit streaming through that protocol.

Google's the blame party for a lot of things, but not the loss of email freedom.

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hunter2_9y ago

I don't know a whole lot about XMPP, but since it's federated, wouldn't it have the same avalanche? It seems like your choices are to use something interoperable and get spammed, or use a walled garden and you don't get spammed because the gardener has pitchforks.

jldugger9y ago

> I don't know a whole lot about XMPP, but since it's federated, wouldn't it have the same avalanche?

It absolutely did. Everyone decrying how XMPP federation was killed conveniently forgets how useful it was to spammers.

upofadown9y ago

Since this is IM the most you could do would be to generate a lot of requests to put the spammer on someone's roster list. In the unlikely event that a particular rogue XMPP managed to convince anyone to let them add some bogus users to their roster before it was blacklisted, it would take literally seconds to resolve the issue by removing them from your roster. So there isn't really any incentive to do spam over something like XMPP.

I have been on the federated XMPP network pretty much as long as it has existed and I have not gotten a single spam attempt. I guess I could post my jabber ID somewhere to make it more sporting (they need that to even try) but I really don't want to add random people to my roster. Email is intrinsically different that way.

the_common_man9y ago

This is not true. There are email standards out there to help prevent spam. But right now Google simply ignores all this even if everything is setup correctly. I think Google has a responsibility in helping me debug _why_ an email is spam and give tools to fix it. Currently, there is 0 information, 0 support. The webmaster tools simply say everything is awesome and dandy. And you can't do anything else.

Here is today' world work flow: 1. Buy a domain

2. Have to use Google because your mail will end up in spam with any provider (unless it's outlook or some special provider).

FussyZeusOP9y ago

I've never heard of Google being particularly helpful in debugging literally anything. According to their "support", Google software is perfect and if it's not working for you you're doing something wrong.

st3v3r9y ago

You realize that if they did offer that support, every spammer in the world would be using it to make sure their spam gets through.

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