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0 pointspas3y ago0 comments

email spam is not a real issue. big uncooperative gigacorps fucking it up for everyone is.

responsibility for spam (and other kinds of abuse) can be delegated via simple reputation scoring for netblocks, sender authentication and a proper feedback mechanism along the chain.

when the user clicks "spam" gmail already uses that to train their fancy AI and if you are not a small nobody, then they already alert you that ooops you sent something spammy via a feedback loop [1]. (see also how Mailchimp proudly claims they work with big integration partners like gmail ... https://mailchimp.com/help/how-mailchimp-prevents-and-handle... )

whitelist clearinghouses exist [2] but they are not terribly useful, because there's most of the signal to use for reputation is hidden :/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email) [2] https://www.dnswl.org/

0 pointspas3y ago0 comments

email spam is not a real issue. big uncooperative gigacorps fucking it up for everyone is.

responsibility for spam (and other kinds of abuse) can be delegated via simple reputation scoring for netblocks, sender authentication and a proper feedback mechanism along the chain.

whitelist clearinghouses exist [2] but they are not terribly useful, because there's most of the signal to use for reputation is hidden :/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email) [2] https://www.dnswl.org/

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3 comments · 1 top-level

armchairhacker3y ago· 2 in thread

> responsibility for spam (and other kinds of abuse) can be delegated via simple reputation scoring for netblocks, sender authentication and a proper feedback mechanism along the chain.

Are there any real-world examples of this? I know other decentralized networks like Tor and BitTorrent have some sort of reputation and feedback system. What type of "spam" do they deal with and how well do they deal with it? Are there any systems more similar to mail with mechanisms to prevent spam?

Spam is a serious issue, not just in email, not just in decentralized systems - it's one of the main issues in technology today. If there's a solution, even a proof-of-concept in a smaller system would be great

massaman_yams3y ago

As a practitioner, I can tell you that this proposal would be quite a bit behind state of the art for email spam filter accuracy. For example, there's a surprising amount of legitimate mail that gets sent without authentication, and which you don't want to block because your end users will get mad if it goes missing.

I may also point out that "reputation scoring for netblocks" is the exact problem the original blog post was complaining about. He was trying to send from residential ISP and VPS netblocks that had poor reputation, and saw delivery problems as a result.

pasOP3y ago

if netblock reputation were known small non-spam senders would congregate, this would help weed out the spammers.

but google et al. don't provide any feedback. nor any way to build reputation for your IP. (where are all the staking blockfoo chainbar solutions? or at least let people pay a one time fee for some exception)

anyway, since we already have certificate transparency, we could have a similar one to look up MTA/domain repu provider, then sending DKIM signed HTTP calls to the reputation report address, and let people aggregate it.

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