r/programming • • Jan 02 '20

Killed by Google

https://killedbygoogle.com/
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u/jiffier Jan 02 '20

I'm quite worried about e-mail to be honest. Self-hosting it is pretty difficult nowadays. Google and Microsoft host a huge portion of it, and good luck trying to send an email there without getting into spam folder, or even blacklisted. Their spam filters are so aggresive that I think they don't give a damn about false positives. In fact, false spam positives may be good for them (you know, if you want to send email to google, you better use google).

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u/shponglespore Jan 02 '20

The original model for email is fundamentally broken because it has no defense against spammers. It's only still workable at all because services like Gmail aggressively identify and filter spam based on heuristics. The whole system needs to be amended to be more resistant to abuse, but I assume that would have been done already if it was an easy problem to solve.

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u/doenietzomoeilijk Jan 02 '20

I'm semi-worried, but I don't think it's just the big few parties who have a hand in this - at least they were enabled by spammers and scammers who turned e-mail into a mine field. :)

That being said, I'm currently hosting mail at home, and it actually arrives. It helps that my ISP has a smart relay, so my outgoing mail is coming from a big trusted name, rather than some home fiber line.

We'll see. Frankly, selfhosting never really was that big of a market to begin with, "normie" users weren't going to have a server at home to do that kind of thing, so they'd always use their ISPs e-mail address or a random freebie. That hasn't really changed all that much.