A note for Hotmail users

Indeed I do not know what is going on (except gmail solved my spam problem). I am not interested in this or that technology, I am just happy to see that it is harder and harder to send email for small players. Things should never have been easy in the first place; SMTP's design is a joke not even worth discussing about.

> by the way, who should I have to pay money to for the privilage of sending mail in your new world?

Do not take "expensive" too literally; I mean "hard" and costing time (see the first post I answered to). And if it also costs a little bit of money (think DNS, or certificates), then all the better.

Are you aware that Windows has tons of security problems that key groups know about but are not published in the open (though we get suggestions of these with large regular Windows security updates)? Closed source Windows doesn't give the customer or outside experts much insight into problems.

Are you aware that Microsoft is a single entity to manage most of the security for many people while Linux is managed by many different groups, some of whom take security as a very high priority over decisions that would maximize say profits? Thus the more security conscientious has more superior customized options with Linux.

Are you aware that Windows details are largely managed by a single company while Linux distros include a lot of variation that makes achieving a wide malware success rate more difficult?

In contradiction to your claims,
Are you aware that Linux is used by a large number of servers, yet it has an established track record of experiencing significantly less wide-scale technology specific security issues than does Windows?

Finally, if Linux is safer because it is used less as a Desktop, isn't that a legitimate reason to switch to it today? By some measures, Linux has been at 1% for many years, so there is apparently no worry that it will leave the 5% boundary any time soon.

I was wondering whether anyone would misunderstand those. You may be the first one. The idea in Linux/BSD is that these vulnerabilities are patched as soon as they are discovered and deployed. Making all the vulnerabilities open helps in discovering them sooner, exposes them to more eyes and gets patched sooner. There are daily security updates on any linux distro.

Also, considering Linux security model, a single application vulnerability affecting a single point on an attack surface is unlikely to compromise the whole system enough to make it send spam or lock up the whole system to make it a botnet.

I presumed that after reading lwn for this long, people would be slightly more aware of these aforementioned basic assumptions about Linux, FOSS in general. But you never know ;).

Also, many distros now include Selinux/Grsecurity and prevention against stack smashing, RELRO, PIE and so on, the vulnerabilities in that page are on the assumption that these are non-existent. So, do your research before you comment.

I suspect the fact that for years most Windows systems had no way of setting file permissions to prevent executable programs from being installed merely by opening an email attachment or clicking on a web link is also of some relevance.

Actually yes, email is part of what I do for several customers and I tend to read their logs. If you think webmail took over, you will be shocked to discover how many companies use Notes or Exchange.

I certainly don't consider the folks at LWN.net to be idiots, so they must be part of the minority I guess.

So, copious amounts of market research don't agree with your opinion.

That may be because you have obviously lots of technical experience how to handle large numbers of private email accounts. Equally obviously you have no business experience. And that's no wonder -- I'm an CEO, and I would never let a staff member with your behaviour near any customer of mine.

Just FYI: People who call their potential customers idiots are not appreciated in the business world. My company does IT consulting, especially in outsourcing management. Your behaviour here is not a good example for the type of service that one has to expect from Gmail engineers in case of problems and speaks against using that outsourcing provider.

And then... your mail may start going again. It's all rather frustrating.

I cannot quite follow your reasoning here. Today we have a 32bit address space. Even if it were fully populated, with a bit of trickery we can store the reputation in 8 Bytes or so, resulting in 32GB total. That will easily fit on a hard disk, an ssd or, if absolutely necessary, into RAM. Yet, somehow, reputation does not work on IP basis but some number of IPs get bunched into "blocks" and reputation is shared among the block.

What makes you think that with a 128bit address space, things will improve? If programmers of reputation systems are clueless today, how will IPv6 make them smarter (or make the task for their poor overworked brains easier)?