A farewell to email

Posted Oct 16, 2018 23:51 UTC (Tue) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087)
Parent article: A farewell to email

I really really miss gmane. And netnews. Email was and remains my primary means of communication. I could compose messages offline, keep my messages offline. I had kill files, and my own personal databases of everyone I talked to. I could search and sort my own mail.

No web browser based tool lets me search my mail locally.

Email used to get pushed to you, asynchronously, and then you could read (at 0 latency) everything you liked... but that was when we had real ipv4 addresses and better control over our dns spaces.

And yet, I do, also feel its demise pending unless "something is done". I beat most of the spam problem by switching my mail servers over to ipv6 only, which only cost me 13% of my correspondents at the time.

But that cost those correspondents and gradually more and more of my email traffic moved to the site (gmail) that just worked than my own personal email server. (which I still maintain).

Furthermore, post-gmane going down, my mailing lists are seemingly not as well indexed as websites are, so finding something that happened "out there" is easier on reddit than https://lists.bufferbloat.net.

And I agree on the gen-gap thing. But this year, it's whatsapp, a few years ago, facebook. I can't find anything I wrote on facebook, nor remember my password for whatsapp.

And then there is correspondence that is genuinely personal that I really only want copies of for the two of us.

lkml used to be indexed usefully too, I had a standard query to "follow" those that I liked to read...

Netnews and email were the bedrock that held the internet together, and today's conversation is so terribly fragmented. And if we could only host more services in the home or office easily then the latency goes down... I started fiddling with my own pod for diaspora and the latency and usability difference was remarkable - just like netnews used to be!

but running yet another server at home... or on my laptop... even if it "just worked" over ipv6... oy... I'm getting old.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 2:00 UTC (Wed) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link] (7 responses)

Actually, what I did to kill spam was require starttls universally.

Get your own certs...
smtpd_tls_cert_file=/etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.taht.net/fullchain.pem
smtpd_tls_key_file=/etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.taht.net/privkey.pem
smtp_tls_cert_file=/etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.taht.net/fullchain.pem
smtp_tls_key_file=/etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.taht.net/privkey.pem

# I started requiring starttls on inbound 5 years back (it is my personal email server after all. Most people would use may, here, and cope with the spam. I couldn't.

smtpd_use_tls=yes
smtp_tls_security_level=encrypt
smtpd_tls_security_level=encrypt

If it wasn't for vger not doing starttls (STILL), and needing to install a policy map for the 13% of my correspondents that didn't have it on 5 years ago (3 lines above MAY, that's it, gawd),
perhaps my personal email would be more useful.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 14:40 UTC (Wed) by bferrell (subscriber, #624) [Link] (6 responses)

Yeah, that's what you said someplace else. I did the same and it's didn't do diddly... What has helped is milter-greylist and delay wait.

But it's no silver bullet.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 17:02 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (4 responses)

My understanding of greylisting is that some people just double-send (and that grey-listing led to this). Does delay-wait solve that problem?

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 18:07 UTC (Wed) by bferrell (subscriber, #624) [Link]

and I forgot to respond... the delay wait makes the spam blasters unhappy. if they don't get a response from your MTA right away, they tend to go away

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 18:09 UTC (Wed) by bferrell (subscriber, #624) [Link]

milter-greylist tells unknown senders to go away and come back later. spammers don't tend to return. legitimate senders do.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 18:39 UTC (Wed) by bferrell (subscriber, #624) [Link] (1 responses)

Greylist does an initial refuse for an unspecified time and says re-try. if they retry before the greylist expires, they get the same.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 18, 2018 8:33 UTC (Thu) by philh (subscriber, #14797) [Link]

MailAvenger does SYN packet fingerprinting which lets you vary your policy depending on the guessed OS of the client.

Using that I only greylist things that look like they're running windows. That catches pretty-much all of the things I wanted to greylist (since they're coming from virus infected spambots) while not delaying the vast majority of legitimate traffic at all.

I really like the per-user scripting with MailAvenger too. It makes it trivial to do things like apply fairly aggressive SMTP-time spam blocking at on main published address, while being able to whitelist senders and (combined with corespondent specific sub-addresses) let regular corespondents avoid any filtering or delays.

However, I notice that MailAvenger needs some love, as it's currently linked against libssl1.0. I'll have to have a look at that...

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 23, 2018 22:50 UTC (Tue) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

My experience with grey-listing was that yes, it reduced incoming spam, but it didn't have any effect at all on the amount of spam getting through my later spamassassin and baysian filters. So, reduced CPU load, but not actually reduced annoyance. For my small mail server, that wasn't worth the downsides.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 7:44 UTC (Wed) by gfernandes (subscriber, #119910) [Link] (11 responses)

You can't be serious about "private correspondence being just with the two correspondents" when you're talking about email.

That would require *both* correspondents to _also_ use GPG. Which raises the bar considerably, and you'd probably find your "loss of correspondents" to be more in the 98% range, than the 13% range you've mentioned.

Signal, on the other hand, has no bar to entry. Install it on both correspondents phones, and you're done.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 14:03 UTC (Wed) by edgewood (subscriber, #1123) [Link] (5 responses)

He clearly meant correspondence between him and another party that was sent point to point via email, vs being in a broadcast like a web forum. The former can be private even if it's sent in the clear: Alice sends Bob an unencrypted email because she is concerned about Charlie, not Mallory.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 16:51 UTC (Wed) by gfernandes (subscriber, #119910) [Link] (4 responses)

Really? Point to point? Email?

Does:
1. Every correspondent run their own email server?
2. Is every email guaranteed to never go via any intermediary?

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 17:04 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (2 responses)

You are discussing an independent topic.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 17:08 UTC (Wed) by gfernandes (subscriber, #119910) [Link] (1 responses)

How is my point independent of the OP's assertion:

"And then there is correspondence that is genuinely personal that I really only want copies of for the two of us."

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 19, 2018 3:14 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

You're simply confusing private and secure (or pretending to be for some unclear reason)

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 17:23 UTC (Wed) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link]

I've been meaning to try signal for some time, btw. I would like it if it had an interface to emacs.

I don't use phones much (having poor eyesight and hearing is why I like videoconferencing - reading lips and email are how I cope). I think I've taken 3 phone calls in the last year, all of which went badly. Sometimes I think it's not just me, but how bad modern telephony is...

Going back to a "moral" and technological stance I'd had since the 80s. I'd wanted the world to run on static ip addresses, that you owned. I wanted email and other essential services to come directly into your home, where classic legal protections existed. I didn't want third parties to store my mail, chat, data, or web sites, I wanted it *here* on the premises. If I was down, the other sender would buffer it until it could be sent.

If my IP address got blocked for spamming, I'd get to know about it, and have technical and legal recourse. There'd be a local email repairman I could call to fix my server, just like I call a plumber.

If someone(s) tried to DOS my connection, I'd have recourse.

The dissolution of direct responsibility for your own internet connectivity is part of the overarching problem we have on the internet today.

All that said, that's not the world that happened.

So somehow retargetting my stance is in the cards, or fighting back. I just scanned through several thousand email list messages in emacs, read two, hit c to "catch up", and I'm done that part of my workflow for the day.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 18, 2018 8:40 UTC (Thu) by philh (subscriber, #14797) [Link] (3 responses)

The barrier to entry with Signal is that you need a phone that runs it, which is the reason I don't use it.

BTW If anyone knows of a secure messaging thing that I can expect to persuade mobile-only communicators to be willing to install/use that also is capable of running on a Linux desktop (without nearby phone), then I'm very interested -- to date I've not found one.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 18, 2018 14:09 UTC (Thu) by giggls (subscriber, #48434) [Link]

Signal does need the phone just once to transfer keys. The desktop client will then work fine without a phone.

You might have a look at https://matrix.org/ though.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 18, 2018 19:45 UTC (Thu) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link] (1 responses)

That would be jabber/XMPP with OMEMO available on Android, IPhone, Linux, MacOSX, and apparently evenWindows?!.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 18, 2018 20:11 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

Let's not forget that the average person is incapable of distinguishing the "app" from the service needed to make it useful.

XMPP is a protocol. There are a ton of clients for every OS out there. But those clients are useless without a service to communicate with. Most folks are not capable of running their own service, but fortunately there are still many organizations providing XMPP services to the general public.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 26, 2018 7:58 UTC (Fri) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]

Signal sets a far too high bar for me:

it requires from me to buy a mobile phone (specifically one with Android or iOS) and make a contract with a mobile phone provider, I cannot easily use it on my Linux distribution
it requires, that I give my phone number to all communication peers, and to the service provider
it requires, that I use a specific service in a specific country on servers of a specific company, which I find too limiting to be useful

Maybe it's just me, but I'm not into mobile phones.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 8:49 UTC (Wed) by mvar (guest, #82051) [Link]

totally agree on netnews - we already had the solution to this problem, but the trend has always been to get everything under the www umbrella

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 17:25 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (4 responses)

Hello,email!

I like email for the following reasons:

I archive and index my email, so it's easy to search.
I control the user experience. I don't have to rely on what some UI "expert" thinks is best.
I control how messages are filed and filtered.
No central organization can take out my history by going out of business or changing Terms of Service or the like.

Admittedly, people like me who run their own SMTP server are becoming rarer, and GMail et al. are destroying the advantages enumerated above. :(

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 22:05 UTC (Wed) by jwilk (subscriber, #63328) [Link] (1 responses)

BTW, how can I back up my LWN comments?

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 18, 2018 13:24 UTC (Thu) by oever (guest, #987) [Link]

I archive all my web visits by using an archiving proxy.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 19, 2018 12:52 UTC (Fri) by mstone_ (subscriber, #66309) [Link] (1 responses)

Plus, the big email providers just don't want to deal with independent mail servers. I'm currently getting rejected by yahoo, no idea why, no way to get it resolved.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 28, 2018 8:34 UTC (Sun) by martin.pitt (subscriber, #26246) [Link]

These days you need to set up SPF and DMARC in private mail servers. Since I did that, I didn't have a single rejection from yahoo, gmail, GMX, hotmail, or other large vendors.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 19, 2018 14:44 UTC (Fri) by zoobab (guest, #9945) [Link] (1 responses)

Same here, I really miss Gmane. They probably got harrassed by people who wanted to get their names removed from the archive, GDPR and all that, I suspect that was the main reason why they stopped.

We need the archive back online.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 20, 2018 23:07 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

You don't need to suspect it: larsi (who is one person) said as much in the blog post when he announced it was shutting down.