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Communications Spam

The End of Email Cometh? 150

Posted by Cliff from the SMTP-no-more dept.
RebRachman asks: "Has the inevitable finally happened? After years of dismissing as alarmist all the commentary about how spam and security concerns will eventually render email useless, is it actually happening to us? I don't know about you, but for the past three days, all of our staff (we are a virtual company of 20 telecommuters) and clients have been unable to get email to one another reliably. Attachments disappear or become garbled, mail disappears into the great beyond, or arrives hours after it has been sent, even within the same ISP. We've resorted to sending one another an IM every time we send an email to confirm that the messages are arriving alright. In extreme cases we have even reverted to using a telephone handset to ensure that clients have received everything that was sent. Is it only a matter of time before we all resort to file transfer by P2P? (And if so, what are we going to do with these firewall boxes?)"
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The End of Email Cometh? More

The End of Email Cometh?

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  • Well.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dark Nexus ( 172808 ) on Tuesday June 29, 2004 @11:55PM (#9567797)
    It would certainly put spammers out of a job if that's the case.

    Funny that, out of a job because they were too good at it...

    • Re:Well.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Carnildo ( 712617 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @04:27PM (#9574757) Homepage Journal
      It would certainly put spammers out of a job if that's the case.

      Funny that, out of a job because they were too good at it...

      It's a common hazard for insufficiently-evolved parasites. The ideal for a parasite is to extract the maximum amount of resources from the host without causing the host permanent harm; parasites that have just moved to a new type of host usually take too much, and end up killing the host.

  • Overhyped? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by djcapelis ( 587616 ) on Tuesday June 29, 2004 @11:56PM (#9567810) Homepage
    I dunno about you, but I still use my e-mail fine. E-mail mailing lists, to personal correspondence, to professional correspondence. E-mail isn't going to die any time soon.

    • Re:Overhyped? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by orangesquid ( 79734 )
      I want to know:
      • why mail from my uni [udel.edu] account is marked as spam by several free providers
      • why lots of providers block ZIP attachments, including AOL, the "#1 national ISP"
      • why messages, even entirely within the uni's email system, sometimes have bizarre delays of several hours
      • why some free providers take _forever_ to get some messages through
      • why it's so damn popular to send messages *only* as html-formatted mime attachments, leaving the actual body of the message completely blank

      ugh!!!

      • here you go: (Score:5, Interesting)

        by RMH101 ( 636144 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @07:58AM (#9569549)
        * because you're on a DNSBL. your upstream probably is RFC-ignorant
        * because of all those frigging trojans that zipped up attachments of infectious exes. also, it stops people mailing things in password-protected zip files.
        * because it's not instant messenger. your email systems could probably do with tweaking, as well
        * because they're FREE, FFS
        * because people are either idiots or want to attempt to get around spam filters.

        that wasn't so hard.
      • I once received an email from my boyfriend's university account to my (different) university account 2 months after he sent it. Good thing it wasn't important. (I think that may have been a feature of my college's email- there were a lot of other problems as well.)

    • Re:Overhyped? (Score:3, Funny)

      by AEton ( 654737 )
      Righto. Where's that paperless office we were promised? Once we have a paperless office, and flying cars, then I might believe there's a chance of email being obsoleted.

      But it's no gopher.

  • Leaving messages (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bobo the hobo ( 302407 ) on Tuesday June 29, 2004 @11:58PM (#9567814)
    for a lot of people, sending email is just a way of leaving a message. When more IM clients can leave messages for people who aren't online at the moment, email will die out more and more. Although, spammers will certainly turn to IM.
    • ICQ was able to do this in ohhh..... I dunno, sometime about the time it was released in '97 or '98. Why current IM services that require contacting a central server _anywaY_ don't do this is beyond me...
    • Yahoo messenger, for all it's failure to play nice with the open-source community, DOES do offline messages. Stored on central servers, naturally.

      So far I've had very little IM spam, thankfully! Mostly spammers seem to use Yahoo to harvest email addresses at the moment.

      If you've an always-on connection and you leave the client running, any IM network can get messages while you're away. Otherwise offline messaging would have to be supported in the infrastructure (and not just the by the client). So that

  • Is it really so bad already? (Score:5, Informative)

    by pediddle ( 592795 ) <pediddle+slashdot@NoSPam.pediddle.net> on Tuesday June 29, 2004 @11:59PM (#9567819) Homepage
    I hadn't noticed. Who are you paying money to lose your mail for you? They don't deserve it, because there are better services available without such problems. I know there must be, because I've never experienced them.

    About the only problem I've ever had with email -- that wasn't my fault, anyway -- is overzealous spam filters. The simple solution to this is to install your own filters, set the threshhold relatively high, and check your junk mail folders periodically. Never should you blackhole email if you value its timely delivery. Anyway, the latest spam filters are good enough that this isn't much of a problem anymore.

    • Re:Is it really so bad already? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by harikiri ( 211017 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @01:11AM (#9568219)
      I'm sorry to say, that it seems like something is wrong with your email infrastructure. We have a large number of desktop users (400+), and we even have a shockingly horrid internal exchange setup, yet I'm yet to have any issues with "lost" emails in the 1.5 years I've been working here.

      I would suspect that the problems your experiencing may be due to various poor implementations of mail servers at your customer's end. Many corporations today that have recently jumped onto the internet have minimal IT support staff, and implement something that "just works". There are usually few considerations for anti-spam controls, content security (viruses, porn), and effective backup procedures.

    • Yeah, I agree. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by torpor ( 458 ) <ibisum AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @03:15AM (#9568753) Homepage Journal
      Oh no, my e-mail is broken, maybe its The Beginning Of The End, fear, fear, fear!

      Umm... I've been using e-mail for 20 years, and I plan on using e-mail for another 20 years. Every single time I've had a problem with e-mail, I've fixed it.

      IF you're getting too much spam, change your e-mail address. Its as simple as that. Yes, it really is that simple. If you "can't" do this because too many people have your 'old' address, well then its not e-mail thats broken, its your management of it ...

      Really, I consider the reaction and subsequent 'conclusion that e-mail is going away' to be utterly ludicrous, and I truly question the motives of anyone who adopts that point of view.

      Technology doesn't die; only mans desire to reliably, standardly sustain it goes away ...
      • Um, who are you that's been using it for 20 yrs? Your average person certainly won't have. I would say the majority on slashdot hasn't used it for more than around 11 yrs.

        If you've truly been using it for that long, you are also more likely to have the skills to fix email problems. Again, the average person to use email isn't. Thus, the demise.
      • IF you're getting too much spam, change your e-mail address. Its as simple as that. Yes, it really is that simple. If you "can't" do this because too many people have your 'old' address, well then its not e-mail thats broken, its your management of it ...

        That's absurd. I suppose your solution to telemarketers is to change your phone number frequently? And the way to avoid getting too much junk mail is to move every year or so?

        I've been handing out business cards with my current address for eight years. I

      • I've used email since 1985. (OK, it was VMS MAIL before I was on the Internet.) Tremendously valuable. But I'm just about to give up on it.

        It's not just the spam. The fact is, I get very little real email nowadays. I'm not sure why. I think many of my friends have given up on it. At work (I'm a software engineer), it's maybe 10 messages a day. I recall in 1992 keeping stats and learning that I was processing more than 100 real messages a day (no spam).

        And the spam is a huge problem. I'm getting

    • Re:Is it really so bad already? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Zardoz44 ( 687730 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @07:40AM (#9569492) Homepage
      My company blocks spam at the firewall level, which becomes tedious when emails sent to me mysteriously disappear. Sometimes they're personal emails with "Free Beer!" in the subject, but other times there's no obvious reason why a message might be eaten.

      The biggest problem with all this is that we get no notification that something was blocked. I find out later when someone asks why I havent responded. That, and my never having received a single spam at this address, even in the years before the front-end filter. Others complained, but I never posted my work email to public newsgroups either.

      That's what hotmail is for.

      • That's why blackholing spam is a terrible idea. Whether you use Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, or whatever other client-side client, it's always better to use the built-in filters. That way you have a junk-mail folder that you can scan periodically, not to mention that the filter can learn what you think is spam, instead of blackholing things based on poor, inflexible rulesets.

  • zerg (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lord Omlette ( 124579 ) on Tuesday June 29, 2004 @11:59PM (#9567822) Homepage
    Solution: switch to gmail. Ok, theoretically any webmail system could work, but google appears to be the least evil of the available choices.

    p2p is not going to solve your messaging problems. *SPRITZ* bad use of buzzword, no. *SPRITZ* what did I just tell you?! Your post provides close to zero information other than "email suxx0rz omg p2p". It's as bad as the llamas who come here seeking legal advice.

    Who is in charge of administrating your email server? (servers?) What email clients are you using? Can you send & receive email normally from your personal accounts? Who is providing your other "virtual" (wtf) services? Which IM client are you using? Have you looked at Jabber for your messaging, including setting up your own private Jabber servers?

    • Gmail? I think not! (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      While the Gmail service is itself reliable, it does not solve his problem. What if he tries to correspond with Hotmail users? Odds are it will go in the bit bucket. What if somebody tries to send him an EXE (or a ZIP file containing an EXE)? It will bounce (Google reasons correctly that most EXEs are viruses, so it rejects all messages containing them).

      As much as I love Gmail, it is not adequate for a be-all, end-all email service.
    • ...even if google does seem to be the land of chocolate.
      This website does a good job summing it up:
      gmail creepy [gmail-is-too-creepy.com].

  • haha (Score:3, Funny)

    by Idealius ( 688975 ) * on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:01AM (#9567829) Journal
    "See any serious problems with this story? Email our on-duty editor."

    meh, email is over as we know it anyway..

  • Who runs your servers???` (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't think that 'email' as a method of communication is as flawed as your implementation is.

    Do your run your own servers? If so, perhaps you should look into a rebuild of the whole mail/anti-spam system.

    If you pay someone to run this system, then i'd be looking for another ISP or other provider.

    The only thing killing email is this kind of thinking.

  • It's getting there. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by antizeus ( 47491 )
    Just before the release of Slackware 10, I installed Slackware 9.1 on a new hard drive (heh) and didn't bother installing any email-related software. My friends are mostly using IM, and my family seems to have stopped using email altogether except for that one relative everyone seems to have that insists on forwarding every piece of crap that he comes across (e.g. let's protest the price of gas by boycotting one particular company, and always seems to be the same one every time). My Yahoo account mostly g

  • Gave up a long time ago (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FattMattP ( 86246 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:03AM (#9567845) Homepage
    <rant>
    I gave up on email two years ago. Yeah, I still have an account that I almost never check. SpamAssassin does a fine job of keeping most things at bay but I'm tired of dealing with it. All SA does it sort it. I still have to double check it and delete it. What a waste of time. I've tried getting my own domain, setting up email accounts for different companies, etc. I tried hiding my email address from web sites. I even tried switching addresses. It's worse than ever now. With all the viruses and spyware, I know that some of them are harvesting email addresses from users Outlook mailboxes and sending them to spammers. I have clients or acquaintances that get infected and even though I've created email addresses just for them to email to, I start getting spammed within a few weeks of their box getting infected.

    People say it's an arms race, and they are right. It's definitely a race and I'm fucking exhausted. My hat is off to those of you who can keep up with it all.
    </rant>

    On the other hand, instant messaging has become an email replacement for me. It's quick, and I can usually send files with it. Either that or I use my cell phone for communication (ringer set to vibrate, thank you). Phone plans are inexpensive now and most include long distance as part of the package. It's much easier, and more pleasant, to talk to my friends and family that are on the other side of the country. I stay in touch with a lot more people these days than I used to just four years ago, thanks in part to my cell phone.

    • Oh, and I should add that I don't think that this is the end of email. Email will still be useful, and it is. I just think that it'll be a while before we see a good fix. I just hope that everyone has the patience to work out a good solution. The thing that I'm most afriad of is people that say "we have to do *something*, now!" I'd rather see the right thing done rather than "something." I feel SPF is a step in the right direction but we'll still have a way to go before we're spam and forgery free.
      • Not sure how well tuned you had your antispam setup. What they don't tell you is a good whitelist is an integral part of it, too. SpamAssassin combined with AMAVIS has given some excellent results. When in doubt, crank the sensitivity down a little and let a few spams come in. I never check my blocked messages--never had to.

        I think e-mail will be here for a long time, as finally literally just about everyone on the planet has e-mail access, even if at a coffeeshop. You got phones, you got e-mail, what

        • Re:Gave up a long time ago (Score:4, Informative)

          by FattMattP ( 86246 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:40AM (#9568056) Homepage
          I've been using a whitelist. I have the following in my procmailrc with FILTER_WHITELIST containing the path to a text file with one email address per line:

          :0
          * ? formail -xFrom: | fgrep -iqsf $FILTER_WHITELIST
          {
          # Learn this message as non-spam for the bayesian classifier. This is
          # better than depending solely on SA's autolearn feature.
          :0c:
          | sa-learn --ham

          # Add a header so that I know this email address was in the whitelist.
          :0f: whitelist-header.lock
          | formail -A 'X-Whitelisted: Yes'

          # into the INBOX.
          :0:
          $DEFAULT
          }
          I'm using several RBLs in sendmail. The thing that's made a huge difference is milter-sender [snert.org]. It's cut the amount of spam I get by over 60%. I tried doing the bayesian thing but it only works for a while. I get very little legitimate email. I'd say about 30-50 messages a month versus about ~400-500 a day of spam (before milter-senter). Things would be good for a while but then slowly even legitimate emails would start to get higher bayesian scores. It seems that the SpamAssassin bayesian DB only holds so many tokens and after a while the spammy tokens start to outnumber the hammy ones. That's what it looks like anyway.

          If you're using sendmail you should give milter-sender a look.

    • Re:Gave up a long time ago (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Simonetta ( 207550 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:20AM (#9567933)
      I use Yahoo! e=mail and have for seven years. No real problems and nearly all spam gets blocked by their spam filters.

      I wonder if the US military network has problems with spam. Generally nothing in America gets taken seriously until it starts messing with the military. Then the problems are given serious thought by serious people with unlimited resources. The successful approachs are then brought into the corporate environment and then the media. Then they filter into general American society.
      A broad example would be the systematic racism and segration against the African-American people that didn't really start to change in American society until it started to drasticily undermine the military's ability to function in the late 1960's. The approaches that worked to reduce institutional racism in the military were adopted by big corporations (slowly, but surely) and are working their way throughout the society. Things are really different now in this area than they were fifty years ago.

      But if you seriously want to get rid of spam, start feeding into the military networks. Let them deal with it in their own simple direct and time-tested manner.

      • Re:Gave up a long time ago (Score:4, Funny)

        by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @01:00AM (#9568165) Journal
        But if you seriously want to get rid of spam, start feeding into the military networks. Let them deal with it in their own simple direct and time-tested manner.

        "Kablooie"?

        (Sounds like a plan!)

      • Re:Gave up a long time ago (Score:4, Informative)

        by dcocos ( 128532 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @01:41AM (#9568359)
        The US Military doesn't use computers that are hooked up to the Internet (or receive external email) for secure systems. The only spam would come from other cleared people on other cleared computers and that would be pretty traceable. Now I realize that they also have external mail systems, but I doubt that spammers are dumb enough to send a lot of email to .mil addresses, and I don't think that while it only effects external systems it will get the attention it needs.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • True, my military network-fu is limited to work visits to the Pentagon and not be allowed to touch anything fun :-( And I'm a developer by trade, not a systems guy. The point I was trying to make is that the original poster said that a good way combat spam is see when it affects mission critical work at the DoD, because they have several smart people (employees and contractors) and vast resources. I feel that since spam doesn't touch SIPRnet* it won't be marked to the highest priority, add in the fact th
      • I wonder if the US military network has problems with spam.

        I doubt spammers would target .mil addresses.
      • I wonder if the US military network has problems with spam. Generally nothing in America gets taken seriously until it starts messing with the military.

        Wow, you're right! I haven't received a single Iraqi spam since the US took out Saddam.

    • Like you, I need to e-mail with clients, which means a lot of the solutions that would work for a purely personal e-mail address don't work. I think a lot of the people who say there's no big problem also have the luxury of never needing to receive an e-mail from someone they don't already know. I also agree with you that it's a lot of work to check that what's in the spam box really is spam, at least cursorily. I get about 300 spams a day, and what happens when it becomes 3000, or 30000? -- it'll be an imp
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Oh no the end of the world is here! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by zoloto ( 586738 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:06AM (#9567860)
    my company can't do email reliably!
    we can't get attachments!
    our isp or servers suck!
    oops, we were at fault!
    can i recind my slashdot article?
    where do i get modded as troll?

    give me a break, people have been saying it's the end of the email/BSD/MAC/intarweb for ages now and it's getting old. rehire some new tech staff that know what the heck to do or learn to do it yourself properly.

    good god WTF is wrong with people.

  • Email will not die... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by stj ( 607714 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:21AM (#9567945) Homepage Journal
    Reason: there is no *open* replacement that would fix the flaws.
    By open I mean something that can receive a message from a person you haven't had a contact with before.
    Any system that would eliminate the spam requires some sort of "web of trust". To establish a web of trust, you need to close the system and limit it only to trusted users. Apart from all possible problems related to the web of trust, the system will be always either too restrictive, if it's effective, or too ineffective, if it's not so restrictive.
    IM is already taken over by spammers in some degree - it's just a matter of time and the number of users for that process to accelerate. Anything else will suffer from the same problems - you let unknown people call/message/email you - you get spam. You restrict yourself only to known people, you filter spam out, but lock out everyone who might potentially need to contact you but doesn't belong to your personal web of trust.
    So, the bottom line is that every new application will suffer from either spam or restriction, and because of that it doesn't pay off to switch to a different system.
    PS: Viruses are not anything that started with email. Email just happens to be a convenient medium of the time, but they were proliferating quite fine with floppy disks, as they are now with email. P2P will (already has in many cases) the exact same problem - people sending around unchecked files, viruses taking over control of P2P programs and multiplying themselves, and so on and so forth.
    • In my opinion, the only real solution is a strict policy on unsolicited commercial messaging followed by actual enforcement of it, and charging spammers real costs of distribution of their emails. The reason why it is so popular is that it's so cheap. If spammers had to pay for all resources used by particular email, most likely the problem would be gone in a minute - unfortunately that can hardly be done in the way the Internet operates at the moment, and any sort of solution of the kind would basically be
    • Reason: there is no *open* replacement that would fix the flaws. By open I mean something that can receive a message from a person you haven't had a contact with before. Any system that would eliminate the spam requires some sort of "web of trust".
      What about hashcash postage? It lets you get mail from people you don't know, and it doesn't require a web of trust.

      Any system that would eliminate the spam requires some sort of "web of trust". To establish a web of trust, you need to close the system and li

    • My uneducated guess has always been that there is only one thing that really is needed: a protocol that verifies that the sender really is the sender.

      If I see spam with casinohotnews as sender, and I know it's from them, I'll just block them on my machine.

      If I see that someone uses a hotmail account to send me mail, and I can trust it is from hotmail, I ask MS to handle the problem.

      The one horrible thing with today's mail protocols is that you can pretend you are someone else. It would have been so easy

      • The one horrible thing with today's mail protocols is that you can pretend you are someone else. It would have been so easy to add a handshake in there: So you claim you are, af62co@spamking.com, ok, pls verify that, before I even think of showing your mail to the recipient.

        I may be missing something here, but I do not know what. Anyone who can tell me where I go wrong?

        Handshake's breaks when you have to store and forward. Sure, the server you're connected with might be ok - but you're effectively

      • > a protocol that verifies that the sender really is the sender.

        That's precisely what SPF is, but it operates on domain granularity. You want it for users, you need digital signatures, and PKI is its own collosal headache with no easy answers.

        Of course a problem with SPF is that yes, you know casinohotnews.com is the sender. And in the next message, you know that hotcasinonews.com is the sender, then it's hotcasinosnews, then casinoshotnews, then casinohotinfo, and so on, each coming from a fresh set

  • The problem is the ANTISPAM software (Score:4, Informative)

    by oldstrat ( 87076 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:29AM (#9568005) Journal

    Quit using your ISP's antispam features, if you cannot turn them off yourself, demand that your ISP turn them off for you.
    Then install POPFile [sourceforge.net] and take ownership of your own email.

    Have your customers/others do the same.
    It's the job of ICANN & IANA to get a grip on the SPAM issue,
    they are issuing numbers and access to authorities that do not deserve it,
    and have not fulfilled thier roles as governing bodies.

  • Is the sky falling, Chicken Little? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ezraekman ( 650090 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @12:35AM (#9568032) Homepage
    I don't know about you, but for the past three days, all of our staff (we are a virtual company of 20 telecommuters) and clients have been unable to get email to one another reliably. Attachments disappear or become garbled, mail disappears into the great beyond, or arrives hours after it has been sent, even within the same ISP.

    Everyone has e-mail troubles, but to assume that it's because of the evil spammers and "security concerns" inherent in e-mail is ridiculous, and borders on negligent. If your server is internal, you need to find a new sysadmin. If it's external, you need to find a new host. If the person running your server knows what he/she's doing, this sort of thing rarely (if ever) happens.

    No offense intended, but what you've said is the rough equivalent of saying "The car that I drive too fast, too often, don't change the oil in, and paid my neighbor's 16-year-old kid who takes autoshop to fix has finally stopped working. That must mean that internal-combustion engines are at the end of their life!"

    If you aren't just talking about environmental impact, what's the solution? Give up on cars, or find someone who actually knows how to maintain them?

    I'm a little disappointed in the editors for allowing this story. :-(

  • believe it or not, aim does pretty well at p2p and meetings. now with the new aim you can do video and audio as well. you can send files to each other and chat too, and you can invite people to aim meetings. in essance you could do away with email and just use aim.. oh and it does logging so you can save your chat sessions so that you have copies of the stuff as well... so who needs email with aim ?

    just my 2cents .. but it is possible.. its also a lot better than p2p.. but if I had to do p2p, I'd have

  • so your mail service is no good, can't you get an email account that works somewhere else?

    the end of of email? come on people... our phone service was screwed up all day but it's not exactly the end of it.

  • Gmail (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Pirow ( 777891 )
    The rise of gmail has extended emails life span by offering users 1gb of space, causing other email providers such as hotmail and yahoo to sit up and take notice, they upped their storage space quite a bit to try and compete and a lot of other email providers will follow suit while trying to beat and match the features offered by their competitors (the vast majority of users want features rather than integrity, take windows for example), which should breath some much needed life into email.

    Gmail has a few

    • The threaded messenger/conversation feature is a piece of crap. Great in theroy, crap in practice. It clumps auto notifications from forums and livejournal as conversations, hides "quoted text" which actually is the important part of the email...

      Blah. But I like it other than that. Hopefully they'll have that worked out in the near future.
      • It clumps auto notifications from forums and livejournal as conversations

        I see this as a good thing since rather than having 1 email listed in my inbox per forum post, I've got 1 per forum thread. This works with vBulletin, but it may work differently with other forum systems depending on the subject line they use for notification.

        hides "quoted text" which actually is the important part of the email...

        Why do you need the quoted text when you have your original message above the reply? Again I see that

  • Hire good admin (Score:2, Insightful)

    by dimss ( 457848 )
    ...have been unable to get email to one another reliably. Attachments disappear or become garbled, mail disappears into the great beyond, or arrives hours after it has been sent, even within the same ISP.

    Hire good part-time admin. Get better MUA. Really. Looks like e-mail works fine for everyone but your company.

  • ...but I think that you have to look at few things. First of all, are you running a spam filter with auto-delete enabled? Are _any_ of the people in your company? Are you running your own mail server, or is someone else running it? Do you have enough bandwidth? Are you subscribed to any RBLs?

    The biggest thing that's changed in the age of spam is that a lot of people now install spam and virus filters that do not have a 0% false positive rate. If your filter scores attachments higher, it may be
  • I am quite happy with having "outsourced"
    my email to yahoo mail, especially with
    their recent bump to 100meg and 10meg
    attachments. Their spam filter is excellent,
    though I still have to check for false
    positives, which are quite rare, though my
    email use is rather minimal. If everyone
    used yahoo or gmail or somesuch, that would
    pretty much prevent spam and allow for pretty
    accurate filtering.

    Of course, being web-based is excellent, as
    I was able to access email the exact same way
    from Finland as from here in the

  • Hey (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dtfinch ( 661405 ) * on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @02:33AM (#9568570) Journal
    You have email server problems.

    I know of a company that had similar email problems, like 2 hour waits and other unreliabilities, and the problem was that spam to no longer existing email addresses was being bounced back and forth between their server and whatever fake server was specified in the return address. Email would pile up into the thousands and they'd have to log into the server and delete the bad messages from the queue.

    Basically, the problem may be a full smtp queue, possibly either by bouncing messages or spammers using your server.

    If you're losing emails entirely, that's generally supposed to be nearly impossible unless the messages are being filtered, they're being deleted manually (lazy solution to full queue problem), the server is full, or the receiving server was unreachable for every delivery attempt.

  • How does this get posted? (Score:5, Informative)

    by np_bernstein ( 453840 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @02:44AM (#9568619) Homepage
    This is a technical site, right? Has been for a while? Presumabley staffed with people who are technical to moderate stories and the like? How the heck would anyone with a modicum of knowlege post an article like this? Even if this wasn't a unique situation, we can fix email. It's not that big of a deal. All you need to do is modify DNS so that is the single MX record is replaced w/ a "MS" (Mail sender) and a "MR" (Mail Receiver) record. Mail is ONLY accepted by a MR if it comes from an address listed as an "MS" for the sending domain. Done. It's just a hassle. We'd have a period of two years where there is a transition, and it just hasn't gotten that bad yet.

  • email problem? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kasper37 ( 90457 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @03:04AM (#9568699) Homepage
    Your problem is not with email, it's with your administrator. If they can't give you an answer as to why it's happening then you need to find someone else because they don't know what they're doing. If you are outsourcing your email (ie someone not in your company is controlling the box) then the company better be able to give you a straight answer. I deal with servers that deliver mail in the tens of thousands a day, and if only 1/1000 were going through slowly (let alone not at all!) there would be major flak to be had.

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by taped2thedesk ( 614051 ) * on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @03:08AM (#9568716)
    Has the inevitable finally happened? After years of dismissing as alarmist all the commentary about how road salt and poor engineering will eventually render cars useless, is it actually happening to us?

    I don't know about you, but for the past three days, I haven't been able to get my car to start. The engine won't turn over, and oil is leaking from somewhere under the hood.

    I've resorted to taking the bus to work every morning. In extreme cases I've even had to walk! Is it only a matter of time before we all resort to telecommuting? (And if so, what are we going to do with all of those gas stations?)

    • and what about carrier pigeons? Have bike carriers, letter mail, email, telephone, and voip rendered the helpless birds useless? I don't know about anyone else, but for the last few years, I haven't gotten a single response from my carrier pigeon messages. I pick up the fat little birds at the park, attach office documents, assignments, and reports and watch them struggle to get off the ground. They fly away and I never hear from them again. I've had to resort to email just to get my documents to famil

  • No, actually its time.. (Score:4, Informative)

    by tigersha ( 151319 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @04:31AM (#9569005) Homepage
    ...that you get a compentent network administrator.

  • If you have *any* kind of tech nounce then you should know that attachments are stupid

    "hey lets convert this binary file to 7 bit ascii and send it via email"

    why not say "lets convert this binary to bar code and fax it"

    SMTP - Small Message Transfer Protocol
    FTP - File Transfer Protocol
    HTTP - Hyper Text Transfer Protocol

    MIME - Multile Incompatible Message Extensions

    If you don't respect the conventions, how the hell can you expect the conventions to respect you!

    SMTP doesn't and never has guaranteed messa

  • High expectations... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by admbws ( 600017 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @05:34AM (#9569157) Homepage Journal
    We've resorted to sending one another an IM every time we send an email to confirm that the messages are arriving alright.

    E-mail has never pretended to be reliable. Once your mail is sent to an alien mail-server, anything can happen, so you're daft if you're using it for anything mission critical. Of course, you do get what you pay for. I've used free email services that have taken hours, even days to propagate an email.

  • Always call if emails are important (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ColaMan ( 37550 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @05:34AM (#9569158) Journal
    In extreme cases we have even reverted to using a telephone handset to ensure that clients have received everything that was sent.

    Ok, email basics here.

    Emails are a queued store-and-forward system. Even with the advent of Pretty-Much-High-Speed-To-Everywhere Internet, it can still sometimes take *days* to get an email to it's recipient and there's still no "problem" as such - it's just overloaded queues, a slow link, or a connectivity issue. Email was designed to try, try, again, so in most cases it will get *enevtually* through. In the cases it cannot, you'll either get a fairly instant reply (eg "no such user") or you'll get "soft" warnings after a few hours and a hard error a few days later.

    If your emails are important , or contain stuff that must be acted on in a certain timeframe, do not rely on it magically appearing in their inbox 3 seconds after you send that 2 meg attachment. Always contact them via some other channel and confirm delivery.

    • Re:Always call if emails are important (Score:4, Interesting)

      by scrytch ( 9198 ) <chuck@myrealbox.com> on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @10:16AM (#9570609)
      > it can still sometimes take *days* to get an email to it's recipient and there's still no "problem" as such

      If it takes "days" without any notification, then something most certainly is wrong -- if not broken, at least overloaded, and will be broken soon. If you know neither side is supposed to be queueing mail out or in, then mail should arrive immediately (modulo some sort of minutes-long polling/refresh interval in the delivery agent). Email does not typically travel through a dozen hops any more than you would expect your flights to have a dozen layovers. This is not 1988 anymore.

      But it sure isn't spam that's the problem here, and even if it is, it's no excuse for email to be silently lost. The article simply demonstrates incompetence in action. But hey, it's also evolution in action: the company that can manage to keep email running will be more likely to keep their clients. The circle of life continues .. or something.

      • "If you know neither side is supposed to be queueing mail out or in, then mail should arrive immediately (modulo some sort of minutes-long polling/refresh interval in the delivery agent)."

        I think you're confusing email with Instant Messaging. Try not to confuse the two.

        There is no such thing as "guaranteed instant delivery" in email, and there never was. We don't need to replace SMTP (which works fine), with something "faster", just because people demand instant access to emails the second they click

        • I think you're confusing email with Instant Messaging. Try not to confuse the two.

          Condescending much? I talk about systems, I get lectures about protocol. Wrong tree, I'm in this one over here. The typical design of a mail system allows for nearly instantaneous delivery. And that delivery delays of days have never been normal. I'm sure there's some fella running a mail gateway that requires him to tunnel it over RFC1149 (IP over Avian Carrier Transport) that might see a week's delay when the pigeons g
  • If you are looking for private and secured messaging, group-chat and file transfer alternatives, there are several available, being P2P or centralized. Just to name a few.

    Waste [sf.net]

    Kdx [haxial.com]

    Jabber [jabber.org]

  • You could set up an FTP site, or switch ISPs.
  • Who probably offers "advanced anti-spam techniques" for small monthly fee.
    I have run my own domain since 1996, and I've never experienced the trouble you describe.

  • email is not dead... and isn't flawed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by salesgeek ( 263995 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @08:37AM (#9569737) Homepage
    Come on. I've been online since the mid 80s. Every time someone complains about spammers or bad protocols or _______ eating up all the bandwidth they are wrong. Reality is that Spam is not fun - but it is not really costing us the gazillions of dollars people say it is. The worst part is that spam can be managed by very simple tools like server-side filters or the the built in spam filter in my email client. The server kills the V14GrA and f4st C@$H junk and my client keeps the rest of what I don't want to see off my plate. Reality check:

    * 50% of the phone calls I get are from sales people.
    * 80% of the snail mail I get is marketing junk. The other 20% are bills.
    * 25-30% of TV time consists of commercials.
    * 10% of the email I see is spam. The other 200 spams go directly to Thunderwhatever's junk folder where I occasionally check them, then purge them.

    Brain dead system administrators, stupid users who fill in every form possible online and wanton use of internet explorer are really the cause of the spam problem. Show me someone who gets thousands of spams, and I'll show you somoene who has posted their email address to a public website or usenet or has clicked on install for some popup marketing tool for IE.
    • The problem the author of the article pointed out isn't the loss of time due to spam, it is the unreliability of the system due to anti-spam.

      White lists, black lists, strict mail filters. Are you sure you're e-mail went through? The best way to be sure is to call.
    • I don't live in the US, I don't have to suffer 25% to 30% commercial time on TV. However your TV analogy is a good one. In any hour there may be 15-20 minutes of ads and 40 to 45 minutes of programs.

      You by a Tivo or whatever and you can skip the ads and see back-to-back program. If the station increases their ad/content ratio, you still don't see the ads but the reception is slower.

      Thunderbird may filter spam, but it is still cluttering up your mail server *and* your bandwidth. If you are on a slow/expe

    • * 50% of the phone calls I get are from sales people

      I haven't gotten a telemarketing call in at least six years. I simply signed up for the DMA's telephone preference service (free) and had my phone number unlisted ($0.25 per month).

      * 80% of the snail mail I get is marketing junk. The other 20% are bills.

      This was much higher for me. When I moved into my house, I was receiving 110 mail-order catalogs a week (more near Christmas). Several bills were lost in the pages. My trash/recycling company said

  • Is it only a matter of time before we all resort to file transfer by P2P?

    Let us not forget that email was the original file transfer by P2P back before we all decided to rely on someone else to run our sendmail services.

  • It is no different than USENET; nobody reads newsgroups any more. There used to be some content, while people were just discovering it in the 90s, but now there is nothing but idiots and spammers.

  • Cost of Free Email (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Wednesday June 30, 2004 @09:46AM (#9570316) Homepage Journal

    Lately, my AM radio statio has been playing self-serving advertisements playing up the fact that, unlike cable TV, movies in theaters, etc, radio is still free.

    Free, that is, and they don't mention, if you don't mind wasting your time polluting your unconscious mind with the drivel of commercial culture for close to 50% of the listening experience.

    Likewise, if you get your email from a provider that locks the front gates enough with good spam protection, it's acceptable.

    But "free" email accounts are typically so spam infested that the true cost becomes apparent.

  • ... Film at 11.

    Attachments disappear or become garbled, mail disappears into the great beyond, or arrives hours after it has been sent, even within the same ISP.

    I suggest you either switch ISP, or host your own mail server with a competent sysadmin.

    Personnally, I never used email as much as I do today. The volume of spam suck, and the time wasted pampering SpamAssassin and other spam counter-measure is insane, but so far the gain still outweight the effort for the vast majority of people apparently.

  • Unless you want to be broadcasting "very important internal document" to the rest of the P2P network. I would recommend an alternate solution. Make an automatic file uploader that sends the document(s) to a secure web site. Either IM or e-mail the intended recipient, giving them the URL and username/password. Ideally, they would have the username and password previously and you don't have to send it over the Internet at all (give it to them via phone call). Let them know the document will be deleted fr
  • > In extreme cases we have even reverted to using a telephone handset...

    Good God! That must have been an extreme case to warrant actually speaking to another human being!
    Let's hope it doesn't happen again.

  • Delivery and routing issues happen occasionally as a result of changes in the fabric in the internet. These can be caused by router failures, line cuts, and any of a number of other causes. Usually these sort themselves out after a brief interval.

    If you're having one of the rare problems where the problem isn't going away, contact your ISP. If they can't/won't fix it, then fire them! There are plenty of companies which have no problem delivering email. My best luck has been, believe it or not, with Y
  • I work for a major university, and one of the things we do here is make sure everyone has access to email. We're not on any blacklists, and everyone can send and recieve mail quite well. Before you claim "anecdotal evidence", let's look at the sheer sense of scale I'm talking about.

    Let's see where we're at today...

    Hmm, 42,600 people on this campus alone (there's 2 others!), and no one's bitching very loudly. We even do pretty decent spam checking.

    Don't post to /. again until you've come to your senses


  • Newsgroups: alt.current-events.net-abuse
    Path:
    ucsbuxb.ucsb . edu!library.ucla.edu!news.ucdavis.edu !csus.edu!csusac!
    charnel.e cst.csuchico.edu!olivea!spool.mu.edu!howland.resto n.ans.net!
    news.sprintlink. net!news.tyrell.net!ttyt1.tyrell.net!user
    From: Inside@tyrell.net (Mark Eberra-Network Adm.)
    Subject: An Open Letter To The Internet From Mark Eberra
    X-Nntp-Posting-Host: ttyt1.tyrell.net
    Message-ID:
    Sender: news@tyrell.net (*)
    Organization: Inside Connections(tm) Commercial Network
    Date: Thu, 9 Mar 1995 00:02:5
  • You are a virtual organisation with telecommuters, yet you don't have the infrasctucture in place to support them?

    Why are you relying on an ISP for mail services? Why are you using existing IM networks? You should be running these yourself. Get a domain. Run a DNS server. Run an SMTP/IMAP server. Manage it all in-house. Install a messaging server and keep your business IM off the public networks.

    E-mail isn't broken. Your e-mail configuration/setup/infrastructure is.

    Don't blame the tools when the
  • It seems to me just recently certain cable providers have finally begun blocking port 25 to prevent all the spam/zombies/etc. bullshit.

    Is your amazing telecommuting company of ~20 people or so a spam circle? Or are you just using crap residential cable to handle your 'business' email?

    Email is fine, your setup/admin is hosed.
  • I've never had a signifigant or regular disapearing email problem.

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