I’m not sure AI would work for detecting spam using email contents so surely it would use other metrics… and if it does, it’s just become another email filter. I don’t think that solution would help much.
I think ultimately email failed as a federated service because in general people do not care about email. They just want to use it to login to services, get one time codes, receipts and maybe if they’re fancy - a newsletter.
From a personal perspective, I absolutely agree - I only check my email when I’m specifically expecting something, which is rarely. But at work emails are still incredibly important.
Are there any protocols/services designed specifically for one time codes? Receipts? I think something that’s dedicated to those kinds of tasks would be great from an ease-of-use perspective - no more messing about waiting for delivery, searching through hordes of emails, checking spam folder, etc.
Another problem we have is the rise of oauth - the core idea is great, but the reality is that it ties a lot of people to these Big Tech services.
For OTP, most people would recommend using TOTP. I don’t think there’s a solution for receipts.
Yeah regarding the first part, for the most part I’m the same way. I don’t care about email. But my work absolutely does. And it’s a big part of our communication, moreso now that we are full wfh
AI’s been in use in commercial anti-spam for quite a while now - and on the flip side is also being used by the spam senders. Just another front on the unending war.
But spam (and phishing, and all malware) happens because humans get fooled by it. No reason to think AI will be any smarter.
Spam is a menace, but bayesian filters and whitelists work quite well together.
Set up boxtrapper and you’ll never have a spam email again. As long as you set up SPF and DKIM records on your mailserver, you’ll never get marked as spam.
This post seems to have been written by someone who has no idea what the hell they are even talking about.
As long as you set up SPF and DKIM records on your mailserver, you’ll never get marked as spam.
Sorry - that’s factually incorrect. If your IP is on a residential block, you’ll be downscored. If you’re on a dynamic IP, same again, but weighted even more harshly, by pretty much every antispam service. In addition, every commercial service is very secretive about what methods they use, for good reason, so you cannot claim with any accuracy that “you just need to do this $thing to get read”. (Although I do agree the original post is not well researched, knowledgeable nor particularly useful to anyone)
SPF and DKIM are essential to getting your email out, but it’s not the only thing, and sometimes no matter what you do do, your hit rate is going to be low.
Source: Me. Been running mail servers privately and commercially for over twenty years. Before then, I ran fidonet and netmail services through the 90s and into the tail end of the 80s. There’s many things I know bugger all about, but email is not one of them. (And if anyone’s interested what I do for personal email now - I use gmail, because it works and maintaining it is somebody else’s problem)
Obviously I didn’t mean that your email 100% WILL NOT be marked as spam just because spf and domain key are set correctly. My point was that your email won’t be auto-bounced just because it didn’t come from gmail/hotmail/aol/etc. I also was talking about mail servers from web hosting companies, such as inmotionhosting.
As is often the case there is more nuance to this. As others have pointed out, it is still possible to run your own mailserver if you really want to.
But, there are also other options that aren’t google, microsoft or any other service.
I personally have registered my own domain and have my mail hosted by mailbox.org. If I am ever dissatisfied with them I can simply pick a different mail hosting provider and move my domain there. Other privacy minded providers can be found here: https://www.privacytools.io/privacy-email
And there are also more options if you just want reliable mail and care slightly less about overall privacy. Fastmail for example is a popular choice.
Yes, these are not free. But neither is hosting it yourself as that costs you the VPS/container to host it and a bunch more time and effort.
What it does provide you with is the ability to no longer use big tech while allowing you to mail with people still having their mail hosted there.
