Required Action for all users: Disable all email notifications right now! Thank you

[Danke]

But I'm more organised than that and prefer the computer to work for me, not the other way round. Every notification of anything from anyone comes through email.

Too complicated.

 

[Danke]

Can I get an email confirmation that it worked? ?

Probably, but it may take quite a while before it’s delivered being that you’re in Sweden.

 

[No.15]

I’d tell you a joke about UDP, but you probably wouldn’t get it.

Can I hear a UDP joke?

Anyway, I switched from TCP to UDP because of Covid 19

 

[Mithril]

This thread is like "this is why we can't have nice things" and "tragedy of the commons" and "why most preppers wouldn't make it through actual SHTF" all rolled into one.

I get the confusion, frustration, and possibly even anger before being informed what's going on. But the absolute, dare I say, childishness after being told whats up, well I wish I could say that it's shocking. Granted I've gotten spicy about things in threads, so I'm trying not to be too "throwing stones in glass houses" here, but goodness.

 

[Will Prowse]

There is some drama on this forum but most of the traffic from google is predominantly directed at serious threads with data/evidence and mature conversation. So the forum is accomplishing its purpose. Just some hiccups here and there but the exchange of information on some threads is no where else on the internet. Just need to keep things going steady and manage spam. Things are going great.

 

[Mithril]

There is some drama on this forum but most of the traffic from google is predominantly directed at serious threads with data/evidence and mature conversation. So the forum is accomplishing its purpose. Just some hiccups here and there but the exchange of information on some threads is no where else on the internet. Just need to keep things going steady and manage spam. Things are going great.

I agree, really good info:noise ratio here.

Some of the heated convos come from being passionate about things, or what people perceive as saving/helping others from making mistakes.

 

[erik.calco]

I did search first, but couldn't find anything. And no, it's not convenient for me to come check this site, since it's 1 of 100 places I go for all sorts of topics. Other forums seem to manage emails ok, I guess a new host is needed. If the email was sent from a different server, it wouldn't block the site. But the main cause is the moronic filters thinking a notification is spam.

P.S. the message really should say something like "because it's costing $1000 a day". People might obey an instruction if it gives a reason. I certainly never obey anything unless a reason is given and I agree with it (and that includes the law).

The real solution is everyone hosting their own email server taking cloud providers out of the equation. Unfortunately, consumer ISPs block port 25 and others to force people to use cloud providers. This is not how the Internet was designed. Everyone should be able to run and use servers. In 1990, corporations didn't even know what the Internet was, upload speeds were the same as download speeds and no ports were blocked. It was true peer to peer. Today, the corporations think they own the Internet and use that to herd us and conform to their rules, turning us into their products.

I, personally, have been running my own email servers since the 90s.

 

[erik.calco]

We were having millions of emails going out to users who have not been active in the last 180 days. Now email notifications only go out to people who have been active recently.

Next issue was people who opted-in to email notifications would mark them as spam and our IP address was getting black listed every week or so. It got so bad that the entire forum had to shut down.

Now I am tracking every single spam complaint with a special program and I am either banning the users here on the forum directly or spam cleaning them. It is working wonders! It has been about a week of no issues. I am hoping this has solved the issue.

The notice is helping a ton! The amount of emails going out keeps going down each day. Really happy I do not have to spend thousands on email host.

Does this mean I can re-enable email notifications since (a) they go to my email server and (b) I'd never in a million years "report" one as SPAM?

BTW, just because we take sabbaticals, doesn't mean we don't appreciate emails on replies to our old threads, and don't occasionally click on one and log in again. ?

I completely understand blacklisting issues. I got on one when I built a new firewall and accidently turned my email server into an open relay that Russian bots quickly began to use. I switched to another IP that I had to build reputation on.

This tells you how to not make that mistake

Using FirewallD as a Linux Router

www.eriksuniverse.com

 

[upnorthandpersonal]

The real solution is everyone hosting their own email server taking cloud providers out of the equation. Unfortunately, consumer ISPs block port 25 and others to force people to use cloud providers. This is not how the Internet was designed. Everyone should be able to run and use servers.

It's not an issue to run your own server. I have several email servers for my company in our own datacenter. The issue is keeping your email server off of blacklists. This is easy when you just send a few emails for e.g. a small company, but as soon as you start sending thousands of emails, others will start blacklisting you since you appear to be a spammer, especially when some of your emails get flagged as such - by accident or otherwise - by some of the the tens of thousands of users of the forum.

 

[erik.calco]

It's not an issue to run your own server. I have several email servers for my company in our own datacenter. The issue is keeping your email server off of blacklists. This is easy when you just send a few emails for e.g. a small company, but as soon as you start sending thousands of emails, others will start blacklisting you since you appear to be a spammer, especially when some of your emails get flagged as such - by accident or otherwise - by some of the the tens of thousands of users of the forum.

I was not referring to Will or any individual. I'm saying this is a problem created by corporations that (a) moved everyone to cloud providers and then (b) cloud providers that put spam that isn't really spam on those lists (often because they don't comply with corporate created "standards") then (c) reject emails and punish IPs for those lists and (d) have created a hosting environment that punishes people hosting servers on those IPs.

Blacklists overall are not necessarily a bad thing. But, look at how many issues are created in a large corporate controlled system. The point I'm making is that if the big corporations did not interfere with the evolution of the Internet, EVERYONE would be running their own email servers. Wouldn't have to do anything. Could be default for any OS install. If you are concerned about uptime, you can put one in a VPS that forwards to yours, or rent one like that (which is also one way to host one in your home and get around port blocking). Email should be P2P. So, if people want to whitelist any sender, by domain, email address or IP, they can. Centralization is our current problem.

What can individuals do today? They can begin by not taking port blocking lying down. Demand an ISP that does not block port 25. You might have to pay for business, but if we all paid for business, there would either be no consumer/business tiers, or they would have to stop port blocking the consumer tier to preserve the more profitable multi-tier pricing. The competition of ISPs at the end of the day would evolve to demand. But, people are not demanding it.

Look at the original problem. People are clicking on the SPAM button on emails from the forum. Those individuals likely aren't trying to blacklist. They have no idea that the corporate email system they are using is doing more than just putting those emails in the Trash bin. They may even think that the Trash bin is a convient way to have those kinds of emails deleted in 30 days.

Likewise, if everyone had their own email server, they can decide which blacklists to use. In the end, we'd vote for the best of breed, or just quit using them. I personally quit using them because I found better ways to block spam using methods you can only do if you run your own email server. (If you run a server, learn how to wildcard and change it to anything other than "+").

Where is the option to provide +1 info to these blacklists so when the +1 is greater than the SPAM clicks it can keep the forum sender off the blacklists? P2P solutions solve problems like this. Corporate solutions don't care about their impact.

 

[justgary]

Demand an ISP that does not block port 25.

Yeeesh. Plaintext email transmission mostly ended about 30 years ago. I prefer to send my emails encrypted and authenticated. Port 587 is the default email submission port. Use it if you care at all about security.

 

[erik.calco]

Yeeesh. Plaintext email transmission mostly ended about 30 years ago. I prefer to send my emails encrypted and authenticated. Port 587 is the default email submission port. Use it if you care at all about security.

Now we're going a bit offtopic, but TLS over 25 has been standard for a long time. You can require it, even for incoming, and some MTAs won't talk to your server if it is not enabled and up-to-date. You also always require auth to send to domains you are not receiving for.