Email notifications

[rehsd]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

Pardon the blunt question, but why are you messing with that Microsoft spyware for E-mail?

A bit off topic, but I'll bite. How did you come to that conclusion? With which specific products/services are you concerned? What are your preferred email service providers (and why)?

[barrym95838]

BDD formed many of his opinions over 65 million years ago, before the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, so please keep that in mind before you engage in any debates with him. I don't try to argue with him, but I have been known to tease him from a safe distance, always being mindful of that dangerous tail of his.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

rehsd wrote:

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

Pardon the blunt question, but why are you messing with that Microsoft spyware for E-mail?

How did you come to that conclusion?

Microsoft's past history and the general behavior of their software. In the past, when I’ve had Windows 10 machines on the test bench, I had noticed they periodically connect to servers whose IP blocks belong to Microsoft (our shop network is routed through a Linux box that logs every connection between machines under test and the outside world). MS Update was not running when this happened, so there's only one explanation for the surreptitious connections...and it wasn't to find out what the weather was like in Redmond.

In any case, it’s hardly a secret that Windows 10 and MS applications that run on it gather statistics about system usage for transmission to Microsoft. That was established early on when 10 was released. Software that does that sort of thing without the user's knowledge is spyware.

Quote:

With which specific products/services are you concerned?

I'm not concerned with any of them since I retired and no longer have to deal with Windows maladies. Anyone who wants to use MS applications should be concerned (same with using Bing or Google as search engines).

Quote:

What are your preferred email service providers (and why)?

None. I run my own E-mail server.

[BigEd]

From the perspective of the general forum user, these tactics and observations aren't going to make any difference.

It's handy, BDD, that you have your own server and can see the raw incoming email. In particular, you're in the position to see and report on the envelope and the transport. Whereas in general, those of us using email providers might see only the header and the body.

rehsd, it will be interesting to see if you can tweak your setup to improve matters. It might possibly help Mike figure out an improvement.

[rehsd]

BigEd wrote:

rehsd, it will be interesting to see if you can tweak your setup to improve matters. It might possibly help Mike figure out an improvement.

The issue appears to be outside of the M365 email services to which I subscribe. I have essentially disabled all incoming security/SPAM checks for 6502.org, by domain name, from email address, and SMTP source IP (i.e., the sending server, listed earlier in the thread). Prior to even doing this, the incoming logs should have shown any dropped emails. I checked again today, and the logs are empty for anything related to this forum.

If someone could PM me (or post here) the full header of a 6502.org forum email notification, that would be helpful. (something like looks like this)

[akohlbecker]

As another data point, my notifications also get delivered to the Spam folder in Gmail.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

rehsd wrote:

If someone could PM me (or post here) the full header of a 6502.org forum email notification, that would be helpful. (something like looks like this)

Please check your PM when convenient.

[rehsd]

Nothing in the header stood out to me that would prevent delivery.

If someone from the 6502.org email side of things (Mike?) wants to dig deeper into it, we could do a quick telnet test from the 6502.org sending server.

I'll just plan on manually checking the forum periodically.

[BigEd]

Just to note: today I got a notification email direct to my inbox. With luck, the overactive antispam measures will no longer get in the way.

Edit: just got four delivered into spam, so we're not out of the woods yet.

[Sheep64]

I noticed your message on Reddit which might cause some people to think that the 6502 Forum is snooty or elitist when this is not the case.

Since the 1990s, Bill Gates has wanted to charge a "digital stamp" for sending email. This hasn't happened because people are collectively cheap-skates. However, services cost money to run and there is a Big Tech mantra that "If you're not paying for the service, you're the product." This has led to a double-dipping scheme where The Product receives adverts while bulk email senders are expected to pay fees for delivery. My information might be highly out-dated but believe that 800-1000 messages per month were allowed. Anything more can be overcome by waving some greenbacks. Don't have any money? That's your problem. It is very much like dealing with customs. You probably won't get charged for five PCBs but if you spend USD1000, your order will be blocked until you pay taxes.

6502 Forum membership has grown by 1/5 since I joined and many people set notification flags on dormant topics. Therefore, I presume that we've hit a plausible threshold of 1000 messages per month. Sheep20, who knows more than me about email, recommended batching notification messages to indefinitely defer this problem.

barrym95838 on Sat 26 Feb 2022 wrote:

my setup is different than yours, in that I have an @yahoo.com address

Yahoo has a higher threshold. That is why it is currently unaffected. However, sooner or later, every major email service will want a cut.

rehsd on Sun 27 Feb 2022 wrote:

I directly subscribe to the M365 services

If you receive adverts then you're being triple-dipped. Either way, you're being treated like the product. That's disrespectful.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

Sheep64 wrote:

Since the 1990s, Bill Gates has wanted to charge a "digital stamp" for sending email...

rehsd on Sun 27 Feb 2022 wrote:

I directly subscribe to the M365 services

If you receive adverts then you're being triple-dipped.

All the more reason to: 1) Stay away from Micro$oft, 2) Stay away from Google, 3) Stay away from Yahoo...etc. A free E-mail account is never free. If nothing else, your time is being consumed in having to deal with the advertising and other asserted cr*p that is emitted by the above (and other) “free” services. It's as bad as the effluent that gushes in from Facebook. And then there is the spyware aspect...

I registered my current domain name in 1999, and my E-mail server went on line shortly thereafter. Before that, I had an ameritech.net E-mail address, which at the time, seldom resulted in advertising and junk mail showing up. It wasn't until after the dot-com bubble burst that the advertising got into high gear. By then, I had cut the cord with Ameritech (one of the “Baby Bell” companies that arose after the AT&T breakup in 1984), obtained static IP addresses for my domain, and was hosting my own website, E-mail, DNS, etc., on one of my servers (a SCO OpenServer box back then—the switch to Linux et al came in 2006). During those “early years,” I developed the automatic anti-spam functions that still run on my server to this day. That alone has had a marked effect on the spam inflow, so much so that I've implemented it for several clients on their self-administered mail servers.

My point is you will never escape the Bill Gates money-grubbing mentality as long as you depend on so-called free hosting. Hosting your own E-mail (and website, if you're so inclined) is not technically difficult to do, and doesn't demand a lot in the way of server resources (an old AMD Opteron box that was taken out of service some 15 years ago hosts my mail, routing, NAT, etc.). The majority of our members have more than sufficient technical savvy to do what I did, and some already have. Best of all, the software needed to set up and maintain a private E-mail server is itself free for the downloading (I use SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and Sendmail).

Quote:

Either way, you're being treated like the product. That's disrespectful.

You're being treated worse than the product. A product has some value. You have no value once that spam arrives in your in-box.

[akohlbecker]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

Hosting your own E-mail (and website, if you're so inclined) is not technically difficult to do.

As much as I hate to say it, while this statement was true before 2000, maybe 2010, hosting your own email has become exponentially difficult to do in the past decade if you want reliable delivery to the major players (Gmail...). Having a basic setup is easy, but if you want your sent messages to land outside the Spam box in Gmail, that's another story, as evidenced by the existence of this thread. Keeping up with the various metadata requirements, making sure the server doesn't end up on a blacklist, making sure to progressively warm-up an IP by increasing email traffic over time, etc... are time investments that few people are ready to make.

[jmthompson]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

Hosting your own E-mail (and website, if you're so inclined) is not technically difficult to do, and doesn't demand a lot in the way of server resources (an old AMD Opteron box that was taken out of service some 15 years ago hosts my mail, routing, NAT, etc.)

A lot of people aren't going to have a way to host an email server on-prem and will need to rent a cloud server of some sort, because blocking incoming port 25 to residential customers is a common way to cut down on open relays running on hijacked computers. For someone paying for a service now maybe that's not a big deal, but for people used to free email it may be a deal breaker.

The other aspect to consider is maintenance. Once you've got a mail server on the net you're gonna need to keep up on your security patches and monitoring for intrusion attempts. Sure you can turn on auto-updates and you'll probably be fine...until you're not.

Here's a simple example. I currently run two cloud-hosted servers for myself, one for Minecraft for me and the wife, and one that runs my blog and an email server. The email server is solely for the use of a friend of mine whose domain I have hosted for nearly 25 years, going way back to when I ran an ISP. About two months ago he hits me up on FB and says "hey I'm not getting email". So, I go poke around...I see email coming in, and I see it delivering to his inbox. But he's not seeing it. After much digging it turns out somebody decided to deprecate some older TLS certs that were being used by the IMAP server, so his client wasn't actually logging in.

Anyway, my point is, while it's not hard to set up an email server, it does take some elbow grease (and either existing knowledge, or good Google-fu) to maintain it. Not everyone has the skills and/or time to do that, and that's fine.

That being said I understand your sentiments. I've been on Gmail almost since it opened, and I'm more entrenched in the Google ecosystem than I care to admit. Ever since the death of free Workspace accounts though I've been mulling over hosting my own email again; I've got the server space after all. I am just not yet sure if I want the added responsibility in my life right now.

BTW I' not surprised you like sendmail. The config file looks like old school line noise.

[GARTHWILSON]

jmthompson wrote:

because blocking incoming port 25 to residential customers is a common way to cut down on open relays running on hijacked computers.

That's what's kept our son from doing his own email service. We've never been able to get port 25 unblocked here. He used to host my website and a few others in our garage on an old PC, but then he moved it to a virtual server 3,000 miles away that has an upload speed that's much faster than what we have at home, and the price is less than it was costing us just for the electric bill to run the server in the garage.

[jmthompson]

GARTHWILSON wrote:

jmthompson wrote:

because blocking incoming port 25 to residential customers is a common way to cut down on open relays running on hijacked computers.

That's what's kept our son from doing his own email service. We've never been able to get port 25 unblocked here. He used to host my website and a few others in our garage on an old PC, but then he moved it to a virtual server 3,000 miles away that has an upload speed that's much faster than what we have at home, and the price is less than it was costing us just for the electric bill to run the server in the garage.

And it can be even worse; I forgot to mention that it's also common practice to blacklist incoming mail from IP blocks that are known to be assigned to residential cable and DSL customers. So even if you just try to do outgoing mail directly from home you may find that those emails are silently thrown into a black hole.