Dnia 13.12.2025 o godz. 20:27:00 Jarland Donnell via mailop pisze: > Obviously, we can't block Gmail. Can't be done. We can filter by > content, but that is getting harder and harder to do with anything > short of burning LLM tokens to get a "human-like" read on every > email, they'll change content around in virtually infinite ways to > get around content filters. So instead my goal is to make sending > spam from networks that aren't Google or Microsoft so incredibly > difficult that spammers realize there's really only one way to reach > my customers with their spam: Send from Google or Microsoft. > > I'm doing this by only allowing mail from whitelisted IPs from every > network out there that sends more spam than ham. That means Hetzner, > it means parts of OVH, virtually every cloud provider out there. > > If I can force increased outbound spam from Google and Microsoft, > everyone collectively is going to be circling them with pitchforks > to make spam THEIR problem to solve.
I'm not sure if this post is serious or just a joke, but if this is serious, it's not gonna work. Assume everybody starts to do excessive blocking like you suggest here. Inevitably, this will not affect only spam, but also legitimate mail. Guess where all the users who could not reach their recipients would move in the end? Yes... to Google, as the provider everyone knows about and the only one who is definitely not blocked. And nobody will care about spam as long as their mail gets through. Actually, I sometimes have the impression that nobody except anti-spam community seems to care about spam. People just happily accept it and ignore ;) - or even worse, they sometimes actually find it useful and buy the products/services advertised by spammers. What makes me think so? The fact that so many people are surfing the Web without adblockers, despite them being easily available. If they don't care about intrusive ads that disturb you all the time when viewing websites, they probably won't care about spam in their mailbox as well. Also, less and less people are using email for actual person-to-person communication, which is the thing people like me care most about when it comes to email. Nowadays the huge majority of legitimate email traffic (spam excluded) seems to be just transactional emails from various services: order confirmations, package tracking details, bank account statements, notifications about court cases, electricity and telephone bills, password reset links... and so on. For actual personal communication, people have long ago switched to various instant messengers (which sadly are incompatible with each other, and form closed ecosystems around the particular provider, totally contrary to email). The fight is lost :( Fun(?) fact: there is a free email provider in my country (and still a quite popular one) that, as a part of their terms of service, spams the users of their free mailboxes by literally DOZENS of advertisement emails. There can be 15-20 of them per day. For someone who uses email occasionally (and this is probably majority of users of that platform) it is hard to find those few actual emails you have received among this spam (well, technically it's not spam, because you agreed to receive it when signing for the free mailbox, but would you call this practice by any other word than spam? I would not). And people are still using those accounts. So do they care about spam? I don't think so. Similarly people don't care about excessive blocking. They are just used to the fact that "sometimes email just doesn't get through" and accept it as a normal and obvious thing(?!). That's also one of the reasons why they are switching to messengers, because they seem to be more reliable for them. So if they won't be able to send an email, they will look for another way of contacting the recipient (via messenger or even social media maybe). That's another reason why your plan won't work. -- Regards, Jaroslaw Rafa [email protected] -- "In a million years, when kids go to school, they're gonna know: once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub." _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list [email protected] https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
