{"id":40610,"date":"2023-09-11T15:06:47","date_gmt":"2023-09-11T19:06:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=40610"},"modified":"2024-09-12T09:34:29","modified_gmt":"2024-09-12T13:34:29","slug":"today-in-e-mail-hegemony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/11\/today-in-e-mail-hegemony\/","title":{"rendered":"Today in E-mail Hegemony"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jamie Zawinski<\/a> (Mastodon<\/a>):<\/p>\n

People keep telling me how email is a great federation success story.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

Here’s the current top ten from the last ~2 years since our post-lockdown re-opening[…]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gmail and Yahoo are dominant, with still a large number of AOL users from his audience, which likely skews more technical.<\/p>\n

Also, my spell checker thingy won’t let you hit “Purchase” with an invalid TLD, and yet, I have 56 orders from gmail.con. There is no .con TLD yet, I checked, though I would not have placed bets on that. So how did those get through? JavaScript turned off? Nope. Every one of them was via Apple Pay, which does not do the typo check as Apple tells us the email directly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It looks like Apple Pay lets you enter an e-mail address that’s different from the one used by your Apple ID, and Apple doesn’t verify it.<\/p>\n\n

Update (2023-10-10): I saw first-hand, as people upgraded to SpamSieve 3<\/a>, that many people have entered e-mail addresses into Apple Pay that are defunct or were never valid in the first place.<\/p>\n\n

Update (2024-09-12): Eryn Wells<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I’ve spent a decent chunk of time over the last week or two learning how to set up a mail server to self-host my email.<\/p>

Ran into a problem with my two test email servers being unable to receive traffic on port 25 from each other. Turns out my VPS provider (and many others) block it for security reasons. I don’t think this is unreasonable.<\/p>

Most have a mechanism for submitting a ticket to unblock the port, but mine, at least, explicitly doesn’t unblock SMTP for personal servers. :(<\/p>

The internet is increasingly not a place where it makes sense to do this kind of thing. Email in particular relies on trust among carriers to manage the unfathomable deluge of spam. Even relatively minor infractions or misconfigurations can get you denylisted by big mail carriers, and they won’t think twice about it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n