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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • digdilem@lemmy.mltoOpen Source@lemmy.mlThe Death of Decentralized Email
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    2 days ago

    (This is as much an answer to some of the comments already raised, as to the article - which like most such personal pieces has pros and cons.)

    As part of a previous job I used to host email for a small business - this was about 15 years ago. I ended up spending several hours to a day a week working on it; apologising to users, tracing and diagnosing missing sent email and the endless, ENDLESS arms war against incoming spam (phishing was much less of a problem then). The trust from the company in our email operation was very poor and you’d regularly hear someone apologising to a customer because we hadn’t contacted them, or answered their email. The truth is much was going astray and staff were relying more on the phone than email because they knew it worked. You might guess from this that I’m terrible at running an email system but I don’t think I am. I started moving email back in the late 80s when Fidonet was the thing, so I have some miles travelled. Tools have improved a bit since then, but so have those used by the bad guys.

    I still consider one of the best things I did for that company was move our company email onto Gmail Business (which was free for us as a charity) Every single one of those problems went away immediately and suddenly I had a lot more time to do more important stuff. I would never self-host email again despite running several personal servers.

    Plenty of people say they self-host just fine, and great for you if that’s so. But the truth is you won’t always know if your outbound mail silently gets dropped and you have a far higher chance of it arriving if it comes from a reputable source. There are a huge number of variables outside of your control. (ISP, your country, your region, your software, even the latency of your MX or DKIM responses factor into your reputation)

    You take the decision on whether any perceieved risks of privacy through using a third party outweighs the deliverability and filtering issues of self hosting, but please don’t say it’s simple or reliable for everyone. If it’s simple for you, you’re either incredibly lucky or just not appreciating the problem.


  • digdilem@lemmy.mltoOpen Source@lemmy.mlThe Death of Decentralized Email
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    2 days ago

    You’re spot on, and even smaller ISPs routinely get blocked by larger hosters (anyone who doubts this, please look around for the many stories along the lines of “gmail silently drops my email”)

    Residential IP blocks are scored much higher and given a negative trust from the start - not surprising since that’s where much of the world’s spam comes from through compromised computers, routers etc.





  • digdilem@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlHas Techlore sold out?
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    11 days ago

    I think you have to be exceptionally strong to resist this sort of thing. You can justify sponsorship in a hundred ways - not least to yourself. But in every case, it changes everything. That, of course, is why companies spend money influencing the influencers.

    Buyer beware, as always.



  • A non technical answer: Don’t interact with other players and don’t give out any personal information.

    Use a unique and non-memorable username in steam and in game. Don’t use any of the social functions in steam.

    It’s often overlooked that the biggest risk to personal information is the person themselves.

    (Obviously you need to give some information to Steam for purchasing, and others have shown other methods to limit what information is sold about you as much as you an. It also depends where you reside - the EU has better protections than most)












  • “We’re shocked” - nobody.

    But companies are crawling everything like mad - I’ve noticed a 400% upturn this year alone in bot traffic on a low traffic web forum and a few sites I host, so much so that I’m having to do some fairly heavy filtering upstream to keep them out. (They don’t resepect robots.txt, obviously)

    When bot traffic outnumbers legitimate traffic at least 10x, it makes you wonder why you’re paying to host stuff.