[casmclas]

> I don't agree that email isn't an example of a decentralized application. She argues that it's not because it's really hard to run your own mail server.

I don't think this is a fair characterisation of the article. She argues that email is an example of something that is failing as a decentralised application: Google's power over email is too strong. This is very different from claiming that it isn't an example of a decentralised application.

Email and the web are decentralised applications. But they are not the email and the web of the 1990s, when their decentralisation was the killer feature that saw them beat out centralised networks. To try and live on a non-Google/non-Facebook web is like using Linux on the desktop in 2000: it's certainly possible, but it's a bit of a hairshirt.

[0xCMP]

Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking.

Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good, very advanced, and trained on huge amounts of data. Something a normal person could never do on their own server and those who could would be spending a lot of time training the blocker which those using Google never even needed to think of.

[smichel17]

Anecdote: although I have spamassassin set up to add a header to my email, my filter for moving likely spam into the appropriate folder is currently commented out, because I get so little spam. I get a very small amount at my public GitHub address, and a little more at one address that is in the source code of a FLO (free/libre/open) app I maintain, but it totals maybe one or two emails a month.

Public organizational emails in orgs I've been a part of (e.g. [e-mail], [e-mail]) get a little more spam, largely sales pitches from what appears to be actual humans at shady SEO companies. Maybe 2 a week.

I get way more "legitimate" corporate spam than actual unprompted/cold spam. The most egregious example in recent memory was when I made an online purchase at Bed, Bath, & Beyond, and made sure the "sign me up for the email list" checkbox was not selected. They sent me no fewer than four emails asking if I would like to sign up for their email list, including one titled, "Thanks for signing up for our email list!" (inside: "Just take this one last step to confirm your subscription <signup link>").

In conclusion, I perceive unwanted email to be largely a self-inflicted problem at present. For example, someone I know likes to complain about the quantity of email she receives, but also refuses to unsubscribe, because sometimes she sees something interesting in one of the many promotional lists she's on. I also don't understand people who say they're not bothered by advertising, but to each her own.

[TedDoesntTalk]

Agreed. After moving away from Gmail about 6 months ago to Namecheap Private Email, I am impressed at how little spam I get. It has SpamAssassin which is quite effective, but the overall spam volume is significantly lower than 10 years ago… and this is an old email address and domain I’m using, not new.

[SergeAx]

I just counted emails in my spam folder, and it is between 6 and 10 per day. Email I actually subscribed to or from other legit sources is in the range of 12-20, almost exactly twice of spam. I am not counting days when I do a contradictory post on local tech resource and getting hundreds of reply notifications.

[smichel17]

Interesting. I assume you have a single email address, so you can't tell the source? (I have a catch-all at my domain ⇒ I use a different email for each site, which is how I know which addresses generate spam). Is your address posted publicly in plain-text somewhere?

[SergeAx]

Yes, it is a Gmail address, from the beginning of Gmail itself. I beleive it was exposed countless times since. This thread made me think about changing that and get a new address on a personal domain.

[swiley]

I'm not convinced Google really solved spam, they're just not afraid to turn the sensitivity on the filter way up even if that means a chunk of legitimate mail gets marked as spam. Most smaller admins seem concerned about correctness and so they don't do this.

I think this really sums up Google's M.O. in general.

[oblio]

I was there when they launched Gmail. I had an email account at almost every other big provider. Most of them were full of spam. Gmail was clean and the amount of legitimate emails misclassified was insignificant.

Everyone else had to up their game due to Gmail. On all fronts.

[account42]

Comparing a new gmail account to an older account that hat many more chances to end up on spam lists is not really fair though.

[tester34]

Honestly, over years I think the amount of emails that were marked as spam but actually weren't (they were news letters that I didn't consider as spam but also were not important) was below 5, I think.

meanwhile tons of spam (crypto related) is marked as spam, without that it'd be pain enter my mailbox

[okprod]

even if that means a chunk of legitimate mail gets marked as spam

Obviously a personal anecdote, but I signed up for Gmail close to when it first came out, and I don't think I've ever had a legitimate piece of mail marked as spam.

I remember people clamoring to sign up for Gmail because it was the new thing, it had the counter that kept going up with "a lot" of storage space, etc. Folks were even paying others for a Gmail invite.

[jjav]

> Most smaller admins seem concerned about correctness and so they don't do this.

This, definitely. Take a look at gmail spam folder, it's always full of false positives.

[taneq]

> Even if that means legitimate mail gets marked as spam

I think that’s “especially as”. Other mail providers are competition, after all.

[bombcar]

This seems to be a rule - “inbound” decentralized systems are susceptible to the spam problem - but “outbound” ones like DNS seem to work OK. Nobody cares if you create fifty billion sub domains.

[bryanrasmussen]

maybe Google does (or could), not sure where their algorithm stands on many subdomains.

[HDMI_Cable]

Spam seems pretty "solved" (if one can call it that) problem nowadays though. Most people who run their own servers simply put SpamAssassin and a couple of other tweaks; not much fuss is needed anymore.

[_0w8t]

I second that. At work we run our own email server (50 people company). I receive single spam message maybe like once in two weeks. With a Gmail home account I have that once in a month.

A slightly more problematic is targeted phishing attacks, where the attackers try to put at least some work-relevant information “. Some of those attempts are not so trivial. I do receive them few times per year, while with GMail I do not remember getting one in at least a year. But on other hand I am not so sure that Google will defend against those if we have used GMail at work.

[eloisius]

I’ve occasionally wondered why the responsibility to mitigate abuse can’t be pushed all the way out to edge nodes (individual ISPs and data centers) instead of relying on centralized abuse prevention. I imagine this does happen for certain kinds of abuse, but wouldn’t the threat of others not peering with your node be good motivation for ISPs not to provide services to spammers?

[lolinder]

That's one big part of what Google does, and it's part of why it's so hard to get Google to accept self hosted email. They have a list of known good hosts (that they effectively "peer" with), and if you're not on that list your mail may or may not make it into a Gmail inbox.

[jjav]

> Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering.

I wish this meme could die. gmail spam filtering isn't particularly good, it never has been. They crank up the false positive rate high enough that the spam in your inbox is about comparable to other solutions, but at the expense of tons of false positives.

I've had a gmail account since the launch. Been there got the tshirt (literally.. have a tshirt of the launch when they were bragging about 1GB storage). I've also been managing email servers and mailing lists since the very early 90s to today.

Notice every site that interacts with email has the ubiquitous warning abot "check your spam folder"? Not solely, but largely a legacy of so many users on gmail getting used to so much legitimate email going to spam. it doesn't have to be that way.

You can easily to an order of magnitude better on fewer false positives while still getting less spam overall in your inbox, by running your own email servers.

I haven't had a false positive in ... certainly many years on my own email on my servers. And a bit less spam getting through than on the gmail account.

> Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking.

gmail has a big false positive problem, yes, but it isn't any worse for you as a sender if you run your own email servers. I experience more false positives emailing from work account to work account (both sides hosted by gmail) than from personal account (hosted by me) to gmail.

> Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well

Spam filtering is actually not hard anymore. I've been running email servers and mailing lists from before spam existed, through its rise and later fall. There was a time, ca.2000, when it was hard. Because nearly every legitimate email server was misconfigured, so one had to allow it all through, but most was spam. So it took a lot of client side filtering.

These days, very easy. Legitimate senders are well configured, so just reject all misconfigured clients at the SMTP connection. There, that's 95%+ of spam blocked. The few remaining items are easily filtered by whichever bayesian filter you like. I'm using spamprobe. Done. No spam. No false positives.

[wyqydsyq]

> Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good, very advanced, and trained on huge amounts of data. Something a normal person could never do on their own server

I'm sure most normal people could install SpamAssassin and configure it to use community blacklists on their Dovecot/Postfix server. It's not that hard.

[2Gkashmiri]

I run a mailinabox server for almost half a year and gmail is a pita. I send an email to a gmail user and it always goes into spam. I have to phone them to unspam it but next day same thing. Yahoo mail or others dont seem have this issue because I have 10/10 on the dkim something scorecard.

Google somehow wants to force me to not use my email server. Fuck them

[lrvick]

Do you have a residential IP?

It you don't have dmarc enabled that is for sure worth doing too.

[spc476]

Name an ISP that will allow non-filtered TCP port 25 traffic for a non-business account to go through.

[gen220]

A $5 reverse proxy with a cloud/colo IP goes a long way (so you can map 25 -> whatever you like).

It does mean your traffic is centralized through a data center, but it probably goes through one already...

[2Gkashmiri]

i am using racknerd

[dtech]

It's been 5+ years since I've last used SpamAssassin, but at that time it didn't hold a candle to Gmail's spam filtering.

Also you're incredibly alienated if you think a "normal person" could manage their own mailserver. 95%+ of western people couldn't use a CLI.

[jeltz]

Hm, personally I feel Google is cheating. While they catch also all spam they also catch a lot of legitimate mails. I have a couple of accounts at Google and one at a company which uses SoamAssasin and I prefer that SoamAssasin setup since it has way less false positives but still catch most spam.

[StavrosK]

> A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking.

> Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good

How can these two sentences be true at the same time?

[0xCMP]

I don't work at google nor have any details on this, but I would assume that just because they could detect it doesn't mean that it doesn't have a cost and blocking things which don't meet some minimum trust level from Google's perspective would cut a lot of the noise down from naive spamming.

[HWR_14]

My reconciliation:

Spam filtering is very hard. Therefore there are some content based rules and some sender based rules. Google is very good at both of those, which means in this context means accuracy and precision based on content and strictness based on sender. Sender based rules make it hard for spammers to send mail pretending to be from a domain, but does make it harder for anyone to send mail. Hosting your own mail server means hosting the authorization architecture to prove you're not a spammer, which makes it harder.

[clairity]

it’s not written clearly, but google does tend to spam filter email from independent domains along with all the obvious spam. they use a legitimate feature as a cudgel against competitors and to lock-in all that juicy personal data flow. it’s one thing to compete with a better spam filter. it’s another to aim it at potential competitors. pretty despicable actually.

[Glavnokoman]

Google mail is used by so many because it has resources to make it free.

[notyourday]

> Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking.

No. It is the domain. No one else in this business has a short pronounceable *mail.com

[wyqydsyq]

> No. It is the domain. No one else in this business has a short pronounceable *mail.com

Except for, oh, I don't know, maybe https://mail.com/ ?

[reader_mode]

Wow, you get this popup on the site :

    Note: Your browser version is outdated. We recommend using the new Firefox Browser. Download now for free!

My browser is up-to-date, their "download now" link takes you to their own download page with a custom Firefox download. They seem like call center scammer level scum. Wonder why Mozzila is allowing them to use their trademarks like this.

[notyourday]

They aren't really in a serious email business.

[bryanrasmussen]

the name is not as good as hotmail, mainly because the standard pronunciation is geemail, meaning that back when the name was not well known you could theoretically say gmail.com to someone and they might think you had said email.com if they were a little hard of hearing or your enunciation was not clear.

the implementation however was much better than hotmail or any other web-based email at the time.

To argue the name was the important aspect is to argue marketing is more important than the quality of what is being marketed, an idea that HN is generally not very open to.

[notyourday]

> the name is not as good as hotmail, mainly because the standard pronunciation is geemail, meaning that back when the name was not well known you could theoretically say gmail.com to someone and they might think you had said email.com if they were a little hard of hearing or your enunciation was not clear

gmail became a brand nearly immediately via initial scarcity of invitations. Hotmail and yahoo mail sounded like idiotic kid email addresses. Webmail never tried doing email. Pobox.com did only forwarding and was too linked to the physical mail in the mind of people. Same went for mailboxes.com.

> To argue the name was the important aspect is to argue marketing is more important than the quality of what is being marketed, an idea that HN is generally not very open to.

Yet the only successful companies are the companies with great marketing and an OK ( or more product ).

[bryanrasmussen]

>gmail became a brand nearly immediately via initial scarcity of invitations

yes, to us (the techies), but there are billions of people in the world who didn't know who or what gmail was for a at least 4-5 years. I specifically made the observation of geemail sounding like email because I had that experienced less than a decade ago giving the address to a dentist's secretary in Denmark.

>Yet the only successful companies are the companies with great marketing and an OK ( or more product ).

first of all I'd say Google had a great product and ok marketing for a few years, nowadays they have great marketing, an ok product, and built in market dominance.

So I suppose I can accept that good marketing is a prerequisite but not sufficient.

That said what do you mean by successful? I mean great marketing being required for successful makes you think that the only successful companies can be ones you've heard of, because how successful can a company be that you've never heard of.

And on that note when I tell people I used to work for Thomson Reuters and nobody knows who that is I suppose this means Thomson Reuters is not a successful company?

[notyourday]

> yes, to us (the techies), but there are billions of people in the world who didn't know who or what gmail was for a at least 4-5 years. I specifically made the observation of geemail sounding like email because I had that experienced less than a decade ago giving the address to a dentist's secretary in Denmark.

I would say you have to look at the alternative names - hotmail? yahoo.com? gmail sounds like a fantastic choice.

> That said what do you mean by successful? I mean great marketing being required for successful makes you think that the only successful companies can be ones you've heard of, because how successful can a company be that you've never heard of.

Your target customers know who you are.

> And on that note when I tell people I used to work for Thomson Reuters and nobody knows who that is I suppose this means Thomson Reuters is not a successful company?

Random people are not customers of Thomson Reuters and Thompson Reuters is not in a market of converting them. Those that consume news content as a part of their product know who Thompson Reuters is.

[Talanes]

Yahoo tried to make Ymail a thing, but that was long after they'd lost most their market to Google.

[notyourday]

No one took @yahoo.com addresses serious.

[Tyr42]

hotmail.com? Just as many syllables

[notyourday]

Terrible, potentially offensive, branding.

[u801e]

hotmail.com seems to meet the "short pronounceable *mail.com" criterion.

[Blikkentrekker]

Then the argument can better be characterized as “The final result of a free market is an eventual monopoly.”

It is not about centralization but about one player winning and beating the competition in that case.

[casmclas]

I think that's a fair characterisation of her premises. For instance, she argues that these outcomes aren't happening because of any systematic quality difference in the products: many centralised products that win significant marketshare are a bit ordinary. I'm not in a position to judge that claim; I tend to avoid products that make gratuitous demands on my personal data so I have less material to compare, but the idea that a universal Electron app is better than a variety of independently developed native apps is certainly not one I would rush to accept.

Her actual conclusion is that in order to create a market whose average members are free, we need more regulation.

[colordrops]

She'd be wrong about that too. Just look at how much better email is than instant messaging. It has succeeded infinitely more at being a decentralized application than IM.

[casmclas]

Well that is an argument no-one is making. No one is comparing email and IM and asking which is succeeding better at being a decentralised application. You're right: email is certainly less centralised than Whatsapp. But it's a red herring. The comparison is between the original implementation of email as a decentralised system and the current experience of email, which is highly centralised.

In the olden days, any business could say in good faith "I want to offer email services" and they would have been treated pretty much the same as any other good faith provider of email service. But today, a business who wanted to start up an email service is insane; just check out the nearby thread of a person who replaced Mailchimp with a semi-self-rolled service. As a matter of fact, no matter what the RFCs say, people in the industry do not treat email as decentralised.

This is partially because people joined the network in bad faith, but it's also because a small number of large nodes are able to assume anyone who isn't known to them is acting in bad faith and therefore force people towards the larger nodes.

As I said before, email and the web continue to be usable in a decentralised fashion, but to do so involves wearing a hairshirt. This is the failure of decentralised applications. The author of the article has a view that is closer to "the market is only as free as its weaker members" rather than the view more fashionable hereabouts "the market is only as free as its stronger members", which leads to a different conclusion. It would probably lead to more insightful disagreements to discuss this underlying difference rather than arguing about what technologies email is less centralised than. (Edit to clairfy: These things in quotation marks are not quotes. The quotation marks are used to help delimit the propositions.)

[colordrops]

My point is that it's better than the alternative. A "failed" decentralized protocol like SMTP is better than several "successful" silo'ed IM clients, payment providers, forum platforms, etc. Framing it as a failure without context leaves out the important detail that it's still more successful than centralized but balkanized solutions.

[taneq]

Decentralised doesn’t mean egalitarian, though.