Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Michael Wise via mailop]

If we throw something in the trash, there's a reason.
Cite, please, with full headers of a junked email.

Aloha,
Michael.
-- 
Michael J Wise
Microsoft Corporation| Spam Analysis
"Your Spam Specimen Has Been Processed."
Open a ticket for Hotmail ?

-Original Message-
From: mailop  On Behalf Of Daniele via mailop
Sent: Tuesday, October 22, 2019 2:36 PM
To: mailop@mailop.org
Subject: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

It looks like Microsoft, with its long history of questionable practices, has 
recently developed a new strategy for tearing down its weaker competitors.

The strategy is quite simple: all legitimate emails sent to Microsoft-hosted 
accounts, coming from small to medium competitors' 
domains or servers, are simply delivered to the junk folder with no apparent 
reason. This strategy is simple but effective: competitors' 
reputation is harmed, their clients upset and pushed to change service 
provider. Well, Microsoft clients neither get a great level of service ...but 
who cares?

So my question is: do you think it's fair that something as important as 
fighting spam, that should push cooperation among Internet Service Providers, 
can be abused to the point of becoming a tool for unfair competition and abuse 
of a dominant position?
What do you guys think?

Best regards,
   Daniele


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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Daniele via mailop]

Thanks Micheal for your feedback.
We've been experiencing these problems for weeks now, and I get this 
behavior for emails sent from different providers / domains / countries.
Please find attached (I hope attachments are allowed in this mailing 
list) the relevant headers for 3 different emails sent from different 
domains / providers.

Any help is very much appreciated!
Thanks and best regards,
Daniele

On 22-Oct-19 11:42 PM, Michael Wise via mailop wrote:

If we throw something in the trash, there's a reason.
Cite, please, with full headers of a junked email.

Aloha,
Michael.

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Steven Champeon via mailop]

I would just like to ask where I can apply to become an official
Microsoft X-header analyst and/or creator. Reading these reminds me of
the old days when I had Eudora and set it up so that it added an
X-Because-I-Can: header well, because I could. But I do question the
wisdom of adding some 5K worth of idiotic X-headers to a message whose
body content is one line of abused URL shortener trying to sell me
make-penis-fast pills. YMMV.

I mean, what could the possible value be of a header like

 X-MS-Exchange-CrossTenant-FromEntityHeader: Internet

? Or

 X-MS-PublicTrafficType: Email

? Of COURSE it's email. And I love this:

 X-IncomingHeaderCount: 21

and yet there are at least 36 headers in the first example Daniele sent.

And despite the fact that Daniele sent message #2 from kernel-panic.it,
you still have

 X-OriginatorOrg: outlook.com

which is, frankly, incorrect. Unless I misunderstand the meaning of
"originator".

We recently refused mail from a potential licensee because their own
Forefront server labeled it as spam. Authenticated, outbound, and so on,
and they still thought it was worthy of rejecting, so we rejected it (I
still don't quite understand why once a message has been determined to
be spam it is still relayed - but I don't have that many X-headers to
draw on). Is there anything at all about these headers that has value?

-- 
hesketh.com/inc. v: +1(919)834-2552 f: +1(919)834-2553 w: http://hesketh.com/
Internet security and antispam hostname intelligence: http://enemieslist.com/

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Sébastien Riccio via mailop]

Hi,

We also have a lot of trouble with mails being sent to the junk folder on 
Microsoft hosted accounts.
We have no problems with gmail or yahoo.

There is no apparent reason for this, we constantly monitor our gateways IP 
reputation, blacklists, and all is green.

This is frustrating because it seems it's some obscure filtering occurring and 
we have no way to understand why this is happening.

It is really unfair competition and it's becoming a huge problem because our 
users think we offer a bad service when we're doing everything we can to offer 
a quality service.

This will have to change. Do small operators need to start a petition against 
this ?

SR

-Original Message-
From: mailop  On Behalf Of Michael Wise via mailop
Sent: mardi, 22 octobre 2019 23:43
To: mailop@mailop.org
Subject: Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition


If we throw something in the trash, there's a reason.
Cite, please, with full headers of a junked email.

Aloha,
Michael.
-- 
Michael J Wise
Microsoft Corporation| Spam Analysis
"Your Spam Specimen Has Been Processed."
Open a ticket for Hotmail ?

-Original Message-
From: mailop  On Behalf Of Daniele via mailop
Sent: Tuesday, October 22, 2019 2:36 PM
To: mailop@mailop.org
Subject: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

It looks like Microsoft, with its long history of questionable practices, has 
recently developed a new strategy for tearing down its weaker competitors.

The strategy is quite simple: all legitimate emails sent to Microsoft-hosted 
accounts, coming from small to medium competitors' 
domains or servers, are simply delivered to the junk folder with no apparent 
reason. This strategy is simple but effective: competitors' 
reputation is harmed, their clients upset and pushed to change service 
provider. Well, Microsoft clients neither get a great level of service ...but 
who cares?

So my question is: do you think it's fair that something as important as 
fighting spam, that should push cooperation among Internet Service Providers, 
can be abused to the point of becoming a tool for unfair competition and abuse 
of a dominant position?
What do you guys think?

Best regards,
   Daniele


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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Thomas Walter via mailop]

On 23.10.19 08:51, Sébastien Riccio via mailop wrote:
> This will have to change. Do small operators need to start a petition against 
> this ?

I'm going to send thoughts and prayers to help! SCNR :)

But yes, what are you going to do? "Block all mails to big players
Wednesday" to protest?

I don't think that'll work.

Regards,
Thomas Walter

-- 
Thomas Walter
Datenverarbeitungszentrale

FH Münster
- University of Applied Sciences -
Corrensstr. 25, Raum B 112
48149 Münster

Tel: +49 251 83 64 908
Fax: +49 251 83 64 910
www.fh-muenster.de/dvz/

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Chris Wedgwood via mailop]

> We also have a lot of trouble with mails being sent to the junk folder on 
> Microsoft hosted accounts.
> We have no problems with gmail or yahoo.

after reading this, i created an outlook.com account (awful UI)

some (not all) trivial messages end up marked as spam as others have
reported

there seems to be no way to bulk mark things as not spam either

overall a very poor experience

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Sébastien Riccio via mailop]

On 23.10.19 08:51, Sébastien Riccio via mailop wrote:
>> This will have to change. Do small operators need to start a petition 
>> against this ?

>I'm going to send thoughts and prayers to help! SCNR :)
> But yes, what are you going to do? "Block all mails to big players Wednesday" 
> to protest?
> I don't think that'll work.
> Regards,
> Thomas Walter

Hmmm, send all incoming mails from Microsoft hosted domains to our users Junk 
Folders.
But from a customer perspective this will be our fault, not MS, because MS is 
always right... 😊
 
SR

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Renaud Allard via mailop]

On 10/23/19 10:01 AM, Chris Wedgwood via mailop wrote:

We also have a lot of trouble with mails being sent to the junk folder on 
Microsoft hosted accounts.
We have no problems with gmail or yahoo.


after reading this, i created an outlook.com account (awful UI)

some (not all) trivial messages end up marked as spam as others have
reported



As far as I have seen, it depends. Free outlook.com accounts have a 
really high percentage of false positives in junk folders (or, even 
worse, discarded mails). While paid outlook.com hosted domains have 
about the same rate as others like gmail or yahoo.




smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Thomas Walter via mailop]

On 23.10.19 10:11, Stefano Bagnara via mailop wrote:
> PS: I REALLY don't think Microsoft is doing filtering for "unfair
> competition", as I also receive Microsoft own invoices for an Office365
> plan I buy in my office365 junk folder. I simply guess SmartScreen is
> somehow "out of control" (or too much a black box) and very few people
> are able to check the reasons SmartScreen does something and confirm
> it's doing right. I also don't want to blame microsoft for trying to
> "hide things" as I've been on the antispam side, too, and I know how
> much spammers can learn from few data, but I can tell Smartscreen seems
> really weird from the outside and sometimes I feel there's some dice
> roll behind the scene ;-)

SmartScreen sounds like it's an AI learning what's good and bad. If it
is, it is probably affected by the typical machine learning problem:
Nobody knows why it does it this way. It taught itself.

And if you try to fix that by teaching the rights from wrongs, it
usually gets wors or totally out of control. So you don't.

I've seen comments about this being another weapon in the "sorry, we
can't do anything about it, its automated" arsenal.

I myself am pretty sure that Skynet will start just like this. An AI
that decides on things and nobody knows why. It's not the "humans are
bad, destroy all humans", it's more going to be like: "Kill all humans
to see how this affects my decision making".

Regards,
Thomas Walter

-- 
Thomas Walter
Datenverarbeitungszentrale

FH Münster
- University of Applied Sciences -
Corrensstr. 25, Raum B 112
48149 Münster

Tel: +49 251 83 64 908
Fax: +49 251 83 64 910
www.fh-muenster.de/dvz/

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Laura Atkins via mailop]

One of the things I’ve deduced over the years from discussions (oh so many 
discussions) is that one of the major factors in SmartScreen filters is how 
recipients are interacting with the mail. It is a direct measure of how your 
users are interacting with the mail. 

This means a few things. 

1) They’re acting in ways that tells Microsoft they actively don’t want the 
mail, including some or all of the following:
a) marking the mail as spam
b) answering the “did we categorize this correctly as spam” question 
with yes
c) answering the “did we categorize this correctly as not spam” 
question with no

2) They’re acting in ways that tells Microsoft they don’t care about the mail, 
including some or all of the following:
a) never opening the mail
b) deleting the mail
c) never looking for the mail and pulling it out of the spam folder. 

In the case of transactional messages, basically what it says is that your 
users don’t care about their password resets, or their receipts or whatever it 
is you’re sending to them. They’re not interacting with the mail in any way 
that’s telling microsoft this is valuable mail. 

When Microsoft tells you to “revalidate your lists” that’s a signal that you 
should really look at the accuracy of your data. Are these messages actually 
going to the people who triggered the transactional mail? Do the addresses 
belong to your users? How active are these users on the Microsoft platform? 
(I’ve had a couple of MS addresses for over 20 years now, but i don’t use them 
for any real mail. Mostly they were my usenet posting addresses and maybe the 
occasional test address.) 

My professional experience is that Microsoft has the most sensitive and 
aggressive filters in the top 3 free mailbox providers. I’m not convinced that 
this is intentional. None of that really matters. It’s their system and we have 
to deal with it. 

My professional experience is that many senders with Microsoft delivery 
problems have underlying issues that need to be addressed to get into 
Microsoft. But they see Microsoft’s sensitive and aggressive filters as 
“unfair” and “broken” because they aren’t having problems with other free 
mailbox providers. They refuse to change what they’re doing. 

Thus, we end up with long threads here on mailop complaining, yet again, about 
Microsoft being mean. 

laura 



-- 
Having an Email Crisis?  We can help! 800 823-9674 

Laura Atkins
Word to the Wise
la...@wordtothewise.com
(650) 437-0741  

Email Delivery Blog: https://wordtothewise.com/blog 







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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Sébastien Riccio via mailop]

From: mailop  On Behalf Of Stefano Bagnara via mailop

PS: I REALLY don't think Microsoft is doing filtering for "unfair competition", 
as I also receive Microsoft own invoices for an Office365 plan I buy in my 
office365 junk folder. I simply guess SmartScreen is somehow "out of control" 
(or too much a black box) and very few people are able to check the reasons 
SmartScreen does something and confirm it's doing right. I also don't want to 
blame microsoft for trying to "hide things" as I've been on the antispam side, 
too, and I know how much spammers can learn from few data, but I can tell 
Smartscreen seems really weird from the outside and sometimes I feel there's 
some dice roll behind the scene ;-)

I don’t think their doing it on purpose, but the final result could make think 
they do. Some of our customers already moved to office365 because of this.
As long as we don’t have a way to clearly understand why some mails are going 
to junk folder and some others don’t, the problem will persists, thus slowly 
killing small services providers or at least their mail services.



-Original Message-
From: mailop mailto:mailop-boun...@mailop.org>> On 
Behalf Of Daniele via mailop
Sent: Tuesday, October 22, 2019 2:36 PM
To: mailop@mailop.org
Subject: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

It looks like Microsoft, with its long history of questionable practices, has 
recently developed a new strategy for tearing down its weaker competitors.

The strategy is quite simple: all legitimate emails sent to Microsoft-hosted 
accounts, coming from small to medium competitors'
domains or servers, are simply delivered to the junk folder with no apparent 
reason. This strategy is simple but effective: competitors'
reputation is harmed, their clients upset and pushed to change service 
provider. Well, Microsoft clients neither get a great level of service ...but 
who cares?

So my question is: do you think it's fair that something as important as 
fighting spam, that should push cooperation among Internet Service Providers, 
can be abused to the point of becoming a tool for unfair competition and abuse 
of a dominant position?
What do you guys think?

Best regards,
   Daniele


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--
Stefano Bagnara
Apache James/jDKIM/jSPF
VOXmail/Mosaico.io/VoidLabs
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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Daniele via mailop]

On 23-Oct-19 11:49 AM, Laura Atkins via mailop wrote:

 It’s their system and we have to deal with it.


That's why it really *looks* like unfair competition and abuse of 
dominant position.


My professional experience is that many senders with Microsoft 
delivery problems have underlying issues that need to be addressed to 
get into Microsoft. But they see Microsoft’s sensitive and aggressive 
filters as “unfair” and “broken” because they aren’t having problems 
with other free mailbox providers. They refuse to change what they’re 
doing.

Sorry but I have to strongly disagree with this.
In my experience, there's no way to understand what's wrong, so there's 
no way to change it; that's why it's "unfair".
And when emails from different IPs /providers / domains are *all* 
delivered to the Junk folder, regardless of their contents, the filter 
is just "broken".
I'd be happy to know which "underlying issues" Microsoft has spotted in 
order to fix them, but I found no way to know (so far).


Thus, we end up with long threads here on mailop complaining, yet 
again, about Microsoft being mean.


Yes, I guess we can expect more of these "long threads" as long as 
Microsoft won't have fixed *its own* filtering issues.
Not to mention that with JMRP I'm getting 100% of legitmate emails that 
users tagged as spam for whatever reason, so the tool is pretty useless 
(just my 2 cents).



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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Noel Butler via mailop]

On 23/10/2019 18:11, Stefano Bagnara via mailop wrote:

> Often the "reason" is "Smartscreen" but sounds like no one really knows why 
> Smartscreen do things, or at least--

Smartscreen has never been smart, it did this exact same thing back in
the late 90's or early 00's. 

MS couldnt figure it out then, why should we think they can now :) 

-- 

Kind Regards, 

Noel Butler 

This Email, including any attachments, may contain legally 
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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Allen Kitchen via mailop]

This gave me an “a-ha!” moment:

> On Oct 23, 2019, at 05:54, Laura Atkins via mailop  wrote:
> ...
> 2) They’re acting in ways that tells Microsoft they don’t care about the 
> mail, including some or all of the following:
>   a) never opening the mail
>   b) deleting the mail
>   c) never looking for the mail and pulling it out of the spam folder. 
...

There are frequently emails that I am glad to get but which I don’t need to 
read anything other than the subject line of in order to satisfy my attention 
to their (desired!) content. 

And this suggests that if I simply delete those emails *apparently* unread, a 
machine that’s monitoring my behavior won’t notice that I jotted an entry in 
another tracking spreadsheet relative to that message before I deleted it. (Of 
course, I’d be pretty freaked out if it *did* have the ability to take that 
into account!)

So, an AI with tunnel vision will only know what I’m doing if it “sees” me 
doing it. 

I can think of a few processes over the decades where I have routinely taken an 
extra “unnecessary” step or two (or several!) when interacting with 
less-sophisticated code in order to accomplish a desired result reliably, and 
couldn’t really rejigger the code to handle the multitude of edge cases, so I 
acted in such a way as to make the code not “think” of them as edge cases. And, 
again, this was with *far* less sophisticated code than an AI. 

Even though I wouldn’t prefer my email service to behave like Zork from time to 
time, and have my emails occasionally eaten by a grue, I think that’s the 
logical extension of where we are with AI brokers. 


-- 
This email was Virus checked by DSSC Solutions Company Security Gateway. 
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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop]

Dnia 23.10.2019 o godz. 08:26:58 Allen Kitchen via mailop pisze:
> And this suggests that if I simply delete those emails *apparently*
> unread, a machine that’s monitoring my behavior won’t notice that I jotted
> an entry in another tracking spreadsheet relative to that message before I
> deleted it.  (Of course, I’d be pretty freaked out if it *did* have the
> ability to take that into account!)

There is more to that: In my case, there is some type of messages that I
regularly receive, and I *want* to receive them, but I move them almost
immediately in the mail client from the inbox folder that is synchronized to
the server to "archive" folder that is kept only on local disk. I guess,
from the server's point of view, the messages are just deleted, so such an
AI might think I don't want them, while it's exactly the opposite.

That's one of the many downsides of relying on "user behaviour" to classify
something as spam or non-spam.
-- 
Regards,
   Jaroslaw Rafa
   r...@rafa.eu.org
--
"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."

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Vittorio Bertola via mailop]

> Il 23 ottobre 2019 08:51 Sébastien Riccio via mailop  ha 
> scritto:
> 
>  
> Hi,
> 
> We also have a lot of trouble with mails being sent to the junk folder on 
> Microsoft hosted accounts.
> We have no problems with gmail or yahoo.
> 
> There is no apparent reason for this, we constantly monitor our gateways IP 
> reputation, blacklists, and all is green.
> 
> This is frustrating because it seems it's some obscure filtering occurring 
> and we have no way to understand why this is happening.
> 
> It is really unfair competition and it's becoming a huge problem because our 
> users think we offer a bad service when we're doing everything we can to 
> offer a quality service.
> 
> This will have to change. Do small operators need to start a petition against 
> this ?

Honestly, I think that the only possible factor that could prompt any change in 
big recipients' behaviour towards small senders (or, more generally, to any 
attitude of the global dominant tech players) starts with "European" and ends 
with "regulation". There is a lot of discussion going on in Brussels and in 
some European capitals on this matter, as this situation is really damaging for 
the European tech industry, which - differently from the American one - is 
mostly made of SMEs. I'm happy to provide details in private if you are 
interested, but complaining to your own government (the people dealing with 
Internet governance) could be a start.

-- 
 
Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
vittorio.bert...@open-xchange.com 
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Michael Rathbun via mailop]

On Wed, 23 Oct 2019 00:14:59 +, Steven Champeon via mailop
 wrote:

>We recently refused mail from a potential licensee because their own
>Forefront server labeled it as spam. Authenticated, outbound, and so on,
>and they still thought it was worthy of rejecting, so we rejected it (I
>still don't quite understand why once a message has been determined to
>be spam it is still relayed - but I don't have that many X-headers to
>draw on). 

Outgoing mail has the same filter set applied to it as incoming mail.  If an
item earns a spammy score, it is marked as such and normally sent out a "high
risk" IP pool.  It is occasionally necessary to track down false positives,
and:

>  Is there anything at all about these headers that has value?

They have value in that they give information that can be useful in
troubleshooting.  

Disclaimer:  I left my office, down the hall from Michael's, a litte over five
years ago.  Just before they moved everybody out of offices and into the
newly-faddish "open plan" workplace hell.

mdr
-- 
   If Jurassic Park had been about email, Jeff Goldblum would be known 
   for saying "Spammers, uh, find a way".

  -- David Carriger of Infusionsoft, after noting that some spammers
 they hosed off the deck had found a new home elsewhere.


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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Doug Royer via mailop]

On 10/22/19 3:36 PM, Daniele via mailop wrote:

It looks like Microsoft, with its long history of questionable practices, has 
recently developed a new strategy for tearing down its weaker competitors.


Not directly related, but gmail has been putting MANY more false positives in 
the spam folder. I used to get 1-3 per week. Now false positives are closer to 
60 a day.

And MOST (about 80%) of them have the X-Microsoft headers. On the first day 99% 
had the text portion ONLY base64 encoded, not text/plain alternate. Only 1 was 
DANE related.

It may be people are tweaking with headers. And I think many are tweaking their 
filtering rules to adjust to the changing spam. It used to be that 100% of the 
email I got with ONLY base64 encoded text, was spam at it attempted to bypass 
filters. I am guessing that gmail had noticed a similar trend and may be 
filtering those as spam.

And why does Microsoft need about 60 X-Microsoft headers per email? Maybe it is 
time for the IETF to deprecate X- headers.


--
Doug Royer - (http://DougRoyer.US)
douglas.ro...@gmail.com
714-989-6135

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Brielle via mailop]

I think you are trying to revive that long and pointless thread about gmail 
putting peoples messages in the junk folder.

I’ll say it again - blunt and brutal, but reality.  

 owns their mail servers and can decide how they 
want to process mail and who they accept mail from.

Unless you have arrangements with them otherwise, their acceptance of mail is a 
courtesy and not a right 

Contrary to your own belief otherwise, you (me, joe blow) are nobody.  Your 
mail is only worth the money you paid to the receiving provider - in this case, 
you paid $0, so your mail is actually costing them from the outset.

Only expect $0 worth of support and you won’t be disappointed.


Sent from my iPhone

> On Oct 22, 2019, at 3:36 PM, Daniele via mailop  wrote:
> 
> It looks like Microsoft, with its long history of questionable practices, has 
> recently developed a new strategy for tearing down its weaker competitors.
> 
> The strategy is quite simple: all legitimate emails sent to Microsoft-hosted 
> accounts, coming from small to medium competitors' domains or servers, are 
> simply delivered to the junk folder with no apparent reason. This strategy is 
> simple but effective: competitors' reputation is harmed, their clients upset 
> and pushed to change service provider. Well, Microsoft clients neither get a 
> great level of service ...but who cares?
> 
> So my question is: do you think it's fair that something as important as 
> fighting spam, that should push cooperation among Internet Service Providers, 
> can be abused to the point of becoming a tool for unfair competition and 
> abuse of a dominant position?
> What do you guys think?
> 
> Best regards,
>   Daniele
> 
> 
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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop]

Dnia 23.10.2019 o godz. 09:16:26 Brielle via mailop pisze:
> 
>  owns their mail servers and can decide how
> they want to process mail and who they accept mail from.
> 
> Unless you have arrangements with them otherwise, their acceptance of mail
> is a courtesy and not a right
> 
> Contrary to your own belief otherwise, you (me, joe blow) are nobody. 
> Your mail is only worth the money you paid to the receiving provider - in
> this case, you paid $0, so your mail is actually costing them from the
> outset.
> 
> Only expect $0 worth of support and you won’t be disappointed.

Because you repeat your rant on this topic again and again, I (as the person
who started the previous thread you are referring to) will also repeat
again: if we agree on what you say above, we might as well shut down the
whole Internet. Because Internet is all about communications, and if we
agree that providers do not have to care if the communications is actually
happening or not - then the Internet (or e-mail at least) has no use.

Of course, problems always happen, and it is possible that someone at
provider A sends mail to someone at provider B and the recipient doesn't get
it. But I remember very well (because I was also doing this in cooperation
with other admins) when such cases had highest priority for admins both on A
and B side; if someone didn't get the message or some message got
mis-classified, nobody had any doubt that this is a defect, and admins on
both sides did their best to fix the system so that it doesn't happen again. 
And nobody was talking about "you didn't pay us, so we don't have to accept
mail from you" nonsense. Because *it is* nonsense - if we accept the that
we don't have to care about reliability of the e-mail, e-mail as a means of
communications becomes completely non-useful.

I pointed you already to the article "How Google and Microsoft made E-mail
Unreliable", seems you didn't read it - or, if you have read it, didn't
understand anything from it.

And, remember the "Jon Postel's law" (aka "Robustness prnciple"), as he
outlined it in RFC 760: "an implementation should be conservative in its
sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior", and later in RFC
1122: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send".

Jon Postel has spoken, end of case. (as in "Roma locuta, causa finita" :))
-- 
Regards,
   Jaroslaw Rafa
   r...@rafa.eu.org
--
"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."

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Brielle via mailop]

On 10/23/2019 10:35 AM, Jaroslaw Rafa wrote:
> Because you repeat your rant on this topic again and again,

It's not a rant any moreso then your suggestions about regulation, 
lawsuits to get your way with e-mail providers, etc.


> I (as the person
> who started the previous thread you are referring to) will also repeat
> again: if we agree on what you say above, we might as well shut down
> the whole Internet.

It's already at that point, if you haven't noticed...  and the internet 
is still functioning.


We have gatekeepers that control access to things already.

We've got mail filtering providers that act as gatekeepers for e-mail - 
proofpoint, etc.  People _pay_ them to control inbound and outbound.



> Because Internet is all about communications, and if we
> agree that providers do not have to care if the communications is
> actually happening or not - then the Internet (or e-mail at least) has
> no use.

Sure, they care about communications.  However, if you bang away on the 
login screen of your bank, their systems will either throttle or rate 
limit you, or even block you if you do it long enough.


They don't really care if you are a customer who has just forgotten your 
password or not.  If you stink of a possible security issue, they'll 
slam the door in your face and let you figure things out.


It's not about caring, its about risk/costs/returns.



>
> Of course, problems always happen, and it is possible that someone at
> provider A sends mail to someone at provider B and the recipient 
doesn't get
> it. But I remember very well (because I was also doing this in 
cooperation
> with other admins) when such cases had highest priority for admins 
both on A

> and B side; if someone didn't get the message or some message got
> mis-classified, nobody had any doubt that this is a defect, and admins on
> both sides did their best to fix the system so that it doesn't happen 
again.
> And nobody was talking about "you didn't pay us, so we don't have to 
accept

> mail from you" nonsense. Because*it is*  nonsense - if we accept the that
> we don't have to care about reliability of the e-mail, e-mail as a 
means of

> communications becomes completely non-useful.


Hate to break it to you buddy, but e-mail has never ever been a 
'reliable' way to communicate.  Any time you have to depend on another 
party to do a job that they don't directly get compensated for from you, 
leaves it as "least effort/if it works, great".


This is why we have other methods to communicate as well - and why most 
courts, for example, won't let you 'serve' people over e-mail and 
require a physical process server.


>
> I pointed you already to the article "How Google and Microsoft made 
E-mail

> Unreliable", seems you didn't read it - or, if you have read it, didn't
> understand anything from it.

Who cares if I read it or not?


>
> And, remember the "Jon Postel's law" (aka "Robustness prnciple"), as he
> outlined it in RFC 760: "an implementation should be conservative in its
> sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior", and later 
in RFC

> 1122: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send".
>
> Jon Postel has spoken, end of case. (as in "Roma locuta, causa 
finita" :))



Yeah... and?   I work on reality, both as a provider of internet 
services, and as a DNSbl operator.


Reality is, your mere suggestion of regulation / courts to make 
providers accept your e-mail makes you a liability to my services.


If this was the olden days, on first mention of either of those, you'd 
have been thrown in my local blocklist and likely had your routes 
dropped coming into my network.


But, these days I find it humorous to see what people have to say about 
what providers should/shouldn't do and watch them try to justify it, 
knowing full well we've been down this path before and already know the 
end result.


Nothing.  Nada.  World moves on, Internet keeps working, etc etc etc.


--
Brielle Bruns
The Summit Open Source Development Group
http://www.sosdg.org/ http://www.ahbl.org

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Michael Wise via mailop]

/applause

Aloha,
Michael.
--
Michael J Wise
Microsoft Corporation| Spam Analysis
"Your Spam Specimen Has Been Processed."
Open a ticket for Hotmail<http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=614866> ?

From: mailop  On Behalf Of Laura Atkins via mailop
Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2019 2:49 AM
To: mailop@mailop.org
Subject: Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

One of the things I’ve deduced over the years from discussions (oh so many 
discussions) is that one of the major factors in SmartScreen filters is how 
recipients are interacting with the mail. It is a direct measure of how your 
users are interacting with the mail.

This means a few things.

1) They’re acting in ways that tells Microsoft they actively don’t want the 
mail, including some or all of the following:
  a) marking the mail as spam
  b) answering the “did we categorize this correctly as spam” 
question with yes
  c) answering the “did we categorize this correctly as not spam” 
question with no

2) They’re acting in ways that tells Microsoft they don’t care about the mail, 
including some or all of the following:
  a) never opening the mail
  b) deleting the mail
  c) never looking for the mail and pulling it out of the spam 
folder.

In the case of transactional messages, basically what it says is that your 
users don’t care about their password resets, or their receipts or whatever it 
is you’re sending to them. They’re not interacting with the mail in any way 
that’s telling microsoft this is valuable mail.

When Microsoft tells you to “revalidate your lists” that’s a signal that you 
should really look at the accuracy of your data. Are these messages actually 
going to the people who triggered the transactional mail? Do the addresses 
belong to your users? How active are these users on the Microsoft platform? 
(I’ve had a couple of MS addresses for over 20 years now, but i don’t use them 
for any real mail. Mostly they were my usenet posting addresses and maybe the 
occasional test address.)

My professional experience is that Microsoft has the most sensitive and 
aggressive filters in the top 3 free mailbox providers. I’m not convinced that 
this is intentional. None of that really matters. It’s their system and we have 
to deal with it.

My professional experience is that many senders with Microsoft delivery 
problems have underlying issues that need to be addressed to get into 
Microsoft. But they see Microsoft’s sensitive and aggressive filters as 
“unfair” and “broken” because they aren’t having problems with other free 
mailbox providers. They refuse to change what they’re doing.

Thus, we end up with long threads here on mailop complaining, yet again, about 
Microsoft being mean.

laura



--
Having an Email Crisis?  We can help! 800 823-9674

Laura Atkins
Word to the Wise
la...@wordtothewise.com<mailto:la...@wordtothewise.com>
(650) 437-0741

Email Delivery Blog: 
https://wordtothewise.com/blog<https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwordtothewise.com%2Fblog&data=02%7C01%7Cmichael.wise%40microsoft.com%7Cd0096e00016c4d0e909508d7579ed90f%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C637074212085458553&sdata=FuH%2F71oTfgYMmxBUBA0FDyfeLcprZhZ0EeJgADG32b4%3D&reserved=0>






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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop]

Dnia 23.10.2019 o godz. 11:36:45 Brielle via mailop pisze:
> It's not a rant any moreso then your suggestions about regulation,
> lawsuits to get your way with e-mail providers, etc.
[...]
> Reality is, your mere suggestion of regulation / courts to make
> providers accept your e-mail makes you a liability to my services.

It's *you* who is constantly bringing up the topic of regulations and
lawsuits and not me.
Seems you must be pretty obsessed with this.

I'm not a fan of regulations and/or lawsuits. If there is a will to
cooperate from all sides, then you don't need any regulations. Anyway,
that's how Internet has been built and operated for many years. Until the
people who *don't* have the will to cooperate, who think like "it's mine, so
I can do with it whatever I want, not caring about others", "my ownership,
my property" and "I don't have any obligation" came and spoiled everything.
They even don't know on what principles was it all based, but they
nevertheless think it's theirs and they are allowed to decide how it should
work.

And they are upset on "mere suggestion" of regulation/courts. Funny.
However, they would probably think other way if it were *them* who get
constantly mistreated by someone bigger. They would be first to go to court
in that case.

In our country we call this attitude "Kali's morality", this name refers to
a character in a well-known book, who used to say "If Kali steals a cow from
someone, it's good; but if someone steals a cow from Kali, it's bad".

That's all you represent. No any worth discussing with you.
-- 
Regards,
   Jaroslaw Rafa
   r...@rafa.eu.org
--
"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."

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Al Iverson via mailop]

Brielle is correct. My server, my rules, the primary tenet of spam
filtering. It is a case where "Be liberal in what you accept, and
conservative in what you send" has been eaten away due to exploitation
by bad actors.

If you want to get the mail delivered, you have to do it to the
specification required by the receiving ISP. Sometimes you don't like
those requirements. Sometimes you may feel that it is unfair. But do
you want to get the mail delivered? Then you need to do it.

Complain all you want, it will do no good. It didn't do any good when
the crazy people put up web pages attacking MAPS in 1999, and it
doesn't do any good to attack the theories of email sender reputation,
spam filtering and deliverability today. It's all long settled at this
point. Decided by the people hosting the mailboxes.

I hope you find it not worth discussing this any further with any of
us, because this unending noise on what is supposed to be an
operational issues discussion is a waste of everyone's time.

On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 2:37 PM Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop
 wrote:
>
> Dnia 23.10.2019 o godz. 11:36:45 Brielle via mailop pisze:
> > It's not a rant any moreso then your suggestions about regulation,
> > lawsuits to get your way with e-mail providers, etc.
> [...]
> > Reality is, your mere suggestion of regulation / courts to make
> > providers accept your e-mail makes you a liability to my services.
>
> It's *you* who is constantly bringing up the topic of regulations and
> lawsuits and not me.
> Seems you must be pretty obsessed with this.
>
> I'm not a fan of regulations and/or lawsuits. If there is a will to
> cooperate from all sides, then you don't need any regulations. Anyway,
> that's how Internet has been built and operated for many years. Until the
> people who *don't* have the will to cooperate, who think like "it's mine, so
> I can do with it whatever I want, not caring about others", "my ownership,
> my property" and "I don't have any obligation" came and spoiled everything.
> They even don't know on what principles was it all based, but they
> nevertheless think it's theirs and they are allowed to decide how it should
> work.
>
> And they are upset on "mere suggestion" of regulation/courts. Funny.
> However, they would probably think other way if it were *them* who get
> constantly mistreated by someone bigger. They would be first to go to court
> in that case.
>
> In our country we call this attitude "Kali's morality", this name refers to
> a character in a well-known book, who used to say "If Kali steals a cow from
> someone, it's good; but if someone steals a cow from Kali, it's bad".
>
> That's all you represent. No any worth discussing with you.
> --
> Regards,
>Jaroslaw Rafa
>r...@rafa.eu.org
> --
> "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."
>
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-- 
al iverson // wombatmail // chicago
http://www.aliverson.com
http://www.spamresource.com

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Brielle via mailop]

On 10/23/2019 1:33 PM, Jaroslaw Rafa wrote:

It's *you* who is constantly bringing up the topic of regulations and
lawsuits and not me.
Seems you must be pretty obsessed with this.



*clears her throat loudly*

Message-ID: <20191007155046.gb21...@rafa.eu.org>

To quote you...


Of course, nobody can succeed individually in a lawsuit against Google. But
maybe *all* senders who are facing this issue should unite and sue Google
together. Even if the lawsuit itself fails, it would probably get big media
coverage (especially if it will be presented as "discrimination" of small
senders by a big company, etc.), and that media coverage itself could cause
Google to rethink their policy...


Yep, totally didn't suggest any of that there!

As you were totally not saying anything about trying to force people 
through lawsuits/regulation...




And they are upset on "mere suggestion" of regulation/courts. Funny.
However, they would probably think other way if it were *them* who get
constantly mistreated by someone bigger. They would be first to go to court
in that case.



I deal with mails going to Spam/Junk on a daily basis from one of my 
senders - stuff like receipts, auction notices, stuff like that.


It happens, we ask users to mark stuff as not spam/not junk, and put the 
from address in their address book...


Not the end of the world.



In our country we call this attitude "Kali's morality", this name refers to
a character in a well-known book, who used to say "If Kali steals a cow from
someone, it's good; but if someone steals a cow from Kali, it's bad".

That's all you represent. No any worth discussing with you.



You are welcome to not consider my input 'important' or 'worthwhile', 
but I'd suggest you listen to some of the advice given to you by others 
here- they've brought up lots of good points.


--
Brielle Bruns
The Summit Open Source Development Group
http://www.sosdg.org/ http://www.ahbl.org

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Brandon Long via mailop]

Re Postel's Law:

The Harmful Consequences of the Robustness

Principle ie Postel was wrong


https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-iab-protocol-maintenance-03

On Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 12:49 PM Brielle via mailop  wrote:

> On 10/23/2019 1:33 PM, Jaroslaw Rafa wrote:
> > It's *you* who is constantly bringing up the topic of regulations and
> > lawsuits and not me.
> > Seems you must be pretty obsessed with this.
>
>
> *clears her throat loudly*
>
> Message-ID: <20191007155046.gb21...@rafa.eu.org>
>
> To quote you...
>
> > Of course, nobody can succeed individually in a lawsuit against Google.
> But
> > maybe *all* senders who are facing this issue should unite and sue Google
> > together. Even if the lawsuit itself fails, it would probably get big
> media
> > coverage (especially if it will be presented as "discrimination" of small
> > senders by a big company, etc.), and that media coverage itself could
> cause
> > Google to rethink their policy...
>
> Yep, totally didn't suggest any of that there!
>
> As you were totally not saying anything about trying to force people
> through lawsuits/regulation...
>
> >
> > And they are upset on "mere suggestion" of regulation/courts. Funny.
> > However, they would probably think other way if it were *them* who get
> > constantly mistreated by someone bigger. They would be first to go to
> court
> > in that case.
> >
>
> I deal with mails going to Spam/Junk on a daily basis from one of my
> senders - stuff like receipts, auction notices, stuff like that.
>
> It happens, we ask users to mark stuff as not spam/not junk, and put the
> from address in their address book...
>
> Not the end of the world.
>
>
> > In our country we call this attitude "Kali's morality", this name refers
> to
> > a character in a well-known book, who used to say "If Kali steals a cow
> from
> > someone, it's good; but if someone steals a cow from Kali, it's bad".
> >
> > That's all you represent. No any worth discussing with you.
> >
>
> You are welcome to not consider my input 'important' or 'worthwhile',
> but I'd suggest you listen to some of the advice given to you by others
> here- they've brought up lots of good points.
>
> --
> Brielle Bruns
> The Summit Open Source Development Group
> http://www.sosdg.org/ http://www.ahbl.org
>
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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop]

Dnia 23.10.2019 o godz. 14:44:58 Al Iverson via mailop pisze:
> 
> If you want to get the mail delivered, you have to do it to the
> specification required by the receiving ISP. Sometimes you don't like
> those requirements. Sometimes you may feel that it is unfair. But do
> you want to get the mail delivered? Then you need to do it.

How to do it if you don't know what exactly these requirements are, and the
receiving ISP doesn't help you with that in any way?

That's what I'm complaining about. Not about the fact that they set up some
rules of rejecting/spam filtering, because everybody does that - it's
obvious.

But in case of an FP, I would expect from the receiving ISP some help -
either to explain *exactly* what should I do to get email delivered (no, and
vague hints like "change your hosting provider, maybe you will have better
luck" are nowhere near an exact explanation), or - if I'm doing everything
right and there's still an FP - fixing the error on their side.

That's how any reliable and decent ISP would behave. Whoever is behaving
differently, is harming everyone on the Internet. Saying "I didn't pay them
to receive my mail, so they don't have any obligation to help me" at this
moment is nonsense.

> I hope you find it not worth discussing this any further with any of
> us, because this unending noise on what is supposed to be an
> operational issues discussion is a waste of everyone's time.

Please take into account that it is Brielle, and not me, who re-started this
discussion. I have finished this dicussion long ago, but Brielle "called me
to the blackboard" by referring explicitly to the thread I started. So I had
to reply.

Don't "call me to the blackboard", and I wouldn't reply.
-- 
Regards,
   Jaroslaw Rafa
   r...@rafa.eu.org
--
"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."

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop]

Dnia 23.10.2019 o godz. 13:47:19 Brielle via mailop pisze:
> To quote you...
> 
> >Of course, nobody can succeed individually in a lawsuit against Google. But
> >maybe *all* senders who are facing this issue should unite and sue Google
> >together. Even if the lawsuit itself fails, it would probably get big media
> >coverage (especially if it will be presented as "discrimination" of small
> >senders by a big company, etc.), and that media coverage itself could cause
> >Google to rethink their policy...
> 
> Yep, totally didn't suggest any of that there!
> 
> As you were totally not saying anything about trying to force people
> through lawsuits/regulation...

Yes, I said that *once*. Not being particularly concerned about that idea.
You are returning to this over and over.

I said this because someone else mentioned a lawsuit earlier in the
discussion, only as a reference to what that person said.

As I said, I'm not a fan of lawsuits and regulations, but if someone hits
you in the face, and you aren't big and strong enough to hit him back, you
have sometimes to resort to lawsuits and regulations.

> I deal with mails going to Spam/Junk on a daily basis from one of my
> senders - stuff like receipts, auction notices, stuff like that.

As I said multiple times: you are a technical person. You know you should
look in the spam folder. A "regular user" doesn't know that.

I suggested in another thread that maybe the initial mailbox setup, right
after account creation, should not include automatic moving of messages
marked as spam to spam folder. They should be left in inbox, only marked as
spam (somewhat like SpamAssassin style). It should be up to the user to
decide, if he/she wants these messages automatically moved to spam folder
(as it is working today by default). If yes, it will be one click setup to
turn this on, but the user will be *aware* that spam folder exists and some
messages are automatically going right there. So he/she is more likely to
check this folder periodically, because now many users don't even know that
this folder exists and what it is for. They assume everything they receive
is in their inbox.
-- 
Regards,
   Jaroslaw Rafa
   r...@rafa.eu.org
--
"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."

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop]

Dnia 23.10.2019 o godz. 12:59:26 Brandon Long via mailop pisze:
> Re Postel's Law:
> 
> The Harmful Consequences of the Robustness
> 
> Principle ie Postel was wrong
> 
> 
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-iab-protocol-maintenance-03

Interesting draft - thank you Brandon - however after reviewing it, I would
say that contrary to the title this document by no way proves that Postel's
law was wrong. It just tries to make it's applicability area more precise.
And it even mentions the very important thing - risk of exclusion
(mitigating that risk was the main reason the robustness principle is all
about, if I understand correctly).

However, even within this draft, we are still talking about
changing/modifying specifications. What if there's no specification at all?
In our case, you don't know what exactly causes your mail to go to spam or
be rejected?
-- 
Regards,
   Jaroslaw Rafa
   r...@rafa.eu.org
--
"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."

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Michael Wise via mailop]

Not knowing in advance if a message is going to be junked or not is a feature 
if one is playing defense, and an absolute, horrible bug if one is on offense.
This is a rough game we're playing on the fringes, with a lot of evil people 
with LOTS of resources attempting to game The System, in this case, "Hotmail".

We are trying to do our best with the tools at our disposal to tip the scales 
to the benefit of the recipients...
The bad guys keep trying to game the system.

Aloha,
Michael.
-- 
Michael J Wise
Microsoft Corporation| Spam Analysis
"Your Spam Specimen Has Been Processed."
Open a ticket for Hotmail ?

-Original Message-
From: mailop  On Behalf Of Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop
Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2019 1:26 PM
To: Brandon Long 
Cc: mailop ; Brielle 
Subject: Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

Dnia 23.10.2019 o godz. 12:59:26 Brandon Long via mailop pisze:
> Re Postel's Law:
> 
> The Harmful Consequences of the Robustness
> 
> Principle ie Postel was wrong
> 
> 
> https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftool
> s.ietf.org%2Fhtml%2Fdraft-iab-protocol-maintenance-03&data=02%7C01
> %7Cmichael.wise%40microsoft.com%7C60ceb098c01a409d728608d757f787dc%7C7
> 2f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C637074592968923834&sdata
> =L8I6eo1TpUn0xU%2FPbroMPkqWZ0VF85wF43qEOt763fM%3D&reserved=0

Interesting draft - thank you Brandon - however after reviewing it, I would say 
that contrary to the title this document by no way proves that Postel's law was 
wrong. It just tries to make it's applicability area more precise.
And it even mentions the very important thing - risk of exclusion (mitigating 
that risk was the main reason the robustness principle is all about, if I 
understand correctly).

However, even within this draft, we are still talking about changing/modifying 
specifications. What if there's no specification at all?
In our case, you don't know what exactly causes your mail to go to spam or be 
rejected?
--
Regards,
   Jaroslaw Rafa
   r...@rafa.eu.org
--
"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."

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Matt Palmer via mailop]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 09:55:10AM +, Sébastien Riccio via mailop wrote:
> I don’t think their doing it on purpose, but the final result could make
> think they do.  Some of our customers already moved to office365 because
> of this.
>
> As long as we don’t have a way to clearly understand why some mails are
> going to junk folder and some others don’t, the problem will persists,
> thus slowly killing small services providers or at least their mail
> services.

You know what they say... "sufficiently inscrutable AI is indistinguishable
from malice."

- Matt


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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Noel Butler via mailop]

On 24/10/2019 03:36, Brielle via mailop wrote:

> We have gatekeepers that control access to things already.
> 
> We've got mail filtering providers that act as gatekeepers for e-mail - 
> proofpoint, etc.  People _pay_ them to control inbound and outbound.

more fool them 

Trust is earned, not bought. 

> This is why we have other methods to communicate as well - and why most 
> courts, for example, won't let you 'serve' people over e-mail and require a 
> physical process server.

Yet courts accept email as evidence, so its reliable enough 

> Reality is, your mere suggestion of regulation / courts to make providers 
> accept your e-mail makes you a liability to my services.

That will never happen, precedent already set, remember that West
Australian super spammer from decades gone by, forget its name, he tried
that after a DNSBL (SORBS from memory??) blocked his trash, the courts
ruled they can block whoever they like, now might just be aussie, but if
your in the commonwealth at least that does hold weight, not sure about
in US but I dare say a defendant can use such a precedence to sway even
a US court. 

-- 
Kind Regards, 

Noel Butler 

This Email, including any attachments, may contain legally 
privileged
information, therefore remains confidential and subject to copyright
protected under international law. You may not disseminate, discuss, or
reveal, any part, to anyone, without the authors express written
authority to do so. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify
the sender then delete all copies of this message including attachments,
immediately. Confidentiality, copyright, and legal privilege are not
waived or lost by reason of the mistaken delivery of this message. Only
PDF [1] and ODF [2] documents accepted, please do not send proprietary
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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Brielle via mailop]

On 10/23/2019 3:05 PM, Noel Butler via mailop wrote:
Reality is, your mere suggestion of regulation / courts to make 
providers accept your e-mail makes you a liability to my services.
That will never happen, precedent already set, remember that West 
Australian super spammer from decades gone by, forget its name, he tried 
that after a DNSBL (SORBS from memory??) blocked his trash, the courts 
ruled they can block whoever they like, now might just be aussie, but if 
your in the commonwealth at least that does hold weight, not sure about 
in US but I dare say a defendant can use such a precedence to sway even 
a US court.


US courts have ruled that providers are allowed to block under 47 U.S. 
Code § 230.  Pretty much reaffirms the whole private ownership thing.


I was more saying, if I know you are litigious piece of crap that 
doesn't respect my rights to control unwanted e-mail, then for my own 
sake it was better if you not have access to ANY of my systems at all 
from the start.


--
Brielle Bruns
The Summit Open Source Development Group
http://www.sosdg.org/ http://www.ahbl.org

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Daniele via mailop]

On 23-Oct-19 10:34 PM, Michael Wise via mailop wrote:

Not knowing in advance if a message is going to be junked or not is a feature 
if one is playing defense, and an absolute, horrible bug if one is on offense.
But knowing in advance that a legitimate message is going to be junked 
also looks a lot like an absolute, horrible bug...


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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Brandon Long via mailop]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 7:00 AM Doug Royer via mailop 
wrote:

> On 10/22/19 3:36 PM, Daniele via mailop wrote:
> > It looks like Microsoft, with its long history of questionable
> practices, has recently developed a new strategy for tearing down its
> weaker competitors.
>
> Not directly related, but gmail has been putting MANY more false positives
> in the spam folder. I used to get 1-3 per week. Now false positives are
> closer to 60 a day.
>
> And MOST (about 80%) of them have the X-Microsoft headers. On the first
> day 99% had the text portion ONLY base64 encoded, not text/plain alternate.
> Only 1 was DANE related.
>
> It may be people are tweaking with headers. And I think many are tweaking
> their filtering rules to adjust to the changing spam. It used to be that
> 100% of the email I got with ONLY base64 encoded text, was spam at it
> attempted to bypass filters. I am guessing that gmail had noticed a similar
> trend and may be filtering those as spam.
>
> And why does Microsoft need about 60 X-Microsoft headers per email? Maybe
> it is time for the IETF to deprecate X- headers.
>

Just a guess at Gmail, once your email is inside our system, we wrap it
in a protocol buffer  and
stick information about the message that we learn at various points into
that.   There are hundreds of entries in the proto for messages, and that
doesn't even talk about the "spam features" which number somewhere over
5000 (not all of which are still in use, that's just the enum values at
this point).  The messages transit different servers in our system using
our RPC system (the precursor to GRPC ), so all of this
data can be shared out of band to the actual message contents.   For many
sub-systems, they don't even get the full message contents, only the small
parts they need.  We only resort back to SMTP when relaying between systems
or virtual ADMDs... and even then, we're trying to do more to keep things
internal so we can keep the accumulated data.  The headers we add that are
a blackbox externally are for our consumption when mail transits via SMTP,
and any that looks like base64 data is base64 data that's encrypted
(usually a serialized protobuf that's encrypted and then base64 encoded).
At first we did that just so we could somewhat trust the data that came
back, but now it's done by default to avoid any possible privacy issues.

Most smaller systems just move messages around using SMTP or LMTP or
whatever  (POP/IMAP to the client), and there's less room for out of band
information there, so you get headers like Authentication-Results or
various system specific X headers.

If I had to guess, MS uses a system much more like that, or as they've also
pointed out, they have a bunch of different systems acting as one, so they
resort to stuffing the info they need into headers so that the hotmail
system can share with the exchange systems and with the frontbridge systems

Which is fine, who the heck cares how many or what type of X headers they
add.  They aren't for you, are they causing your system issues?  I know we
put in a maximum size of headers at one point to prevent some poor edge
cases in our system, but if the size of standard headers reached that
point... we'd just make the cut-off bigger.

Brandon
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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Brandon Long via mailop]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 2:34 PM Daniele via mailop 
wrote:

> On 23-Oct-19 10:34 PM, Michael Wise via mailop wrote:
> > Not knowing in advance if a message is going to be junked or not is a
> feature if one is playing defense, and an absolute, horrible bug if one is
> on offense.
> But knowing in advance that a legitimate message is going to be junked
> also looks a lot like an absolute, horrible bug...
>

Do you think any system is perfect?  Of course we know ahead of time that
some "legitimate"[1] mail is going to be junked.

Just because the system is imperfect doesn't make it a bug.

Brandon
[1] legitimate is actually a horrible word to use here, but we'll assume
that it equals a message that a user actually wants to see
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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Daniele via mailop]

Do you think any system is perfect?  Of course we know ahead of time 
that some "legitimate"[1] mail is going to be junked.


Just because the system is imperfect doesn't make it a bug.

It looks like some details got lost along the thread: as I said, when 
all the emails I receive on my outlook account (and by "all" I mean 
*all* ...like, you know, *all*) are simply stored in the Junk folder 
like it was my INBOX, that really looks like a bug to me and to any 
reasonable user.


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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Michael Wise via mailop]

Please define, "Legitimate" in this context ... in a way that we can explain it 
to a machine.

Please.

Aloha,
Michael.
--
Michael J Wise
Microsoft Corporation| Spam Analysis
"Your Spam Specimen Has Been Processed."
Open a ticket for Hotmail<http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=614866> ?



-Original Message-
From: mailop  On Behalf Of Daniele via mailop
Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2019 2:33 PM
To: mailop@mailop.org
Subject: Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition



On 23-Oct-19 10:34 PM, Michael Wise via mailop wrote:

> Not knowing in advance if a message is going to be junked or not is a feature 
> if one is playing defense, and an absolute, horrible bug if one is on offense.

But knowing in advance that a legitimate message is going to be junked also 
looks a lot like an absolute, horrible bug...



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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Michael Wise via mailop]

They do?

Who would that be, I obviously didn't get the memo.

Aloha,
Michael.
--
Michael J Wise
Microsoft Corporation| Spam Analysis
"Your Spam Specimen Has Been Processed."
Open a ticket for Hotmail<http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=614866> ?



-Original Message-
From: mailop  On Behalf Of Matt Palmer via mailop
Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2019 2:03 PM
To: mailop@mailop.org
Subject: Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition



On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 09:55:10AM +, Sébastien Riccio via mailop wrote:

> I don’t think their doing it on purpose, but the final result could

> make think they do.  Some of our customers already moved to office365

> because of this.

>

> As long as we don’t have a way to clearly understand why some mails

> are going to junk folder and some others don’t, the problem will

> persists, thus slowly killing small services providers or at least

> their mail services.



You know what they say... "sufficiently inscrutable AI is indistinguishable 
from malice."



- Matt





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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Daniele via mailop]

On 24-Oct-19 12:13 AM, Michael Wise via mailop wrote:

Please define, "Legitimate" in this context ... in a way that we can explain it 
to a machine.

Please.


As W. Churchill said "However beautiful the strategy, you should 
occasionally look at the results": so if you can't explain it to the 
machine and the machine keeps getting it wrong over and over, maybe the 
strategy is not that beautiful.


Do you mean that, since you can't explain what a "legitimate" message is 
to the machine, the solution is to junk all messages so you can't get it 
wrong? Sooner or later the user will get a real spam message and at that 
moment ...yeh! We filed it in the Junk folder! Great job, woohoo!


How comes that, as far as I can say, no other Mail Service Provider has 
such a *huge* rate of false positives?




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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Michael Wise via mailop]

Depends who you ask, about the FPs.

If you’re doing testing, and you keep feeding it tests that look like address 
probes, you’re going to one set of conclusions, certainly.



But just creating an account and sending it test messages is no way to evaluate 
the FP rate, for many, many reason.

If you’re in this business, you should already know this.



If you know how to explain what a, “Legitimate” message is, *BEFORE* it 
arrives, to a machine … I’d very much like to hear it.

Aloha,
Michael.
--
Michael J Wise
Microsoft Corporation| Spam Analysis
"Your Spam Specimen Has Been Processed."
Open a ticket for Hotmail<http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=614866> ?



-Original Message-
From: mailop  On Behalf Of Daniele via mailop
Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2019 3:29 PM
To: mailop@mailop.org
Subject: Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition



On 24-Oct-19 12:13 AM, Michael Wise via mailop wrote:

> Please define, "Legitimate" in this context ... in a way that we can explain 
> it to a machine.

>

> Please.



As W. Churchill said "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally 
look at the results": so if you can't explain it to the machine and the machine 
keeps getting it wrong over and over, maybe the strategy is not that beautiful.



Do you mean that, since you can't explain what a "legitimate" message is to the 
machine, the solution is to junk all messages so you can't get it wrong? Sooner 
or later the user will get a real spam message and at that moment ...yeh! 
We filed it in the Junk folder! Great job, woohoo!



How comes that, as far as I can say, no other Mail Service Provider has such a 
*huge* rate of false positives?







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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Daniele via mailop]

And by the way, you said "If we throw something in the trash, there's a 
reason."
That's fine, I sent you more material to investigate on; can you please 
let me know, even off-list, what is the reason?


On 24-Oct-19 12:13 AM, Michael Wise via mailop wrote:


Please define, "Legitimate" in this context ... in a way that we can explain it 
to a machine.

Please.

Aloha,
Michael.
--
Michael J Wise
Microsoft Corporation| Spam Analysis
"Your Spam Specimen Has Been Processed."
Open a ticket for Hotmail<http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=614866> ?



-Original Message-
From: mailop  On Behalf Of Daniele via mailop
Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2019 2:33 PM
To: mailop@mailop.org
Subject: Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition



On 23-Oct-19 10:34 PM, Michael Wise via mailop wrote:


Not knowing in advance if a message is going to be junked or not is a feature 
if one is playing defense, and an absolute, horrible bug if one is on offense.

But knowing in advance that a legitimate message is going to be junked also 
looks a lot like an absolute, horrible bug...



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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Joel M Snyder via mailop]

If you know how to explain what a, “Legitimate” message is, *BEFORE* it arrives, 
to a machine … I’d very much like to hear it.


Me too.

I have hand-sorted more than 1.5 million messages over the past 13 
years, and there are *ALWAYS* messages that get dropped into the "don't 
know" category---ones where I can't tell whether it's legitimate or not.


You can't explain it to a machine because you can't even figure it out 
yourself 100% of the time.  And your decision may vary depending on time 
of day, whatever you had for breakfast, what you read in the news the 
last week, and what your manager asked you about two weeks before.


After watching every major anti-spam engine in action, I observe that 
there are vast differences in the philosophy of "what is spam" from 
different anti-spam engineering teams.  Some of these show up as knobs 
in the config that you can twiddle, but often it's just "this product 
works this way and if you don't like it, there are others to choose from."


In addition, the definition of "legitimate" has varied over time.  There 
are few that would argue that phishing should not be trapped and blocked 
today, but 10 years ago what we now call "whale phishing"---one-to-one 
non-commercial non-bulk messages, sometimes between friends---would have 
gotten through every mail filter.


I'm all for better machine learning and smarter mail filter technology, 
but it's a long-term war with a clever and persistent enemy.  Any mail 
security gateway product/service that doesn't have an active engineering 
team constantly working on explaining what a "legitimate" message is to 
their software will be useless in a very short period of time.


jms


--
Joel M Snyder, 1404 East Lind Road, Tucson, AZ, 85719
Senior Partner, Opus One   Phone: +1 520 324 0494
j...@opus1.comhttp://www.opus1.com/jms

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Jay Hennigan via mailop]

On 10/23/19 03:57, Daniele via mailop wrote:

Not to mention that with JMRP I'm getting 100% of legitmate emails that 
users tagged as spam for whatever reason, so the tool is pretty useless 
(just my 2 cents).


Actually, that shows that the tool is indeed quite useful. It tells you 
that the mail was delivered and the user marked it as spam. That is good 
useful information indeed.


Either the user doesn't want your mail, or the user doesn't know the 
difference between "delete" and "spam". In either case, the action can 
be directly linked to the user.


It does seem that the user behavior of incorrectly marking mail as spam 
has been going on far too long. Large webmail providers, PLEASE update 
your UI to label that choice "Report as spam", not simply "Junk".


--
Jay Hennigan - j...@west.net
Network Engineering - CCIE #7880
503 897-8550 - WB6RDV

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Doug Royer via mailop]

On 10/23/19 3:45 PM, Brandon Long wrote:



On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 7:00 AM Doug Royer via mailop mailto:mailop@mailop.org>> wrote:

On 10/22/19 3:36 PM, Daniele via mailop wrote:
 > It looks like Microsoft, with its long history of questionable 
practices, has recently developed a new strategy for tearing down its weaker 
competitors.

Not directly related, but gmail has been putting MANY more false positives 
in the spam folder. I used to get 1-3 per week. Now false positives are closer 
to 60 a day.

And MOST (about 80%) of them have the X-Microsoft headers. On the first day 
99% had the text portion ONLY base64 encoded, not text/plain alternate. Only 1 
was DANE related.

It may be people are tweaking with headers. And I think many are tweaking 
their filtering rules to adjust to the changing spam. It used to be that 100% 
of the email I got with ONLY base64 encoded text, was spam at it attempted to 
bypass filters. I am guessing that gmail had noticed a similar trend and may be 
filtering those as spam.

And why does Microsoft need about 60 X-Microsoft headers per email? Maybe 
it is time for the IETF to deprecate X- headers.



Thanks for the feedback!


. Just a guess   They aren't for you, are they causing your system 
issues?


No clue if they are the reason gmail tags them as spam. I am posting the 
changes I see, and gathering information to try to find a pattern for the false 
positives. That is one of the patterns I see. I do not know if it is a cause or 
unrelated.

I get my email via IMAP from google, they are pre-filtered into the spam filter 
by gmail. I now manually tell Thunderbird to run my message filters on my gmail 
spam folder multiple times a day to place them back into the inbox or correct 
sub-folders. The only problem is the increasing number of false positives (many 
from IETF mailing lists) that show up in the gmail spam folder.

I tried turning off all of my Thunderbird filters to make sure it was not 
happening at my end.

Then I started using gmail filtering only. It seems to keep them out of the 
spam filter (because I check never send to spam with the specified 
to/from/...). However they show up in my folders but do not show up as new 
messages. I have to manually click on each of my folders before it shows me new 
email in that folder. This issue may be some interaction issue with gmail 
filters, IMAP, and Thunderbird. I am still trying things to figure out what 
changed. ( may have found this fix)

If this all fails, I will run a fetchmail/procmail from the gmail spam folder 
and have procmail filter IN what I want from the gmail spam filter. This is the 
basic technique I use for dumber than gmail systems I have to interact with. A 
bit of sed/awk/scripting and I should be able to import/export filters from 
procmail to/from gmail. The gmail filters export as XML, so an XSLT script 
should be able to create a procmail filter that I can use to filter back in the 
false positives.

I have noticed on the IETF, NANOG, and MAILOP messages about similar things. 
Something has changed.

--
Doug Royer - (http://DougRoyer.US)
douglas.ro...@gmail.com
714-989-6135

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Jay Hennigan via mailop]

On 10/23/19 13:01, Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop wrote:


How to do it if you don't know what exactly these requirements are, and the
receiving ISP doesn't help you with that in any way?


If the receiving ISP published the criteria which it used to determine 
that a message is not spam, then the spammers would simply adjust their 
messages to fit those criteria. Then the receiving ISP needs to change 
their criteria to reject that form of spam. If they then publish the new 
criteria, the spammers simply re-adjust. Lather, rinse, repeat.


Actually, that's essentially what happens even without the ISP 
publishing the specifications. Not publishing them makes it somewhat 
more difficult for the spammers.



That's what I'm complaining about. Not about the fact that they set up some
rules of rejecting/spam filtering, because everybody does that - it's
obvious.

But in case of an FP, I would expect from the receiving ISP some help -
either to explain *exactly* what should I do to get email delivered (no, and
vague hints like "change your hosting provider, maybe you will have better
luck" are nowhere near an exact explanation), or - if I'm doing everything
right and there's still an FP - fixing the error on their side.


See above. If the ISP were to explain *exactly* what is needed to get 
your mail delivered, then every spammer in the world will do *exactly* 
that.


The advice to change your hosting provider is indeed relevant. There was 
a suggestion in the case of OVH that you use their smart host rather 
than direct from your customer assigned IP. Did you consider that 
suggestion and try it?


There was also the suggestion that you not use a free domain name. Did 
you try that?


Rather than trying to suss out what criteria will get your mail 
delivered, try to figure out what criteria is likely to get your mail 
sent to the spam folder, and don't do those things. I can think of three 
things that you admit to doing that will tilt the scales toward routing 
your mail to junk.


* Sending directly from an OVH customer IP.
* Sending from a free domain name.
* Sending to addresses scraped from websites.

So don't do that then.


That's how any reliable and decent ISP would behave. Whoever is behaving
differently, is harming everyone on the Internet. Saying "I didn't pay them
to receive my mail, so they don't have any obligation to help me" at this
moment is nonsense.


It's how the Internet works. The postal service works the same way. Try 
mailing a letter without a stamp, then throw a tantrum and threaten to 
sue the government when it isn't delivered. Let us know how that goes.


--
Jay Hennigan - j...@west.net
Network Engineering - CCIE #7880
503 897-8550 - WB6RDV

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Noel Butler via mailop]

On 24/10/2019 07:20, Brielle via mailop wrote:

> On 10/23/2019 3:05 PM, Noel Butler via mailop wrote: Reality is, your mere 
> suggestion of regulation / courts to make providers accept your e-mail makes 
> you a liability to my services. That will never happen, precedent already 
> set, remember that West Australian super spammer from decades gone by, forget 
> its name, he tried that after a DNSBL (SORBS from memory??) blocked his 
> trash, the courts ruled they can block whoever they like, now might just be 
> aussie, but if your in the commonwealth at least that does hold weight, not 
> sure about in US but I dare say a defendant can use such a precedence to sway 
> even a US court.

US courts have ruled that providers are allowed to block under 47 U.S.
Code § 230.  Pretty much reaffirms the whole private ownership thing.

I was more saying, if I know you are litigious piece of crap that
doesn't respect my rights to control unwanted e-mail, then for my own
sake it was better if you not have access to ANY of my systems at all
from the start. 

Absolutely, our network our rules will always win the day, but when you
are one of the huge guys in the business, you cant be as anal about
things like the smaller guys can, contradicting myself here though as
I'm not sure I always agree with that, such as I dont believe in certain
DNSBL's policy to never blacklist certain freemail providers because
they are too big . poppy. nobody is too big if they send enough trash.

-- 
Kind Regards, 

Noel Butler 

This Email, including any attachments, may contain legally 
privileged
information, therefore remains confidential and subject to copyright
protected under international law. You may not disseminate, discuss, or
reveal, any part, to anyone, without the authors express written
authority to do so. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify
the sender then delete all copies of this message including attachments,
immediately. Confidentiality, copyright, and legal privilege are not
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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Thomas Walter via mailop]

Hay Jay,

On 24.10.19 01:58, Jay Hennigan via mailop wrote:
> It does seem that the user behavior of incorrectly marking mail as spam
> has been going on far too long. Large webmail providers, PLEASE update
> your UI to label that choice "Report as spam", not simply "Junk".

This doesn't help as long as users categorize "emails I don't like right
now" as Spam.

For example a lot of our students seem to be sorting official university
emails that remind them to re-register or important test reminders as
"Junk". E-Mails they have explicitely subscribed to and that are
important for their academic career.

Users can not be trusted to categorize emails.

Regards,
Thomas Walter

-- 
Thomas Walter
Datenverarbeitungszentrale

FH Münster
- University of Applied Sciences -
Corrensstr. 25, Raum B 112
48149 Münster

Tel: +49 251 83 64 908
Fax: +49 251 83 64 910
www.fh-muenster.de/dvz/

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Chris Wedgwood via mailop]

> Users can not be trusted to categorize emails.

who better than the recipient to decide if it's undesirable?

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Suresh Ramasubramanian via mailop]

On 24/10/19, 11:43 AM, "mailop on behalf of Thomas Walter via mailop" 
 wrote:

>Users can not be trusted to categorize emails.

Not one user no.  Neither can a single voter be trusted with the decision of 
who gets to rule a country.

Yes sometimes the aggregate of all the voters - or all the users at a provider 
- might get it wrong, and you then end up with [insert politiican's name here] 
or [university alerts getting misfiled] 

That's still better than some omniscient postmaster deciding what's spam and 
what's legit.

--srs 

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Alessandro Vesely via mailop]

On Wed 23/Oct/2019 22:26:17 +0200 Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop wrote:
> Dnia 23.10.2019 o godz. 12:59:26 Brandon Long via mailop pisze:
>> Re Postel's Law:
>> 
>> The Harmful Consequences of the Robustness
>> 
>> Principle ie Postel was wrong
>> 
>> 
>> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-iab-protocol-maintenance-03
> 
> Interesting draft - thank you Brandon - however after reviewing it, I would
> say that contrary to the title this document by no way proves that Postel's
> law was wrong. It just tries to make it's applicability area more precise.


To be fair, Postel's words on being tolerant, cited right at the beginning of
the Introduction of that draft, end in "unless [intolerance] is required by the
specification".  IOW, tolerance is the default behavior.  That doesn't mean
that protocol specifications should be sloppy, but just in case...


> However, even within this draft, we are still talking about
> changing/modifying specifications. What if there's no specification at all?
> In our case, you don't know what exactly causes your mail to go to spam or
> be rejected?


The draft exemplifies a few protocols (TLS, JSON, HTTP, HTML) but not SMTP.

I'd note that the Internet Standard for email is still rfc821.  Rfc5321 is a
Draft Standard.  It is 11 years old and is not yet being refined, AFAIK.  It
doesn't dig into spam filtering, reputation, authentication, and similar; it
barely acknowledges that they exist.  It is still a specification, though.

There are specifications on authentication, such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.  For
reputation, there is a specification (rfc7070 & Co.) for exchanging reputation
values, it neither says how to obtain those values nor how to treat them.
After all, also HTML specifies the format, not the content.  The same goes for
DNSxLs.

We invented a global loudspeaker but said nothing about lists to speak.


Best
Ale
-- 

























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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop]

Dnia 23.10.2019 o godz. 15:56:00 Joel M Snyder via mailop pisze:
> There are few that would argue that phishing should not be trapped
> and blocked today, but 10 years ago what we now call "whale
> phishing"---one-to-one non-commercial non-bulk messages, sometimes
> between friends---would have gotten through every mail filter.

But even if one such message goes through, is this really a problem?

Perhaps we should ask ourselves what is the actual goal of spam filtering.
In my opinion it is *not* to filter out *absolutely all* spam (for "spam",
consider here "messages unwanted by the recipient"), because it's not only
impossible but also requires too much effort and - most important - doesn't
make sense.

The goal of spam filtering is - in my opinion - filter the majority of spam
messages, so that they don't clutter the user's mailbox and don't prevent
him/her from normally using e-mail. If one or two (or even five) spam
messages go through, it's not a tragedy - the user can delete them manually.

On the other hand, if one or two "legitimate" messages (for "legitimate",
consider here "messages that recipient wants or at least may want") end up
in the spam folder, which means they will never be read by an average user,
is a much more serious issue.

I have an impression that we are trying to replace user's own intelligence
by artificial intelligence and machine learning, trying to prevent user from
every possible - actual and imagined - "bad" message. That's simply
impossible, will not work and has no sense. We are humans and computers are
computers; we have to be smarter than computers and we have to decide what we
do and what we don't want to see. And if we don't want to see, we simply
delete it. As long, as it's not like 20 or 30 messages per day and a large
part of my inbox, it's absolutely no problem that one or two unwanted
messages go through.

If someone is stupid enough to fall for a phishing message, they should be
educated. It should start from schools; it should take place in companies
etc. People should be constantly taught how to recognize phishing and not
fall for it. Why do we teach people how to safely cross the street, but we
don't teach them how to safely use the Internet?

We have the unique capability that differs us from computers that we are
able to THINK. We (all) should make use of that capability. Instead, we
(engineers) try to make computers think - is it in a hope that they will
replace human thinking and we (all) wouldn't need to think anymore?

It's clearly visible in the smartphone business. The "smarter" the
smartphones and their applications are, the dumber their users become. They
"outsource" all their thinking to the device they are holding in hand and
just trust blindly whatever the device tells them.

That's just absurd.

Don't try to be too perfect at spam filtering. Just be good enough. That's
enough :).
-- 
Regards,
   Jaroslaw Rafa
   r...@rafa.eu.org
--
"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."

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Graeme Fowler via mailop]

On 24 Oct 2019, at 11:15, Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop  wrote:
> The goal of spam filtering is - in my opinion - filter the majority of spam
> messages, so that they don't clutter the user's mailbox and don't prevent
> him/her from normally using e-mail. If one or two (or even five) spam
> messages go through, it's not a tragedy - the user can delete them manually.

I'd love to have your user base. 1 or 2 potential junk/spam/phish messages in 
inboxes across ours makes for multiple calls to our service desk that the "spam 
filter has failed". It's like the delete key doesn't exist (or has been mapped 
to a "raise a ticket" routine).

> On the other hand, if one or two "legitimate" messages (for "legitimate",
> consider here "messages that recipient wants or at least may want") end up
> in the spam folder, which means they will never be read by an average user,
> is a much more serious issue.

I'll come back to this point below.

> If someone is stupid enough to fall for a phishing message, they should be
> educated. It should start from schools; it should take place in companies
> etc. People should be constantly taught how to recognize phishing and not
> fall for it. Why do we teach people how to safely cross the street, but we
> don't teach them how to safely use the Internet?

People still get run over crossing the road; they still cross the road in 
stupid places, when they're not concentrating, when they're in a rush, when 
they're not feeling very well... the list goes on. People aren't "stupid" per 
se, they are - as you state - human, and humans make mistakes. No amount of 
education will prevent humans making mistakes or being distracted. I'm not 
saying don't educate, but as someone who is regularly involved awareness 
campaigns about IT security I am acutely aware of the fine line between too 
much and too little. Too little? Users get scammed. Too much? They report. 
Every. Single. Unwanted. Message (even the ones that are "legitimate").

Additionally (from above), if you think education is the key, why not educate 
your users to check the junk folder? It would be "stupid" to not check it if it 
exists (your term). Our users are taught to do just this, a side-effect of 
which is week-old emails that were put in the Junk folder get reported as - you 
guessed it - Junk.

Humans are fallible. Computers programmed by humans inherit the same 
fallibility, despite our ongoing attempts to either teach them to not be or 
make them teach themselves. They inherit the same biases from us, but what they 
can do is the same task at mega-scale that we can do at an individual level, 
and they can do it much more quickly. And they never get tired. This does mean 
they can make mistakes at a stupendous rate too, though, which brings us to...

> Don't try to be too perfect at spam filtering. Just be good enough. That's
> enough :).

There's the issue. Your "good enough" isn't a global setting - so we're back to 
"their network, their rules" all over again.

G
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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Bill Cole via mailop]

On 24 Oct 2019, at 6:15, Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop wrote:

Don't try to be too perfect at spam filtering. Just be good enough. 
That's

enough :).


Everyone has a different idea of "good enough" and it even varies by 
address for individuals...


I have a dozen distinct email accounts including test accounts on most 
big freemail providers, professional accounts in domains owned by 
clients/employers, and personal accounts on my own systems. Some of 
these also have aliases or are on the receiving end of external 
forwarding. Most days, no spam of any sort is delivered to any of these 
accounts, even to the "spam folders" imposed by some mailbox providers. 
It's a bad month when I see a dozen spams across all of my mail 
accounts, and I look at all of my spam folders because I don't trust the 
providers who use them.


I'm still working to make my spam filtering "good enough."

--
Bill Cole
b...@scconsult.com or billc...@apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Kelly Molloy via mailop]

On Thu, Oct 24, 2019 at 6:22 AM Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop
 wrote:

> But even if one such message goes through, is this really a problem?

Yes, it certainly can be. If an email causes a user to install
ransomware on a corporate network, then it is an enormous and
expensive problem; it's put companies out of business. If a phishing
message means that an company gets infected with malware, the
remediation is hugely expensive. A neighbor of mine just missed a
paycheck when the small business he works for got an email giving the
payroll clerk a new routing number. It looked just like the legit
emails she gets from the processor, so she transferred the money to
some guy in Indonesia. They filed a report with the FBI, but they
won't get that money back. The level of education needed to prevent
these incidents is not feasible for the casual user; I just got email
from "Expedia" telling me to log in because my trip had changed, and I
had to look very carefully and check headers against an email I knew
to be legit to determine it was a phish, and I've been doing this for
20 years.

It's really a problem.

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop]

Dnia 24.10.2019 o godz. 15:11:23 Kelly Molloy via mailop pisze:
> 
> Yes, it certainly can be. If an email causes a user to install
> ransomware on a corporate network, then it is an enormous and
> expensive problem; it's put companies out of business. If a phishing
> message means that an company gets infected with malware, the
> remediation is hugely expensive.

Protecting against malware is not a spam filter's job; it's a UTM's
(firewall's, web proxy's or whatever you use to protect your network) job.
Malware is best blocked at download; of course, if some links are identified
as pointing to malware, you may block emails containing links to it (URIBLs
do pretty good job at it, without the need to wild-guess), but it's a second
line of defense, just for convenience. The UTM should block the download of
a mailicious file anyway.

Antispam filter is not a tool to protect against malware; there are another
tools to do that, that are able to identify mailicious content pretty well.
It is possible to determine whether a message contains actual malware with
much larger certainty than whether it is "spam" and there are basically no
problems with messages being mis-classified in this aspect. AV software is
pretty reliable.

Additionally, a corporate environment is quite different from
general-purpose email service. Corporate email accounts are generally for
internal use; you could put much stronger restrictions on them as on a
generic email account. You could basically even block all senders from
outside the company except the ones you are regularly cooperating with. 
Only a handful of recipients (especially the employees who are handling
inquiries from potential new customers) woluld be able to receive mail from
"any" sender. All this does not apply for an "ordinary" user.
-- 
Regards,
   Jaroslaw Rafa
   r...@rafa.eu.org
--
"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."

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Michael Rathbun via mailop]

On Thu, 24 Oct 2019 23:22:59 +0200, Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop
 wrote:

>Dnia 24.10.2019 o godz. 15:11:23 Kelly Molloy via mailop pisze:
>> 
>> Yes, it certainly can be. If an email causes a user to install
>> ransomware on a corporate network, then it is an enormous and
>> expensive problem; it's put companies out of business. If a phishing
>> message means that an company gets infected with malware, the
>> remediation is hugely expensive.
>
>Protecting against malware is not a spam filter's job...


You may have failed to notice Kelly's wording:  "causes a user to install".

No anti-malware facility yet devised would have protected my Brazilian client
from one particular attack, because there was absolutely no indication of any
sort that a compromise was intended by a particular message, which looked for
all the world like the stuff the finance department received every day.  Some
rather nerdy and introspective anti-spam rules nabbed it.

mdr
-- 
  The world was almost won by such an ape!
The nations put him where his kind belong.
  But do not rejoice too soon at your escape.
The womb he crawled from is still going strong.
-- Bertold Brecht,"The Resistible Rise of Arturo UI"


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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop]

Dnia 24.10.2019 o godz. 16:35:50 Michael Rathbun via mailop pisze:
> 
> No anti-malware facility yet devised would have protected my Brazilian client
> from one particular attack, because there was absolutely no indication of any
> sort that a compromise was intended by a particular message, which looked for
> all the world like the stuff the finance department received every day.  Some
> rather nerdy and introspective anti-spam rules nabbed it.

I understand it was a 0-day and AV software didn't know it? Of course I
don't know what that particular kind of malware was, but maybe heuristic
tools like DeepInstinct, that try to analyze what a file *actually does*
before allowing it to run, might have caught it.
-- 
Regards,
   Jaroslaw Rafa
   r...@rafa.eu.org
--
"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."

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Michael Rathbun via mailop]

On Thu, 24 Oct 2019 23:48:30 +0200, Jaroslaw Rafa  wrote:

>I understand it was a 0-day and AV software didn't know it? Of course I
>don't know what that particular kind of malware was, but maybe heuristic
>tools like DeepInstinct, that try to analyze what a file *actually does*
>before allowing it to run, might have caught it.

What file would that have been?   "Causes to install" does not require a file

mdr
-- 
I regret that I have but one * for my country.


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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop]

Dnia 24.10.2019 o godz. 16:51:41 Michael Rathbun via mailop pisze:
> 
> What file would that have been?   "Causes to install" does not require a file

And what does the user install if it's not a file?
-- 
Regards,
   Jaroslaw Rafa
   r...@rafa.eu.org
--
"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."

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Jay Hennigan via mailop]

On 10/24/19 14:22, Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop wrote:


Protecting against malware is not a spam filter's job; it's a UTM's
(firewall's, web proxy's or whatever you use to protect your network) job.


Email messages containing malware are unsolicited. They are bulk in most 
every case, and by definition they are email.


A spam filter's job is to filter out bulk, unsolicited email. Therefore, 
it is indeed a spam filter's job to filter out email messages containing 
malware. Are you making the claim that email containing malware is 
"legitimate"?


Malware delivered by malicious websites, on USB sticks, etc. is indeed a 
different problem.



Antispam filter is not a tool to protect against malware; there are another
tools to do that, that are able to identify mailicious content pretty well.
It is possible to determine whether a message contains actual malware with
much larger certainty than whether it is "spam" and there are basically no
problems with messages being mis-classified in this aspect. AV software is
pretty reliable.


If a message contains malware, it is almost certainly also spam. Not 
only is it spam, it is often sent from a compromised host to every 
string that looks like an email address on that host. This makes it 
trickier for the spam filter because the targets of the malware are 
likely to have the sender's email and/or IP address whitelisted.


It's not uncommon to have more than one lock on a door, and it's not 
uncommon to have more than one defense against malware. Spam filters are 
one such defense. It is far better to block the malware before it's 
sitting in a user's inbox on the target host than afterward.


--
Jay Hennigan - j...@west.net
Network Engineering - CCIE #7880
503 897-8550 - WB6RDV

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Scott Southard via mailop]

>
> And what does the user install if it's not a file?
>

I think the idea here is that a phishing attack is just as straightforward
a path to installing malware as an email containing malware. Which I
completely agree with. Spam filtering has to work in tandem with AV, and
suggesting that there's a simple solution for any of these is reckless and
scary.

On Thu, Oct 24, 2019 at 5:08 PM Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop 
wrote:

> Dnia 24.10.2019 o godz. 16:51:41 Michael Rathbun via mailop pisze:
> >
> > What file would that have been?   "Causes to install" does not require a
> file
>
> And what does the user install if it's not a file?
> --
> Regards,
>Jaroslaw Rafa
>r...@rafa.eu.org
> --
> "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."
>
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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop]

Dnia 24.10.2019 o godz. 15:03:25 Jay Hennigan via mailop pisze:
> 
> If a message contains malware, it is almost certainly also spam.

Yes, but it's better to have two separate tools - one specialized in
detecting malware, that does it with high accuracy, and the other a
general-purpose spam filter (which can pass through some spam) - than try to
fit everything in one tool.

That's why you usually have both antivirus/anti-malware scanners AND
generic spam filters on a mail host. Even if a spam filter happens to pass
the message containing malware, AV scanner usually catches it, as it is
specialized to do that particular task only.

If the malware is not attached directly to email, but needs to be downloaded
from a link included in the message, then we have an UTM on the way which
should block the download attempt.

And if everything else fails, there is anti-malware software running
directly on end-users computer.

Antispam filter isn't supposed to do everything... :)
-- 
Regards,
   Jaroslaw Rafa
   r...@rafa.eu.org
--
"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."

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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Brandon Long via mailop]

On Thu, Oct 24, 2019 at 3:22 PM Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop 
wrote:

> Dnia 24.10.2019 o godz. 15:03:25 Jay Hennigan via mailop pisze:
> >
> > If a message contains malware, it is almost certainly also spam.
>
> Yes, but it's better to have two separate tools - one specialized in
> detecting malware, that does it with high accuracy, and the other a
> general-purpose spam filter (which can pass through some spam) - than try
> to
> fit everything in one tool.
>
> That's why you usually have both antivirus/anti-malware scanners AND
> generic spam filters on a mail host. Even if a spam filter happens to pass
> the message containing malware, AV scanner usually catches it, as it is
> specialized to do that particular task only.
>
> If the malware is not attached directly to email, but needs to be
> downloaded
> from a link included in the message, then we have an UTM on the way which
> should block the download attempt.
>
> And if everything else fails, there is anti-malware software running
> directly on end-users computer.
>
> Antispam filter isn't supposed to do everything... :)
>

There have been constantly mutating viruses in the wild for years now where
almost every copy is
unique (ish) involving bad payloads in overly permissive file formats
(office, pdf, etc), not to mention
various spear phishing payloads for the same.  Getting ahead of those
involves combining more typical
spam features with content features and then doing something ridiculously
expensive like opening the
document on a virtual windows box.  Combining those features allows you to
do this and take the processing/delay
hit only on the most likely messages.

Also, you may have noticed that spear phishing messages helped change the
outcome of the last US Presidential
election, not to mention wiping every Windows computer/server in various
organizations across the world,
industrial espionage theft on a massive scale, etc.

I mean, sure, we invest more resources in protecting enterprise accounts
than consumer ones, but your assumptions
of the risk environment or how these modern systems work is woefully naive.

Yahoo went p=reject on yahoo.com because phishing messages had caused their
customer support operations to handle
an increased load to the tune of at least tens of millions of dollars in
support costs.  Heck, Google started the internal precursor to DMARC
due to fraudulent AdWords activity costing our customers at least that much
money a quarter.  And that's not even counting
the money that people have lost mistakenly falling for various "mugged in
London" type scams or the current favorite of
DoSing a user's inbox so they don't notice the real notification messages
of money stolen from their Paypal or whatever
account.

Brandon
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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Simon via mailop]

On 24 Oct 2019, at 21:22, Kelly Molloy via mailop  wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Oct 24, 2019 at 6:22 AM Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop
>  wrote:
> 
>> But even if one such message goes through, is this really a problem?
> 
> Yes, it certainly can be. If an email causes a user to install
> ransomware on a corporate network, then it is an enormous and
> expensive problem; it's put companies out of business. If a phishing
> message means that an company gets infected with malware, the
> remediation is hugely expensive. A neighbor of mine just missed a
> paycheck when the small business he works for got an email giving the
> payroll clerk a new routing number. It looked just like the legit
> emails she gets from the processor, so she transferred the money to
> some guy in Indonesia. They filed a report with the FBI, but they
> won't get that money back. The level of education needed to prevent
> these incidents is not feasible for the casual user; I just got email
> from "Expedia" telling me to log in because my trip had changed, and I
> had to look very carefully and check headers against an email I knew
> to be legit to determine it was a phish, and I've been doing this for
> 20 years.
> 
> It's really a problem.

Two different people, two different views. To my mind this rather illustrates 
that different mailboxes are exposed to different threats and have differing 
appetites for risk. The massively large receivers simply can’t tune for this.

There’s hope for the rest of us!

Simon
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Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition

[Mike Hammett via mailop]

Users (even technical ones) aren't reliable for determining what spam is. 




- 
Mike Hammett 
Intelligent Computing Solutions 

Midwest Internet Exchange 

The Brothers WISP 

- Original Message -

From: "Jay Hennigan via mailop"  
To: mailop@mailop.org 
Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2019 6:58:31 PM 
Subject: Re: [mailop] Junk filtering as a tool for unfair competition 

On 10/23/19 03:57, Daniele via mailop wrote: 

> Not to mention that with JMRP I'm getting 100% of legitmate emails that 
> users tagged as spam for whatever reason, so the tool is pretty useless 
> (just my 2 cents). 

Actually, that shows that the tool is indeed quite useful. It tells you 
that the mail was delivered and the user marked it as spam. That is good 
useful information indeed. 

Either the user doesn't want your mail, or the user doesn't know the 
difference between "delete" and "spam". In either case, the action can 
be directly linked to the user. 

It does seem that the user behavior of incorrectly marking mail as spam 
has been going on far too long. Large webmail providers, PLEASE update 
your UI to label that choice "Report as spam", not simply "Junk". 

-- 
Jay Hennigan - j...@west.net 
Network Engineering - CCIE #7880 
503 897-8550 - WB6RDV 

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