Puckdropper
The "envelope" portion will always be world readable
Mon Aug 14, 2023 5:58am

It's just how it's got to work. The body could easily be encrypted, but it needs to be seamless. PGP never really took off, unfortunately.

Sometimes I think it's a useful thought exercise to pretend an email costs the same as postage stamp. Do you really need to spend that money to just tick off your customer?

Yahoo! tries something similar, but it seems to pick up on the pattern that mass e-mail is undesired. It generally is, but group notifications and group messages are useful to me. They're not spam. I think most spam detectors fight this battle.

  • Didn't even think of that - Erik_, Tue Aug 08 2023 8:32am
    But it makes sense. The sending and receiving parties have to read the email in order to process them. You can base64 encode the body but that's trivial to reverse. (IIRC the types of transfer encoding were 7bit, 8bit, base64, printable and binary or something) I guess that's how messages with too much... more
    • The "envelope" portion will always be world readable- Puckdropper, Mon Aug 14 2023 5:58am
      • I wonder how much an email does cost? - Erik_, Tue Aug 15 2023 1:05am
        It's using server resources on every hop it makes to the final mail server. It's probably a fraction of a fraction of a cent from end to end but the sheer amount of unsolicited spam emails that get generated and sent around must cost a somewhat substantial amount of money overall. I had that issue only... more
        • Good question... Probably what you're thinking. - Puckdropper, Fri Aug 25 2023 6:05am
          I'm sure somewhere you can find stats on how much stuff is on the Internet backbones that no one actually wants. Spam, the Nieman-Marcus cookie recipie that's been forwarded 35 times without being cleaned up, etc. It's actually quite a bit. It could be that it's an exchange server... Yahoo! and... more
          • Yeah, it's definitely an Exchange server - Erik_, Wed Aug 30 2023 9:54am
            It's just been so long since I've done IT/SRE work besides just development that I wasn't sure if maybe MIcrosoft had their own spam filter that they do on top of whatever your local Exchange server has set up. I guess thinking about it now, that would probably annoy a bunch of IT workers who are wondering... more
            • So now we know--email sending is cheap (like stealing) - Puckdropper, Wed Aug 30 2023 5:09pm
              and the receivers waste around $.95/message (like those being stolen from) and the only real solution is filtering (like theft prevention) but that takes resources (like buying locks does) and everyone except the spammers (thieves) would be happier without it. I really didn't expect the analogy to... more
"Forces act when not restrained" - Puckdropper