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The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports:
A Halifax [Nova Scotia] man is facing the daunting task of going through almost two decades of email messages after his email provider served notice it was deactivating his account in 30 days because of his email address: noreply@eastlink.ca
"I had it since the late '90s, probably 1998 when I really started getting online," Steve Morshead told CBC News.
"I asked for it, it was available and they gave it to me without hesitation."
He said he picked the handle "noreply" because he wanted an unusual address--and back in the '90s, it was.
Morshead never expected to lose his email address, which he uses for communicating with everyone from friends to banks to lawyers. He is in the process of selling his home and says this couldn't come at a worse time.
[...] "Now, after all these years, 20 years almost, I find it reprehensible they want to pop out of bushes and just give me 30 days to go through 20 years worth of emails and decide what I want to keep," he said.
[...] Morshead did ask the company to transfer the contents from the existing email account to a new one but they said no.
"Just flat no. No offers of help. Just the bullying that 'We're going to do it, you're going to take it. That's it.'"
Also at The Inquirer.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday July 06 2017, @06:50PM (29 children)
Not sure why he has to go through it all, he should just be able to keep it all. Space is very cheap these days.
This sort of thing is one of the reasons that I encourage people to get their own domain. Relying on someone else for your identity can end up being a pain if you ever have a disagreement with them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 06 2017, @06:57PM (27 children)
Have fun when your domain is seized for arbitrary regulatory violation. Since it's your own personal domain and only you are affected and you're a nobody, nobody will give a shit.
And you have to convince all the big boys that you're not a fly-by-night spammer.
And you still have to pay your hosting bills and avoid nasty disagreements with whichever hosting provider you choose.
Basically if you're not Google, you're already fucked.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday July 06 2017, @07:09PM (22 children)
I see. This happens a lot, does it?
Don't be ridiculous. This would be an exceedingly rare thing to happen. The value in having your own domain is very much better than being tied to an "email provider". This is like saying that there's no point in getting out of bed in the morning as we're all just going to die anyway.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Unixnut on Thursday July 06 2017, @07:46PM (18 children)
> I see. This happens a lot, does it?
Yes, in a nutshell, but it is a bit more insidious than the blunt "seize your domain" mentioned by GP. I provide my anecdotal evidence here (sorry for the length).
So, in the late 90's/early 00's I ran my own email service on my own domain. While msn.com was giving 5mb attachment limits and 30mb storage limits, I had gigs of space and could send large attachments if needs be. All good.
Then Google came along, and all of a sudden all that space, large attachments, and simple interface. The rest of the competition suddenly had to provide similar to stay relevant. At the same time spam emails were becoming bad. Seriously bad, so bad there was talk that it could usher the end of email as a useful communication medium.
Google did really good spam filtering, and others followed. It seems a losing proposition to run your own service, and when I left the family home to go study, I shut down the email server and got a "hosted address" at a place that was called "nerdshack.com", which provided excellent service and security to boot.
Cue the years going by, nerdshack.com renamed itself to mailshack.com, then eventually to lavabit.com, which is what most people knew it as. Then Snowden was caught using it, and it was shut down, and I lost my account.
So, looking around, no other privacy based hosted providers that I could find. Google and the "big hosters" are all into reading your stuff and spreading it far and wide for "monetizing" purposes, so they were out.
So, I decided to revisit my own mail server. Things have changed a lot. Firstly, you have a bunch of companies that provide "spam lists" of what they call "known spammers". In reality they are really lax in what they consider a "spam mail server", and seem to follow a "guilty until proven innocent" methodology for classic mail servers as spammers.
For example, you can't have a dynamic IP, automatically a spammer. In the old days a Dynamic DNS address with mx records was fine. Now it isn't, so you have to pay for a static IP. Even then, if the spam list provider things your static ip falls in a "dynamic ip range" you are screwed. most ISPs, when they provide a static ip, just give you a statically assigned IP From their dynamic list, so you are seen as a "dynamic IP" to the spam list providers.
Next, just setting up the DNS records isn't enough, you have to get your ISP to set the reverse DNS pointer of your static address to point to your email servers domain, instead of the generic rDNS (so no name based virtual email hosting anymore). If you don't do this, you get flagged as a spammer (even if it would work otherwise). So here you need not only to pay for reverse DNS, but your ISP has to be willing to provide it, and many won't unless you upgrade to their "business package" for some outrageous cost per month. Plus once you get it you can only assign it to one mail domain per static IP.
Once you do this, there is still no guarantee you won't be marked as a spammer. Some lists just assume if you are not one of the big "known" email providers, you are a spammer, and you have to prove to them you are not.
I am not alone, this guy ranted quite nicely about it, and I pretty much experienced the same: http://pigeonsnest.co.uk/stuff/crapstuff/sorbs.html [pigeonsnest.co.uk]
Running your own mail server is a massive PITA. Had I known how much harder it had become to do so, I may not have bothered. However now having done it, I will keep using my email system.
However I am never sure if my email actually gets through. Many people receiving email don't even know about the spam lists or blacklists, they never get the email, and I never get a clue to whether it was blocked or not, so if I don't get a response. Sometimes if I ask for a delivery report, the mail server will lie and say "successfully delivered" when it went to the bitbucket (presumably to prevent spammers working out they are being blocked).
I found that GPG signing seems to improve things, having signed emails is a plus when passing spam filters (at least for now), but running your own personal mail server (or just for your family) is much harder.
And the best thing is, they can still pull the rug under you. So I set all this up, but I am still at the mercy of the ISP and the spam list people. If they decide that my ISP IP range has a bit too much spam potential, they can blacklist the entire range, and I'm screwed. My ISP may no longer provide static IP, or reverse DNS changes, or they go bust and I need to find another ISP that provides the same. So many things that can go wrong.
And that is ignoring seizure of domains, which, while rare, can happen as well. That is the worst, because then they can receive all email destined for you, and impersonate you (another good reason to sign everything with GPG, but even then they can create a new private GPG key tied to an identity on the domain). And there have been cases of social engineering being used to unlawfully transfer domains to others, but it seems to have reduced somewhat, presumably because domain registrars were getting it in the neck from people due to lax security.
(Score: 4, Informative) by NewNic on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:29PM (2 children)
I have suffered similar problems with running an email server, but I think that you haven't really touched on the worst issue.
There are ISPs and email providers that seem to have their own lists of spam sources. They refuse to accept email from me, despite it being sent from a private server in a datacenter, despite my IP address not being listed with any reputable spam block list. Perhaps my IP address was used to send spam before I got hold of it, but that was years ago. These ISPs simply don't care. They don't respond to any attempt to contact them to fix the issue.
Hotmail was also a source of problems. They had my IP address blacklisted, but at least they responded and removed my IP address. However, their listing was years old, based on how long I had control of the IP address.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:29PM (1 child)
To be honest, I haven't come across that issue. Primarily because I would have no idea if those emails are being blacklisted and for what reason (not like they ever tell you).
I mean, if my IP was used by spammers before, I would not know about it. It isn't like a remote mailserver will respond with "Yeah sorry, this IP is blocked since $date for spamming". Hence I mentioned that I can't ever be sure my emails actually reach their target.
It is a complete fiasco quite frankly, and you've added yet another layer of crap I didn't think of. Thanks, lol.
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:36PM
What I have found is that, with Postfix (you are using Postfix, aren't you, not that abomination called Sendmail?) it is easy to create a list of domains for which outgoing email is routed through my ISP's mail server. No one is going to block any of Comcast's main outgoing email servers, so this is quite reliable. It requires a login, of course, but that is easy to configure.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:55PM
Damn boy
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:05PM (1 child)
Geez, after reading that link...I have a hard time believing anybody could be this incompetent. It must be malicious.
"If you're not satisfied with our service, use one of the following contact methods: {lists 4 different things that are all either broken or actively ignored}."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:19PM
A few IP/domain blacklists are actually malicious. Most are not. The problem is usually the operators of the systems using the lists; they don't really differentiate between them and haven't updated theirs since the 2010. They just throw 50 lists on their system so they can advertise "checked against 50 blacklists!" to clients. They don't really take into account that 20 of them are dead, 20 of them are scams, and 9 are just okay.
Your system can use blacklists but it can't use just one. About the only one I really have the highest confidence in is Spamhaus, but even that one, if there are enough traits the mail is probably okay I let it through. Anyway the goal of these lists is to identify the sending systems, because the actual email addresses and even domains that are on the mail are borderline meaningless (trivial to send each spam mail with its own address).
The blacklists focused on sending systems are okay-ish, but really need to be fast to matter, because most spam are sent out in very tight bursts infrequently rather than a continuous stream. Sending out bursts like that makes them a lot harder to block. After 15 minutes the listing is too old to matter much for better than 50% of spam.
Google doesn't really use IP/domain blacklists. They rely almost entirely on content scanning. This is a riskier proposition for those of us with some dislike to continuously scan the contents of users' mailboxes. Google doesn't care. They'll scan everything in your mailbox constantly and even pop things out to put into the spam folder after delivery.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:27PM
Off the top of my head, OVH rejects e-mail for that reason. Many e-mail providers--the great majority, in my experience--accept it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 06 2017, @10:03PM
You're not just using your own domain, you are trying to run your own email server.
You're not just trying to run an email server, you also try to run the sending part.
Yes, it's lamentable that that is no longer possible, but most freemail providers allow you to send email with arbitrary "from" address, so you can just forward to such an account and let them handle that.
The worst that can happen then is that you can't send email anymore.
But apart from that, the problem in the article is silly, just using a provider that offers IMAP (NOT Outlook, what they implemented is so broken, calling it IMAP should be considered false advertising).
Then run something like offlineimap or isync and you don't need to care what happens to your email account, the own domain would just be there so that people can still reach you at the same address even if you switch providers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Friday July 07 2017, @01:12AM
This is *not* having your domain seized, which the GP was on about. I assume because it sounded like some other product or service. Bull.
You don't have to run your own email server if you have your own domain, you can get your host to provide it, Goggle, etc. It's still *your* domain though, and it's not going to get seized. er
This whole set of comments have lowered my perception of the people here. I would think that people would know that having your own domain is a *good* thing, and having it seized pretty much *never* happens.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Friday July 07 2017, @05:55AM (5 children)
Here's my experience:
I rent a VPS and use it to send password reset emails to people with GMail addresses. The IP address I have has an extremely bad history somehow, and students occasionally have problems accessing my website because some shitty antivirus program they're running thinks it's a malware site based solely on the IP's reputation. (On that ... what the actual fuck? ... antivirus programs are the spawn of Satan I guess.)
The emails get through. Always. They sometimes get put in the spam folder; the students sometimes think the email didn't get through because they ignore the 72-point all caps bold font instruction to CHECK YOUR SPAM FOLDER -- but they do get through. Always.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Friday July 07 2017, @06:06AM (4 children)
And, btw, I am doing nothing right with the email server.
I have no MX record. I have no SPF record. I have no DKIM whatever. I'm not an open relay; I'm not actually spamming; but, that's about the only thing I'm doing right running that email server. I literally just did chmod +x rc.sendmail after installing Slackware.
So I do absolutely zero kneeling before the anti-spam gods. No special DNS records to please them. No security-related recitations in the bodies of the messages. An IP with a history so horrible it makes antivirus programs faint at the sight of it (also: fuck antivirus programs). I am the absolute ugliest, shittiest possible domain to be getting emails from.
And my emails get through. To GMail and Outlook 365. They never get dropped, ever, and they only ever go to spam in GMail, never Outlook 365.
So, from my experience, self-hosted email is working. That's my personal experience only, of course, but I thought it was worth saying.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday July 07 2017, @07:50AM (3 children)
Yet strangely, we use that server for all client communication, we too just have to occasionally tell clients to check their spam folders, and point the finger at them, they have made the incorrect conclusion about the mail, not us.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Friday July 07 2017, @01:35PM (2 children)
Thank you for the corroboration, but I don't think you needed to be rude to me? My point was "self-hosted email's death has been greatly exaggerated", not "I'm awesome for doing nothing at all". If I was forceful, it was only to counter the loud chorus of "evil megacorps drop any mail not from other evil megacorps as spam".
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday July 07 2017, @02:36PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Thursday July 13 2017, @03:55AM
I understand now. Thanks.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday July 07 2017, @06:02AM
A trick for when you're not sure if your emails go through, at least when you expect an answer -- dual reply-to (me@here.com,me@there.net) with the other one being some public provider -- at least that way you can check.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @08:10AM (1 child)
It gets even worse.
Many years ago, I was hired at a spam company. At the time there were something called SPF and Domain Keys, but they weren't widely used yet. Except for one thing: The number one most important thing when working at a spam company like the one I worked with was to ensure that all our spam mails always had both SPF records and domain key signatures, because then the big e-mail providers (i.e. Gmail and Hotmail) would value our spam HIGHER than real e-mail. The only e-mail we sent out that didn't have SPF and Domain Keys were the ones from the Exchange server, i.e. the actual business mail we sent to lawyers, accountants, etc.
On top of that, there was a company called Senderscore/Return Path (oh my, they still exist) that would provide early warnings when one of our IPs were about to be blocked by Hotmail. Usually between a couple of hours and a day before they blocked. I did they know? I don't know for sure, but they claimed to have some sort of deal with Microsoft, that allowed them to get the data straight from the Hotmail spam filtering system, so that they could inform spammers like us of when it was time to switch IP addresses. And no, that was not us abusing some kind of ISP cooperation facility, the communication we received from them was worded to make it clear that their purpose was to help spammers (I clearly remember the word "campaigns" used, as in "advertising campaigns", aka. SPAM).
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday July 07 2017, @10:46PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Informative) by tangomargarine on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:50PM
Well, it only has to happen once to matter...to you :P
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @08:15AM (1 child)
It does over here.
Our law says that you are not allowed to own a domain for the purpose of selling it. So if someone wants your domain, they will just claim that you do. Then a judge with no IT knowledge will take a look at your home page (e-mail, SSH and all that stuff he doesn't understand doesn't count), and conclude that since there is no financial purpose of your private web site, that you have no use for the domain other than possibly selling it. And so he orders that it be transferred to the company that wants your domain.
I have personally decided to not get a .dk domain for that reason.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday July 07 2017, @01:57PM
Danish courts are that retarded? Maybe it can be countered with a website documenting some hobby project of yours to make it look occupied?
(not that I hold other courts higher, they seem to be populated with the same retards worldwide)
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday July 07 2017, @02:03PM (2 children)
With your own domain and your own server. Seizing of the domain won't zap your already received emails. And PGP signed emails make sure that impersonation becomes hard.
Otoh, maybe .onion is the domain one should have. No authority there nor kangaroo courts.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:37PM (1 child)
> Otoh, maybe .onion is the domain one should have.
That TLD only works on the Tor network. Your correspondents will have difficulty sending e-mail to you:
-- https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq-abuse.html.en [torproject.org]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday July 08 2017, @11:09PM
Sure. But there's possibilities to build another email protocol that is built using other ports, other connection setup and infrastructure. SMTP badly needs an upgrade and social media is surely NOT the answer.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday July 07 2017, @04:16PM
Have fun when your domain is seized for arbitrary regulatory violation
Such as? It's not going to happen.
And you have to convince all the big boys that you're not a fly-by-night spammer.
Nonsense, I've had domains for years and never got any email problems. Period.
And you still have to pay your hosting bills and avoid nasty disagreements with whichever hosting provider you choose.
You can't afford fifteen bucks a YEAR? You can have your own email address that will firward itself to your Gmail account. And in almost two decades I've never had the tiniest bit of trouble with Register4less. I highly recommend them. There are certainly others as good out there, too.
I can't figure out if the AC is ignorant, trolling, or works for Google.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:56PM
I used to run a personal web and mail server at my own domain.
It was kind of a pain in the butt. Not impossible, just annoying.
You have to have at least some technical expertise around setting up your mail server of choice, and an appropriate front-end. You need to ensure you stay up to date with security patches. You need to understand things like SPF DNS records and being reverse-dns'able to ensure that major providers don't consider you spam and start dropping your outgoing e-mail in a black hole (i.e. you should do a "deliverability" test regularly). You need to have a server that's always up (the modern era of cheap cloud servers make this easier). You need recoverable backups (and need to test that they're recoverable). You need to consider having a backup MTA if your primary goes down (and the degree to which that can be abused by spammers).
None of these tasks are hard, and I learned a lot about how e-mail works over the few years I kept my personal domain. It was just the cycle of keeping up-to-date that eventually made me decide it wasn't worth the effort. As spam gets more sophisticated, the things you need to make sure you do to make sure you don't get caught in someone's spam filter get more involved. I finally decided the best way to make sure all my e-mail would be delivered to the recipients was to have it come from a major provider and not a server running in my closet.
I now run my domain on google apps, so I can still control the accounts and have my own domain, but all the annoying stuff I just don't need to deal with.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 06 2017, @06:51PM (1 child)
You mean to say not everyone communicates via coded messages disguised as racist trolls in public forums?
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday July 06 2017, @07:26PM
Nope, too visible these days. We've mostly upgraded to coded messages disguised as gender, tax, and guns arguments, except for that guy who's stuck on a loop about coercive governments and contracts.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Thursday July 06 2017, @07:23PM
Over here in murika we respect computing history artifacts. You give that nice snow dweller his pre-noreply noreply back.
I understand the issues with using what are now reserved names. But I'm like 70% sure we knew what reserved names were in the 90s and definitely recall addrs like postmaster@ used at the very least. Maybe they should have stopped rolling syrup into snow for a minute and checked their shit hm? HM!?
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday July 06 2017, @07:58PM (6 children)
It's a de facto standard, but has any standards agency, any at all, made it an official standard that mail to user noreply should be disregarded?
I guess what I'm asking is: if they want to seize it so they can send noreply emails, can't they just use donotreply@theirstupiddomain.gofuckyourself?
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:44PM
I suspect the concern would be more that someone could use an address like this to spoof official-looking emails, rather than not being able to find an alternate e-mail for the administrator to use.
For example, if I had the email address "updates@foo.bar," and sent an e-mail to various addresses @foo.bar with a message like "We're changing to a new billing system. Please log in to the following site and give it your credit card details..." Some people might be fooled (reasonably) into thinking the fact that the email came from an "official looking" address to mean the email was legit. Sure, you could trace such activity back to the sender, so doing this from your own owned email address might not be a winning play. But if that account gets compromised the same "bad activity" can happen.
If I own a domain, I'd prefer that users weren't able to have e-mail addresses that looked "sufficiently official." 20 years ago, the conventions on sending official email were still forming, so you can see why a provider might have allowed something then that they might not allow today.
That said, to me the issue is the provider giving a hard 30 day termination. This can't be a problem that affects many people, so working with a long-time customer to migrate less painfully would seem like more of a classy move than just terminating the account (and possibly allow you to keep a customer you'd likely lose otherwise). Might be worth a call to your provider to discuss over just complaining online...
Though my suspicion is someone just discovered regular expressions, and did a sweep for any address that looked like a rude word, racial epithet, or spam/phishing account, then put them all on a "terminate" list without considering any individual circumstances.
(Score: 4, Informative) by butthurt on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:11PM (4 children)
RFC 2142 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2142.html [faqs.org]) enumerates standard mailbox names (I've put these into alphabetical order):
The most important and universal are ABUSE and HOSTMASTER; POSTMASTER is "required" for domains that send mail. It doesn't mention "noreply". I think that is, as you say, a de facto standard.
I dislike the practice of sending out e-mails without reading the replies. It's disempowering to the recipients, especially when they want to stop receiving the messages. RFC 2142 says:
The "distribution lists" referred to in the passage are, if I'm not mistaken, also commonly known as "newsletters", for which "noreply" (I've observed) is often used. Hence I argue that such use of "noreply" violates RFC 2142.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday July 07 2017, @07:58AM (3 children)
The real WTF is the company giving customers email addresses in the same namespace as ones that they would want to reserve for themselves. Clearly separate them and us, and you never need to care what they do.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Friday July 07 2017, @03:01PM (1 child)
How's working at Microsoft treating you? :)
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:37AM
Of course, that measures installations, and some installations (such as google) are larger than others (such as my home server).
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:16PM
> As someone who works for the company that makes the single most popular, and most standards compliant, mail server in the world
Congratulations!
> there's nothing about noreply that in any way violates even the spirit of 2142.
The spirit of the RFC, I'd say, is that when one has a domain name, or provides services over the Internet, one should be reachable via e-mail. A "noreply" address implies that messages will be ignored. That can obviously be used in a way that violates the RFC. I didn't say that "noreply" is always a violation. What I tried to say was that if a "noreply" address is used in place of a "list-request" address for a distribution list, that is a violation of the RFC. Are you disagreeing with that? If so, why?
Without anticipating that noreply@example.com would be something you'd want to reserve, how would you do that? The way that comes to mind is to have an invariant string in the user part of e-mail addresses, like customer_foo@example.com, customer_bar@example.com and so on. That's not a common practice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:24PM
I think I created an email account with the name admin or postmaster, something like that. And very soon after they said I couldn't use that account :).
Sorry can't remember the details, was a long time ago...
(Score: 5, Informative) by driven on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:29PM (1 child)
Fire up an email client such as Thunderbird and create a new Local Mail folder. Drag and drop all the email that you want to keep into the new local folder. It will be time consuming since doing a select-all drag and drop will almost certainly fail. You'd have to do it in batches.
Or write a program to download the emails. Here's a Python module with example code as a starting point: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pymmails/0.2.223 [python.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:16PM
Why would he not just set his client up as POP and download the lot in one go?
He can sort through it at his leisure then.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:03PM
Surprised that no one suggested taking down eastlink.ca in support for the poor noreply-user...
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Thursday July 06 2017, @10:33PM
It would greatly cut down on spam. Or if not that, is null@eastlink.ca taken?
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Friday July 07 2017, @12:45AM (2 children)
Gosh, that's awf--wait, what? "Decide what I want to keep"?
He has 20 years of email sitting on the email SERVER of his ISP? How?
Besides those who use a service like GMail, it's been my understanding that most people even today with ISP-based email accounts are still largely using the older POP3 protocol and downloading their mail daily from servers with ridiculously archaic mailbox size limitations, like a maximum of 100MB. Even the commercial IMAP and Exchange email services from Rackspace (previously MailTrust) had a size limitation of 10GB per account until just a few years ago when they finally upgraded it to 25GB, and even 25GB hasn't been big enough for the more prolific users in my previous company to hold less than 10 years worth of email without backing up older mail offline. And those were the highest account sizes I could find at any online business email provider at the time. Was this Canadian ISP really handing out web-based email accounts with infinite storage limits in 1998? That's kind of amazing if true. GMail didn't exist until 2004 and it's main claim to fame (besides being free) was that you would never again have to delete email due to hitting a maximum storage limit, and even today it seems to have a limit of 15GB for individual accounts. Even Hotmail always had a relatively small account storage limit.
And then to go beyond all that and have no clue that you can just jump on any fast connection with a local email client like Thunderbird and download that 20 years worth of email to your local computer in a matter of hours... To have no local backups of 20 years worth of correspondence... That's just incredibly sad. Somebody needs to help this guy download his email and dispel his illusion that he needs to somehow manually sort through 20 years of emails in less than 30 days to decide what to keep. It sucks that they're not giving him more time to work on switching all of his related online accounts to a new email address, but he seems to think he's in a terrible quandary that doesn't actually exist.
Best thing he can do for himself is get the hell away from being dependent on that ISP in any way, as fast as he can.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @05:11AM (1 child)
Gmail beats local storage due to hard drive crashes, OS install corruption, floods, theft, and fires.
No, I'm not going to make daily tape backups and FedEx them to geographically separated underground bunkers. No, I'm not going to pay for a service that will delete my backups if one day I'm unable to pay the bill.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday July 07 2017, @02:11PM
Newer malware may actually connect to your Gmail and wipe it or encrypt it. If you can access it. So can malware.
For offisite backup there's no need to bother with FedEx, bunkers or bills. Just encrypt it and save it on tape or disc. Seal it into a airtight box stuffed with some de-humidification capsules. Then just dig it down somewhere where people will not wander nor build stuff.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday July 07 2017, @02:14PM
Have you let people know that eastlink.ca is now to be shitlisted and messed with? ;-)
Anyone sent the poor guy a email with links to IMAP/POP/screenscraper software so he can download it all in one go if he's not aware of this possibility?