[HN Gopher] Blackholing My Email
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Blackholing My Email
Author : semyonsh
Score : 162 points
Date : 2026-04-07 08:42 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.johnsto.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.johnsto.co.uk)
| riverforest wrote:
| Email is the one thing everyone complains about and almost nobody
| actually fixes. Curious how long this lasts before something
| important falls through.
| righthand wrote:
| There's nothing to fall through, email fits it's exact purpose.
| Email is supposed to have 0 sending/receiving friction. So one
| idea to fix it is to only accept email from addresses you've
| allowed. No one wants to constantly update their address book
| though, they just want the email (forgetting to remove the
| marketing email allowance after you receive the account
| verification link). So then there's nothing to fix.
|
| The abuse is by design.
| MattTheRealOne wrote:
| Email definitely has its issues, but given that every other
| form of digital communication is getting worse and more locked
| down, I have no confidence that a replacement would be better.
| While increasingly difficult to get self-hosted email to be
| accepted by the big providers like Google and Microsoft, it is
| still great to at least have the option of hosting a
| universally accepted form of communication yourself.
| BorisMelnik wrote:
| my theory is that if rcs keeps advancing we might see
| "texting" kind of merge with email at some point.
|
| at this point RCS and email are pretty similar on paper.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| RCS is incredibly centralized. More than half of the phone
| carriers decided it was too complicated to run their own
| RCS servers and so just sub-contract them to a Google
| subsidiary (Jibe).
| jprjr_ wrote:
| To be fair that seems to be the path email is going down.
| Most businesses don't want run their own email and just
| use one of two big providers.
| BadBadJellyBean wrote:
| Do you have any suggestions on how to fix email?
|
| From my perspective all attempts at fixing anything broke
| something for smaller senders. Today if you want to host a mail
| server you can set up everything correctly (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
| and your email still lands in the spam folder because you have
| not enough reputation. There are whole IP address segments that
| a flat out prohibited from participating.
|
| Email is designed to be a distributed system. That means new
| standards can not really be added without breaking most of the
| systems. We still don't have mandatory transport encryption. So
| I don't see how to fix anything but to improve spam filtering
| and accept that it will be imperfect.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| There have been many fixes over the decades, but it's hard to
| change the fundamentals of something widely-used.
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| Email is fixed by avoiding the usage. I only check my email for
| password resets and bank notifications. I never send email.
| Every other channel of communication with anyone outside of
| work is a text message.
| 3form wrote:
| To me, the fact that the author of the article is the author of
| de_dust2 is the real highlight! For those who don't know, it's
| the most popular map ever in Counter Strike, and I expect so it
| remains to this day.
|
| This is funny, as I always imagined these things to be made by
| some nameless author of good old Internet, and never bothered to
| check and look it up. Further less I expected to stumble upon it
| by said author's random blogpost where it's not even the primary
| topic.
| pete5x5 wrote:
| Dust2 (and Cobble, another map mentioned) is, IMO, both art and
| genius; most of us will never make anything that brings joy to
| so many.
|
| It inspires me to work on things that I'm passionate about just
| for fun. You never know what might come out of it!
| rockbruno wrote:
| I had seen noclip's documentary about de_dust2 featuring him
| before but didn't piece the name together. Very happy to find
| that he has a blog!
| timrogers wrote:
| It's an incredible map - so many fun memories!
| elmean wrote:
| G O A T Youtube doc about it
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWWhxfGq_yk
| pityJuke wrote:
| He also had blogs about those maps:
| https://www.johnsto.co.uk/design/
| jnettome wrote:
| I love your work! Thanks for the huuuuge work on de_dust2!
| dmd wrote:
| I'm always stunned at how good GMail's spam filtering is, at
| least for me. I've been using the same email address since 1996 -
| that's 30 years now - and posting it with absolutely no thought
| to spam protection all over the place.
|
| I get ~1000 spams per day. About 1-2 end up in inbox. Every so
| often I do go through my spam, and while it's possible I've
| missed something, I generally find less than 1 false positive a
| month and it's never anything especially important.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I've been a Fastmail customer for years and have been pretty
| happy with their spam filtering too. Anything that does get
| through either gets a custom rule to send it to the shadow
| realm, or gets sent to a special "Learn spam" folder that I set
| up which will train the spam filter on that message.
| simgoh wrote:
| Have you noticed decreases over time by sending thigns to the
| "Learn Spam" folder? I'm a relatively new Fastmail customer -
| I setup a domain for some family accounts that I can manage
| on behalf of my aging family members so it's not receiving a
| lot of email _yet_ but I expect it to in the future.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I have noticed it for sure. The default spam filter catches
| most of what I'd consider spam, but the Learn Spam feature
| is needed for things that get through because they _look_
| legitimate. For example, I get a lot of those weird
| "You're an American, I'm from [China, India, etc.], we can
| make a lot of money if you go to all the
| interviews/meetings and then let me do all the work" kind
| of emails. They look like normal correspondence (maybe they
| are) so they occasionally end up in my inbox. When they do,
| I send them to the "Learn Spam" folder, and the next time I
| check my actual Spam folder I'll find that Fastmail caught
| several more just like it and sent them straight there.
| encom wrote:
| Fastmail here too, and my email address is older than Gmail,
| and probably older than a significant portion of HN posters.
| Fastmails spam filter just works. I get a few false negatives
| per month, and some months zero. I've set it to /dev/null the
| most obvious spam, and I can't recall the last false
| positive. It's happened, but extremely rarely. Google spam
| filter is not unique or magical.
|
| And I never liked Gmail the client. It's not as godawful as
| Outlook, nothing even comes close, but it always gets in my
| way and does things in weird Googly ways. I'll stick with
| Kmail, thanks.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I've started to question if GMail's spam folder is marketing
| more than substance. I've used the same primary email address
| for nearly the same number of decades. The time I saw the
| "most" spam in a spam folder was only while it was hosted on
| Google Workspace. Actually trying to skim through those "1000s
| per day" a lot of them seemed suspect in strange ways (why was
| this even delivered anywhere?) and some of them even seemed
| like Google just dumping random ad copy from legitimate search
| ads into the folder.
|
| (Also it says a lot that right now my two biggest sources of
| daily spam are Google Calendar Notifications and Random
| Firebase Accounts. Both of those further leave me questioning
| if Google's approach to spam filtering is sincere.)
| dhosek wrote:
| I've had the same gmail address since it was first announced.
| It also gets email forwarded to it from another ancient email
| address that I used to self-host and that still gets
| occasional real mails. Most of the spam is addressed to that
| other address.
|
| Just took a peek at my spam folder: 207 messages going back
| to March 18th, two false positives (both from mailing lists),
| but nothing critical. I think maybe I've seen one spam
| message across all my accounts in my inbox. Their filters
| benefit from a huge set of trainers on their data.
|
| (As an aside, I would note that some newer addresses that I
| publish naked on some websites that I maintain get very
| little spam (14 messages between the two accounts in the same
| timeframe, most of which are from a single sender who decided
| that they should send me their press releases without any
| means of opting out.)
| freediddy wrote:
| de_dust... such good times! A perfectly designed map where
| everyone knew what the chokepoints were and what the best
| strategies were but the outcomes between equal opponents was
| never guaranteed. That's what makes a perfect playing field!
|
| I recently got my older kid and his friends hooked on CS2 via
| steam. I'm considering having a "dads vs kids" tourney because
| we're at that cross section where all the dads have played CS2
| and now some of the kids are getting old enough and good enough
| to be competitive.
| sonofhans wrote:
| Careful. The crossover from "I'm showing my kid CS2" to "I'm
| getting easily deleted by my kid in CS2" is pretty fast :)
| freediddy wrote:
| My nephew who is in his early 20s beat me at Madden so badly
| that I quit. It wasn't that he just beat me, I couldn't score
| against him at all, and I consider myself a decent Madden
| player. I've been playing that game since the times I was
| changing his diapers and babysitting him. It was so
| humiliating that I haven't touched the game since.
| dhosek wrote:
| Oh man, the ILOVEYOU worm--I remember getting that from a former
| co-worker (who I was pretty sure was not secretly in love with
| me) and asking him who he got it from that he opened the
| attachment and he sheepishly identified a female co-worker who as
| it turned out had been interested in dating me but I was already
| dating someone at the time. I look back at how stuff was set up
| in 1999-2000 and man, we were so trusting of the world then.
| siruwastaken wrote:
| I'm probably showing my age here, but did these email worms
| largely die out due to spam filtering, or did the email programs
| just get better protections against viruses that made it more
| difficult to exploit? The only email "viruses" I have come
| accross today are actual humans accidentally replying "reply all"
| to a legitimate email.
| jprjr_ wrote:
| The answer is yes, to all of it.
|
| Email providers have better spam filtering, some have strict
| rules about attaching any kind of executable code to an email
| (as in - you just can't).
|
| Email clients are always getting updated, stricter about
| validating content before showing it, etc.
| encom wrote:
| And the internet stopped using Outlook Express.
| buserror wrote:
| I got fired off pair.com because I had a wildcard email, and was
| receiving (and to my credit, discarding) _millions_ of emails...
| a day... on my personal domain. Whoops.
|
| I still use my super optimized c++ email filter to this day, 25
| years later. Beats anything else I ever tried.
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(page generated 2026-04-07 23:01 UTC)