Discussion:
[GTALUG] Aggressive and Underhanded?
ac via talk
2018-06-12 06:05:03 UTC
Permalink
Hey Everyone,

I was wondering whether I am the only one noticing that Google and
Microsoft has become increasingly aggressive and underhanded in their
email operations?

I noticed the trend a few years ago already and have been watching for
new patterns and collecting millions upon millions of spam emails

Microsoft and Google is dominating email relay and their market share
in the geo areas where they dominate, has steadily increased each year.

recently there has been more changes

Both monopolies are now using more and more complex email headers.

Both Microsoft and Google have become more aggressive, more dominating
and seemingly less ethical in their behaviors.

Google has apparently moved their back end mail servers to private ipv6
ranges and are pumping emails out, spam and ham, through ipv4. Google
has also become non responsive to abuse complaints. Microsoft also now
uses ipv6 but at least uses public ipv6, with abuse information but is
also 'allowing' spam and abuse to be relayed in much higher numbers.

Bot of these (Microsoft and Google) are now relaying for criminals,
normal spam, pump end dump rubbish as well as ham, from the same public
ipv4 numbers.

The result of this new aggressive push is declining quality of email
service for smaller providers - as ham is marked as spam more
frequently.

They (Microsoft and Google) are using their sheer size to bully out
more market share and if the trend continues there will be no more
'independent' email providers in the near future as more and more
providers are forced to run their email services through one of the two
monopolies.

Anyone else noticed the more aggressive system designs, more aggressive
non responsiveness to abuse complaints and other non ethical behaviors?
And, is there anything that general society can even do?

If there are only two email providers in the future, how long will it
take before there is just one?

Andre
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o1bigtenor via talk
2018-06-12 10:50:38 UTC
Permalink
Post by ac via talk
Hey Everyone,
I was wondering whether I am the only one noticing that Google and
Microsoft has become increasingly aggressive and underhanded in their
email operations?
I noticed the trend a few years ago already and have been watching for
new patterns and collecting millions upon millions of spam emails
Microsoft and Google is dominating email relay and their market share
in the geo areas where they dominate, has steadily increased each year.
recently there has been more changes
Both monopolies are now using more and more complex email headers.
Both Microsoft and Google have become more aggressive, more dominating
and seemingly less ethical in their behaviors.
Google has apparently moved their back end mail servers to private ipv6
ranges and are pumping emails out, spam and ham, through ipv4. Google
has also become non responsive to abuse complaints. Microsoft also now
uses ipv6 but at least uses public ipv6, with abuse information but is
also 'allowing' spam and abuse to be relayed in much higher numbers.
Bot of these (Microsoft and Google) are now relaying for criminals,
normal spam, pump end dump rubbish as well as ham, from the same public
ipv4 numbers.
The result of this new aggressive push is declining quality of email
service for smaller providers - as ham is marked as spam more
frequently.
They (Microsoft and Google) are using their sheer size to bully out
more market share and if the trend continues there will be no more
'independent' email providers in the near future as more and more
providers are forced to run their email services through one of the two
monopolies.
Anyone else noticed the more aggressive system designs, more aggressive
non responsiveness to abuse complaints and other non ethical behaviors?
And, is there anything that general society can even do?
If there are only two email providers in the future, how long will it
take before there is just one?
It won't move to just one provider - - - my guess is that there is
enough cross ownership
private and possibly even with a private memorandum of agreement so
that they will
snipe at each other officially but will continue to work until they
have world dominance.
Then - - - who knows.

It is interesting that you mention this as what I have been noticing
is that between
the two mentioned and crackbook and amazon - - - they truly believe
that they collectively
own our on-line lives - - and they do. They use that ownership to
make billions for themselves
and will continue to add to their 'ownership'. There no longer is an
effective way to slow
them never mind to stop them! There is a possibility that this group
would also include
alibaba but that's not as clear, at least at this point!

Regards

Dee
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D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk
2018-06-12 14:41:16 UTC
Permalink
| From: ac via talk <***@gtalug.org>

| I was wondering whether I am the only one noticing that Google and
| Microsoft has become increasingly aggressive and underhanded in their
| email operations?

No, I haven't. But then there is no reason why I would. I run my own
mail server but only for my family.

Can you be more explicit about what I would notice and what they are doing
that is wrong? Note: I'm not challenging the correctness of what you are
claiming, I'm just trying to understand it. Remember I, and probably most
other list, members don't have your level of knowledge about this.

I understand that Google and Microsoft are very very dominant in email.
This is so very different from when I started -- every little group ran
their own server.

I guess that the main driver is SPAM. The above-board reason is that SPAM
detection is a balance between hard and imperfect. I'm willing to live
with imperfect but many folks are not.

My amateur act spam handling: SPAM Assassin (uncustomized) + some
custom procmail rules + each user gets do delete what comes through.

I understand the G&M do much better SPAM detection. To the extent that
they've forced all mailing lists (including this one) to change in an
unpleasant way. Or maybe that was just Yahoo.

I think that you are saying that G&M are now pushing the burden onto other
providers, but I don't understand how.

Is it a matter of forwarding or of originating?

I thought that very little forwarding (except internally) happens
these days. I kind of think you only need to judge the last hop.

Your complaints about IPv6 aren't clear. Is that about internal
forwarding? Is the problem that those internal nodes don't accrue
"reputation"? Why would IPv6 be worse than IPv4? (I've had internal IPv4
forwarding at times. Those IP addresses happened to be routable
addresses, with forward and reverse DNS entries, but that was kind of
accidental.)

(Aside: although not currently the case, I used to and intend to use
forwarding to provide for secondary mail servers. I.e. sometimes my
power goes down or my internet connectivity goes down and I want my
mail to go to a secondary server and then flow to my main one when it
comes back. I haven't put the time in to figure out how I can handle
inbound DKIM correctly in that case.)

| I noticed the trend a few years ago already and have been watching for
| new patterns and collecting millions upon millions of spam emails
|
| Microsoft and Google is dominating email relay and their market share
| in the geo areas where they dominate, has steadily increased each year.

So it seems to be relaying.

But I thought that relaying is broken by DKIM so it is no longer done.
In other words, DKIM is kind of end-to-end with no provision for
relaying.

There ought to be support for trusted relaying. What I mean is: a last
hop that you trust to not lie about what it is forwarding so you can look
at the headers it passed to you with as much trust as normal last-hop
headers. Without this, your mail system can only really look at the last
hop. Is there any formal mechanism for trusted relaying?

| Both monopolies are now using more and more complex email headers.

I'm guessing that you are trusting the last hop, if it is Google or
Microsoft, and want to be able to look through their header
transformations to see what they actually got so you can filter on
that. So your complaint is that they are making it more and more
difficult to look through those header transformations. Am I correct?

I guess that there is another problem. If each trusted forwarder
has to be handled differently, there is a limit on how many can be
trusted. Then Google and Microsoft probably make the cut and our servers
probably don't.

| The result of this new aggressive push is declining quality of email
| service for smaller providers - as ham is marked as spam more
| frequently.
|
| They (Microsoft and Google) are using their sheer size to bully out
| more market share and if the trend continues there will be no more
| 'independent' email providers in the near future as more and more
| providers are forced to run their email services through one of the two
| monopolies.

So are you saying that they've "accidentally" made it harder for
providers to "look though" their forwarding when trying to filter?

| Anyone else noticed the more aggressive system designs, more aggressive
| non responsiveness to abuse complaints and other non ethical behaviors?
| And, is there anything that general society can even do?

"Aggressive" seems like a leap. How about "designed to not
interoperate well"?

| If there are only two email providers in the future, how long will it
| take before there is just one?

An oligopoly is of the same nature as a monopoly. So what we have is
already a monopoly regime. But reducing the number of players would
almost certainly make things worse.

[RANT]

I truly believe that monopolies are the scourge of our era.

Political "free marketeers" don't seem to understand that a free
market requires constraints on monopolies. Look at the Republican
Party in the US. It seems to be willful blindness because they
don't even get it when it is explained to them (eg. FCC and Network
Neutrality)

- there are only a few ways of dealing with natural monopolies (often
caused by the network effect). They should be used in combination.

+ public ownership (i.e. government ownership or co-ops). Not
intrinsically better than private monopolies, but with care can
operate with a better mandate

+ regulation

+ forcing the monopoly to operate in the narrowest possible domain
(i.e. without doing anything other than the function subject to
the natural monopoly). A good example would be separating
electricity generation from transmission (a natural monopoly)

Monopolies generate a lot of "rent". This rent is used to corrupt
governments in various ways (many tacit and unrecognized by the
participants). This seems to be too hard for the electorate
to understand so nothing gets done.

It looks as if the next area of big change is going to be with
autonomous vehicles. There seems to be no planning done with the
public interest in mind. What happens is probably going to be
determined by corporate competition. The outcomes are likely to be
determined by the wrong objective function.

[END RANT]
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tal
ac via talk
2018-06-13 04:16:08 UTC
Permalink
On Tue, 12 Jun 2018 10:41:16 -0400 (EDT)
Post by D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk
| I was wondering whether I am the only one noticing that Google and
| Microsoft has become increasingly aggressive and underhanded in
their | email operations?
No, I haven't. But then there is no reason why I would. I run my
own mail server but only for my family.
Can you be more explicit about what I would notice and what they are
doing that is wrong? Note: I'm not challenging the correctness of
what you are claiming, I'm just trying to understand it. Remember I,
and probably most other list, members don't have your level of
knowledge about this.
in google you would notice increased complexity of headers, as well as
pvt ipv6 forwards and other leads, here is an actual example, from an
actual recent Google abusive email:

X-BeenThere: ***@bigprofts.press
Received: by 2002:a0c:b599:: with SMTP id g25-v6ls1095627qve.2.gmail;
Tue, 12 Jun 2018 18:41:05 -0700 (PDT)
X-Received: by 2002:a0c:d78d:: with SMTP id
z13-v6mr27784qvi.0.1528854065786; Tue, 12 Jun 2018 18:41:05 -0700 (PDT)
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2018 18:41:05 -0700 (PDT)
From: "aaans.moleskin25reign" <***@bigprofts.press>
To: "aaans.moleskin25reign" <***@bigprofts.press>
Message-Id: <b7a0e727-58f6-48d6-bb76-***@bigprofts.press>
Subject: Are You Still Struggling To Make Consistent Money Online ?

From the same Google abuse and prior to this header extract, Google has
a "check in group" and "relay group" which imnsho is used by Google
black ops which I suspect may be a bofh group or culture from within
the corp somewhere.

As this specific example is actually a crime (and criminal activity)

and exactly the same group, tag, check-in, ipv4 and ipv6 has been
reported to ***@google.com over 64 times in the past 30 days and

there has been no action, response or anything at all (reported through
SpamCop as well as directly from numerous places

this clearly indicates that google is an evil organisation hell bent
on world domination :) - and that they are non responsive to abuse
complaints for the specific reason of destroying infrastructure,
reducing email quality of other vendors and bypassing spam filters and
competing anti spam technology.

even in an even handed approach and if I try hard (which is difficult)
to be "pro google" at the very least they are a money hungry
multinational, hell bent on destroying all competition.
Post by D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk
I understand that Google and Microsoft are very very dominant in
email. This is so very different from when I started -- every little
group ran their own server.
I guess that the main driver is SPAM. The above-board reason is that
SPAM detection is a balance between hard and imperfect. I'm willing
to live with imperfect but many folks are not.
My amateur act spam handling: SPAM Assassin (uncustomized) + some
custom procmail rules + each user gets do delete what comes through.
I understand the G&M do much better SPAM detection. To the extent
that they've forced all mailing lists (including this one) to change
in an unpleasant way. Or maybe that was just Yahoo.
I think that you are saying that G&M are now pushing the burden onto
other providers, but I don't understand how.
Is it a matter of forwarding or of originating?
both.. both Google & Microsoft classify incoming relay from 'competitors' as
spam for their own users sometimes at exactly the correct 'timing' when the
competitor is also under 'attack' from what seems to be gov/org crime from
say russia, china, korea, etc.

the patterns for this action repeats to frequently for it to be chance
(if you flip a coin enough times heads and tails eventually comes
closer to balance - heads & tails cannot be 80% apart...- as this means
that either the coin is weighted etc so that heads or tails has a
higher statistical probability, etc.)
Post by D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk
I thought that very little forwarding (except internally) happens
these days. I kind of think you only need to judge the last hop.
yeah, this is what I am saying :)

thank you for clarifying that!

the last hop - this is the actual server passing you the criminal
activity or the abuse, spam, etc.

Google is making it impossible to block or weight (spamassassin +3 etc)
the "last hop" as too high percentage is spam and too high percentage
is ham. this is a design change by Google and is non competitive as
they are already too huge and are now a bully - while of course still
growing their market share.
Post by D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk
Your complaints about IPv6 aren't clear. Is that about internal
forwarding? Is the problem that those internal nodes don't accrue
"reputation"? Why would IPv6 be worse than IPv4? (I've had internal
IPv4 forwarding at times. Those IP addresses happened to be routable
addresses, with forward and reverse DNS entries, but that was kind of
accidental.)
(Aside: although not currently the case, I used to and intend to use
forwarding to provide for secondary mail servers. I.e. sometimes my
power goes down or my internet connectivity goes down and I want my
mail to go to a secondary server and then flow to my main one when it
comes back. I haven't put the time in to figure out how I can handle
inbound DKIM correctly in that case.)
| I noticed the trend a few years ago already and have been watching
for | new patterns and collecting millions upon millions of spam
emails |
| Microsoft and Google is dominating email relay and their market
share | in the geo areas where they dominate, has steadily increased
each year.
So it seems to be relaying.
But I thought that relaying is broken by DKIM so it is no longer done.
In other words, DKIM is kind of end-to-end with no provision for
relaying.
There ought to be support for trusted relaying. What I mean is: a
last hop that you trust to not lie about what it is forwarding so you
can look at the headers it passed to you with as much trust as normal
last-hop headers. Without this, your mail system can only really
look at the last hop. Is there any formal mechanism for trusted
relaying?
| Both monopolies are now using more and more complex email headers.
I'm guessing that you are trusting the last hop, if it is Google or
Microsoft, and want to be able to look through their header
transformations to see what they actually got so you can filter on
that. So your complaint is that they are making it more and more
difficult to look through those header transformations. Am I correct?
I guess that there is another problem. If each trusted forwarder
has to be handled differently, there is a limit on how many can be
trusted. Then Google and Microsoft probably make the cut and our
servers probably don't.
| The result of this new aggressive push is declining quality of email
| service for smaller providers - as ham is marked as spam more
| frequently.
|
| They (Microsoft and Google) are using their sheer size to bully out
| more market share and if the trend continues there will be no more
| 'independent' email providers in the near future as more and more
| providers are forced to run their email services through one of the
two | monopolies.
So are you saying that they've "accidentally" made it harder for
providers to "look though" their forwarding when trying to filter?
| Anyone else noticed the more aggressive system designs, more
aggressive | non responsiveness to abuse complaints and other non
ethical behaviors? | And, is there anything that general society can
even do?
"Aggressive" seems like a leap. How about "designed to not
interoperate well"?
| If there are only two email providers in the future, how long will
it | take before there is just one?
An oligopoly is of the same nature as a monopoly. So what we have is
already a monopoly regime. But reducing the number of players would
almost certainly make things worse.
[RANT]
I truly believe that monopolies are the scourge of our era.
+1

monopolies are going to kill us as a species.

we need drastic action and words no longer mean anything.

or are we already at the point where it is just too late?
Post by D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk
Political "free marketeers" don't seem to understand that a free
market requires constraints on monopolies. Look at the Republican
Party in the US. It seems to be willful blindness because they
don't even get it when it is explained to them (eg. FCC and Network
Neutrality)
- there are only a few ways of dealing with natural monopolies (often
caused by the network effect). They should be used in combination.
+ public ownership (i.e. government ownership or co-ops). Not
intrinsically better than private monopolies, but with care can
operate with a better mandate
+ regulation
+ forcing the monopoly to operate in the narrowest possible domain
(i.e. without doing anything other than the function subject to
the natural monopoly). A good example would be separating
electricity generation from transmission (a natural monopoly)
Monopolies generate a lot of "rent". This rent is used to corrupt
governments in various ways (many tacit and unrecognized by the
participants). This seems to be too hard for the electorate
to understand so nothing gets done.
It looks as if the next area of big change is going to be with
autonomous vehicles. There seems to be no planning done with the
public interest in mind. What happens is probably going to be
determined by corporate competition. The outcomes are likely to be
determined by the wrong objective function.
[END RANT]
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Evan Leibovitch via talk
2018-06-12 17:39:20 UTC
Permalink
I guess it depends on what you consider "email relay"

For LPI's outgoing mail. we use mailman and OpenEMM for anything other than
one-to-a-few personal communications.

For the SMTP relay we use Sparkpost.

This is a combination of self-hosted open source solutions combined with a
trusted cloud service owned by neither G nor M nor A.

- Evan
Post by ac via talk
Hey Everyone,
I was wondering whether I am the only one noticing that Google and
Microsoft has become increasingly aggressive and underhanded in their
email operations?
I noticed the trend a few years ago already and have been watching for
new patterns and collecting millions upon millions of spam emails
Microsoft and Google is dominating email relay and their market share
in the geo areas where they dominate, has steadily increased each year.
recently there has been more changes
Both monopolies are now using more and more complex email headers.
Both Microsoft and Google have become more aggressive, more dominating
and seemingly less ethical in their behaviors.
Google has apparently moved their back end mail servers to private ipv6
ranges and are pumping emails out, spam and ham, through ipv4. Google
has also become non responsive to abuse complaints. Microsoft also now
uses ipv6 but at least uses public ipv6, with abuse information but is
also 'allowing' spam and abuse to be relayed in much higher numbers.
Bot of these (Microsoft and Google) are now relaying for criminals,
normal spam, pump end dump rubbish as well as ham, from the same public
ipv4 numbers.
The result of this new aggressive push is declining quality of email
service for smaller providers - as ham is marked as spam more
frequently.
They (Microsoft and Google) are using their sheer size to bully out
more market share and if the trend continues there will be no more
'independent' email providers in the near future as more and more
providers are forced to run their email services through one of the two
monopolies.
Anyone else noticed the more aggressive system designs, more aggressive
non responsiveness to abuse complaints and other non ethical behaviors?
And, is there anything that general society can even do?
If there are only two email providers in the future, how long will it
take before there is just one?
Andre
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@evanleibovitch or @el56
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