Recently in Email Category

I think it's because a lot of spam comes from Asian domains and IP addresses, but more and more ISPs and companies are banning email from addresses in Asia. I now get at least a few of these a day:

: host smtp1.***.com[xx.xx.xx.xx] said: 550
Rejected: No spam wanted here. Your email was deemed to be spam and is not
accepted. Send a message to postmaster@***.com if you feel this
rejection is in error. (in reply to end of DATA command)
Reporting-MTA: dns; 35.145.221.202.bf.2iij.net
X-Postfix-Queue-ID: 8880B67052
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; jito.***.com
Arrival-Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2007 17:53:05 +0900 (JST)

I don't know exactly what you guys can do about it, but blocking regions seems a bit blunt and rude. The IP address I'm sending from is a pretty legitimate block of address owned by WIDE.

The reason I suspect that it is an Asian thing is that the usual response from the various "postmasters" is, "oh, it's because the email is from an Asian address."

Is there any way to get my IP address added to some white-list so this doesn't happen or will the physical proximity of my mail server always cause my IP address to be painted with the spam brush?

Although I suppose that's how it feels when blog comments get stuck in my spam queue. The only difference is that I look at those regularly and let them through. These spam rejection notices are basically 86 at the door deals.

I can't get to my personal email server from Shanghai so if you have sent email to one of my other accounts and need to reach me urgently, please send it to joiito at gmail or joi at technorati.com which are both working.

Please please stop setting up scripts that bounce virus and spam email back to the sender. You're doubling the spam. Usually the sender or the "from:" is forged. My mailbox is getting filed with people bouncing email back to me that did not originate from me. (I DO check the IP addresses in the headers to makes sure.) What triggered this message was from an ignorant ass who bounced a message to me saying:

Your mail was rejected

You are crimer

Checking the header showed that it came from an IP address of a network I've never been on.

So please. Stop it.

Ariel has started a service called Mailinfo. It looks pretty interesting. It's a plugin for Outlook that lets you see when people have read email that you've sent. Too bad it doesn't work on OSX yet. With all of the spam filters and "gee I wonder if he read my email..." stuff going on, this might be a good tool to unbreak email. Ariel! Hurry up and write a plugin for Mac users. ;-)

It looks like my backlog of email has reached a critical level. I will try to get to it in the next few days, but apologies to people waiting for replies from me.

People have been auctioning Google gmail invitations on eBay. Jonas has set up a gmail invitation exchange for people who donate invitations and for people willing to do something "good" in exchange for an invite.

Jonas

It's not free, however. If you're interested in one, comment here and let me know what you're willing to do for it. Not to me (though I am more than ready to trade for a few good massages), but to someone else. A random act of kindness, maybe? Work in a soup kitchen? Help out at a needle exchange? Or maybe you're doing that already - you'd be the ideal recipient.

I've been having email problems and have been missing email the last few weeks. I'm pretty sure I'm caught up on my email so if I haven't responded to an email you've sent, can you try sending it again? Sorry about this!

Scambaiting is the sport of baiting and messing with 419 scammers.

via Thomas

LOAF

Loaf is a way to share your address book without abandoning your privacy.

Yet another cool idea hatched on IRC by Joshua and Maciej with help from Peter and Dan. It's a distributed email hack that uses Bloom Filters to allow you to check whether mail is from people you know, partial strangers or complete strangers. Lots of obvious applications in spam filters and social networks. Good stuff.

Check out the web page.

Mailblocks was working well for me ever since it it failed on my in January. At the time, I told them that they should have an outages page so that users could find out why mail wasn't working and when it might be back up.

This time, I can access the mailbox, but I haven't been able to receive any new mail for about 8.5 hrs. So if you're trying to reach me urgently, please email me or leave a comment here.

They don't have any information on their page or replied to the email I've sent. hmm...

I am joi_ito at mac.com on AIM.

UPDATE: FYI. Mailblocks was acquired by AOL.

I'm at a dinner where we're talking about spam. There are high level execs from many of the companies involved in email. One person said that he thought we've seen the worst of spam and that it's getting better. It's too bad I can't quote people with attribution, because I think this is a totally unreasonable position.

We've now moved on to Internet governance and as usual, I haven't heard a single opinion that convinces me that email isn't broken and that it isn't just getting worse. We talked about pay to send, better filters, re-inventing smtp, regulations... all of the usual. Yet another fruitless discussion about spam. (yafudas). 17% of legitimate email is not delivered. 81% of people in a recent survey are afraid of false positives.

I don't know if it is just me or the entire service, but Mailblocks.com, my mail host/spam filter was down for about 11 hours yesterday and has been down most of today. (Still down.) It appears that it is bouncing my mail with a error 500. If you have sent me any important mail in the last day or two, please send it to jito(at)eccosys.com or IM me at joi_ito(at)mac.com.

This is the first time I haven't had access to my mail server directly and BOY IS IT FRUSTRATING. I'm going to take a look at moving my mail back under my own control. This really sucks. Does anyone know someone at Mailblocks.com? All I have is a silly support email for them. I wish they had IM support like Earthlink. Ugh.

UPDATE: I'm starting to get really upset now... Why don't they even have an outage statement on their web page or their support page. Hello!?!

UPDATE 2: First of all. Thanks to everyone for their constructive comments. I DO have backup routes to divert my email, but the problem is that the server kept going up and coming down so I never knew when to "throw the switch". I don't like to keep backups spooling my mail because I travel a lot and I can't afford to download redundant mail or allow mailboxes to overflow. (I guess I could auto-delete old backup mail... hmm...)

Also, in the comments people pointed out that their CEO, Phil Goldman, recently passed away and might have something to do with this. I feel very bad about this and didn't realize it at the time. For this reason I have decided to cut them some slack.

Anyway, although my email to support@mailblocks didn't get a response and a call at night didn't reach anyone, I just called and stayed on the line past all of the messages about entering the extension number of the person you want to reach (of course I know no one there) and that I should email support messages (I did several times), I reached a human being. She was nice and when I told her that I was having problems she said that she had heard people were having problems and agreed to pass me over to tech support. The tech support guy was a pleasant guy and he told me that app1, my server, was having hardware problems and that although they didn't know when it would be fixed, that they were working on it. I suggested to him that they have an "outages" page with ETA's of when things might be fixed so they could calm people like me down and help us figure out whether we should be waiting or diverting our email. He said he had received this suggestion from several people they were considering it.

So, my position right now is that I still like the service very much and will continue using it. I will put better backups in place. They seem to be nice people, but they need to provide better support and I hope they figure this out.

FINAL (I HOPE) UPDATE: Seems to be working now. Switching back...

Merry Christmas everyone. Many years ago, I stopped sending Christmas cards. Last year, I stopped sending out traditional Japanese New Years cards and sent email instead. This year, I'm going to stop sending email greetings as well. I hate to be a scrooge, but firing up my bulk mailer, importing my address book and spewing forth my seasons greetings feels way too much like spam.

Thanks to my birthday script, I have a way to spread greetings to my friends across the whole year instead of having to pack it all into one day. (By the way, if I don't know you, you're not going to get a personal greeting...) So please excuse me if you don't get a electronic greeting card from me for the holidays. As Seth says, I think this is one more treasured tradition that has become roadkill along the information super-highway.

On that note, does anyone know who decided that in Japan, Christmas was the day that you were supposed to go on a date with your honey and end up in a hotel room? Every restaurant has a special Christmas menu tonight for couples and ALL of the hotel will be booked by couples for a romantic evening.

Did you know that Japanese families will be lining up in front of Kentucky Fried Chickens today to get their chicken for Christmas? I DO know where this comes from. When my friend Shin, introduced KFC to Japan, the ad campaign showed wealthy American families all eating friend chicken for their holiday feast. KFC was marketed as an upscale food of the privileged in America. This triggered a tradition in Japan for families to eat friend chicken on Christmas.

(I'm on a roll now...)

And you DO know that in Japan only men receive chocolates on Valentine's Day and that women receive their chocolates on "White Day" one month later. (This notion was introduced by the confectionary industry in Japan.) People are encouraged to give chocolates widely and these chocolates are called giri choko (obligatory indebtedness chocolates) in Japanese.

So, although I'm a sucker for ritual, this is all getting a bit crazy for me. I think I'm going p-time on this whole situation and will give people gifts and greet people spontaneously and in a load-balanced way so I don't get thrown out with the spam.

UPDATE: No room at Japan's Love Hotels at Christmas - BBC
Thanks for the link Khalid

Larry is using a white-list spam filter called Mail Blocks. I used to run a server side white-list spam blocker but people got upset so I stopped. Now people are upset because of false positives and just getting buried in my email. I think I'll try this for awhile. Bear with me. You will probably get a challenge/response the first time you send me email again.

I think it may be due to the press I got this month, but my mailbox has been totally overloaded with a variety requests. I've tried to go back and follow up with people who have sent me email, but I think I've missed a bunch. If you've sent me email about something and haven't received a reply, can you either put yourself in my Public To Do List or continue to ping me? I know this is rude, but not replying is more rude. I try to reply to everything I get, so if you've been ignored, it is accidental. Sorry.

Good rant from Ray Ozzie on the death of email.

Ray Ozzie

As time goes on, though, you'll only visit eMail as a low-priority background task, much as you do when sorting through your physical mail at home. You'd never do important work through your home mailbox, would you?

Exactly.

Email is breaking, breaking, broken. Adriaan has a neat graph.

Ray links to Clay and Ross who link to Gelernter and Hornik on the issue.

I recently received email from Bruce Schneier. It was my first interaction with Bruce. He introducing himself, said that he occasionally reads my blog and requested a response to a request from me. I responded and received no reply. I've sent him several emails since then, but haven't gotten any response.

I don't know Bruce well, but from the tone of the email, he seemed anxious to get a response to me about his request. With all of the spam SNAFU these days, I have no idea if my email is getting through. I am left with a weird feeling not being sure whether he's busy or my email has disappeared. Email is truly broken.

So Bruce. if you're reading this please let me know if you got my email or not. If someone who knows Bruce well is reading this, can you ask him?

Two of my emails to ado got blocked by SpamAssassin today. According to him SpamAssassin message, my server was an open relay. I asked about this on #joiito and crysflame pointed to an article that explains that Osirusoft which Spam Assassin uses to check for open relays is broken. "Apparently, after having been DDOS'ed, the Osirusoft people have 'given up the ghost' and are now returning back every IP as a spam source when queried!"

So if you want to get mail from me, please reconfigure SpamAssassin as explained on the use PERL; site.

UPDATE: µthe inquirer has an article about this.