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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Email is the one thing everyone complains about and almost nobody actually fixes. Curious how long this lasts before something important falls through.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
It inspires me to work on things that I'm passionate about just for fun. You never know what might come out of it!
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.
(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.)
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.)
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.
at this point RCS and email are pretty similar on paper.
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.
The abuse is by design.