Blackholing My Email

(johnsto.co.uk)

117 points | by semyonsh 6 hours ago

5 comments

  • 3form 1 hour ago
    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 1 hour ago
      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 45 minutes ago
      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!
  • freediddy 11 minutes ago
    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.

  • dmd 14 minutes ago
    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 4 minutes ago
      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.
  • riverforest 2 hours ago
    Email is the one thing everyone complains about and almost nobody actually fixes. Curious how long this lasts before something important falls through.
    • MattTheRealOne 1 hour ago
      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 55 minutes ago
        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.

    • BadBadJellyBean 10 minutes ago
      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.

    • righthand 2 hours ago
      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.

  • nuker 3 hours ago
    [flagged]