Email and the right to free speech (was: Thanks for the feedback on Yahoo in Canada right now...)

[David Collier-Brown]

On 04/17/2014 12:20 PM, Christopher Browne wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 11:56 AM, CLIFFORD ILKAY
> <clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org <mailto:clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>> wrote:
>
>     On 04/17/2014 10:01 AM, David Collier-Brown wrote:
>     > ... The next step is to figure out what to do about it.
>
>     How about ditching Yahoo? Both Yahoo and Hotmail/MSN/Live and any ISP
>     that uses them in the background are huge pains for e-commerce systems
>     that rely on sending confirmation links to users. More often than not,
>     those emails will either get misclassified as junk or never get
>     delivered at all. Recently, I was speaking with someone who hadn't
>     received an email I'd sent to his Sympatico (Microsoft backed). He
>     asked
>     me to send it again and he didn't receive it. He said he has a Gmail
>     address so I sent the same email to both his Sympatico and his Gmail
>     account. He got it immediately at his Gmail account. It never reached
>     his Sympatico account. It's nowhere to be found and it's not in
>     his junk
>     or inbox folders. He realized then that he's probably been missing
>     important emails from people for years and he switched to Gmail.
>     I'm not
>     advocating for Gmail, though it's a perfectly capable mail system. I'm
>     just saying that in the universe of possibilities, Yahoo and
>     Microsoft's
>     various free email offerings are the worst possible choices.
>
>
> Agreed.
>
> One way to regard this is to consider the change to be "censorship",
> and, to some degree, a matter of "human rights" warranting protest.  I
> don't think that is well-representative of what's up at Yahoo!, since
> censorship is usually expected to involve the suppression of speech by
> a governmental organization.  Yahoo! is a company operating in a
> foreign country, not a governing organization.
>
> Another view (less than "censorship") might be to consider this to be
> a form of "editorial selection", though I think that overstates the
> amount of intentionality involved.
>
> I'll quote from Jan Wieck on this from another list which has been
> discussing this from a more purely practical perspective.
>
> "One aspect of the whole thing is that the DMARC proposal is two years
> old and it was well known that this (breaking mailing lists) would be a
> side effect of it. The powers that be at Yahoo! went ahead with it
> anyways. This can mean only one thing. That Yahoo! does not want users
> with a @yahoo.com <http://yahoo.com/> address to participate in third
> party mailing lists.
> If that is what they want, then that is what they should get."
>
> A consequence of this is that Yahoo! will lose some paying users. 
> (Jan was, until quite recently, one such.)
>
> For those that have been paying users, this is providing a compelling
> reason to shift to some more satisfactory service provider.  For those
> that haven't been paying, well, your service exists at the sufferance
> of a company whose finances I can't properly comprehend.  Doesn't seem
> like something worth depending on to me.  (In contrast, I understand
> how Google can get value from its free service offerings.)
>
> FYI, there is a relevant GTALUG practicality; we probably need to
> block subscribers "@yahoo.com <http://yahoo.com>" from posting to this
> list, as the DMARC configuration will mean that mail from those
> subscribers is liable to cause us problems by virtue of bouncing
> around with the risk of encouraging mail routers to block US, which is
> distinctly undesirable.
> -- 
> When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
> question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"

I'd certainly consider it censorship, however much some people insist
that a company is incapable of censorship.

In part this is because DMARC is a */filtering/* system, intended to
reduce some but not all of the problems of other mechanisms that seek to
filter out spam messages, phishing and the like.  Such programs require
great care in design and use, as they can be very harmful to
non-spammers, as has happened here.  And, of course, they're what a
government uses when they wish to implement censorship.

In addition, it is a denial of one's existing rights, including the
right to speech, whatever specific name one puts on it.  Imagine the
reaction if a subcontractor to Canada Post were to introduce a
mail-sorter that filtered out and shredded messages that contains an
ambiguous indications of a possible scam, based on irregularities in the
from-address on the envelope (;-))

--dave

-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb-0XdUWXLQalXR7s880joybQ at public.gmane.org           |                      -- Mark Twain

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