Pretty much, when they removed search engines who wouldn’t pay them was the final straw and I went back to reddit (after not being there since the API debacle) 1 last time and replaced all my 26,000 karma worth of comments with “Comment removed in protest of Reddit blocking search engines.” Took me a while, but meh, if they want to hasten its enshitification, I don’t mind doing my part.
yup, those too.
My initial question was did this “researcher” just discover SMTP Open Relay? Cause if so I can do the exact same thing by configuring my SMTP server to open relay then using telnet to connect to it and issue the SMTP commands directly and it will send the email as though sent from whatever email address I want. This has been a known issue with SMTP for decades at this point and can’t be reliably resolved with SMTP, but since the whole world uses it for email, its probably not going away any time soon. However to mitigate it as much as possible is what DMARC DNS entries are supposed to help with, by providing assurance that the email was sent by an SMTP server allowed to send email on behalf of the domain.
I used to send people emails from themselves to demonstrate why they can’t trust the “from” address when they get an e-mail.
Gmail wasn’t even the first, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, there were tons of free email offerings, even sites that would host your whole website for free like geocities. Gmail came into the market when 3rd party email being free was already well established. They just followed an Apple style of development, taking something that already exists and made a better version of it. Also back then their motto was still “Don’t Be Evil” and they mostly still kept to it, so they used that goodwill and the better user experience to grow it at a massive rate. And for the most part, its still the best experience for email for many cases.
yeah, I had heard of that, I’m hoping that since it was a while ago and most of them were the ones done by automated systems and not going through it comment by comment editing them, but I’ll keep at it, if I have to sneak one edit through a day or something.