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Comment by Aurornis

6 days ago

Comments like this are a good example of rose colored glasses

> You could send out email and it would be received, and the incoming spam volume was manageable.

You must have very different memories of the spam problem than I do. I wouldn't trade today's spam filtering technologies for what we had back then.

> 20 years ago, a buddy used an account on my net-connected Linux machine to scrape map tiles off Google Maps. Google put a stop to it, and Gmaps wouldn't work any more on my (static) IP address. I told him "you broke it, you fix it" and he got on the horn with someone at Google and got it unblocked.

Which part of this do you miss? The fact that your friend had to try to manually scrape a service because it wasn't trivially easy to download open map tiles like it is today? Or the fact that you had to know somebody to get your home IP un-banned, because it once again wasn't cheap and easy to get a cloud server running in minutes like it is today?

The only fun part about this memory appears to be the adventure you had because the internet was new to you two and doing things is more fun when it's new.

> 20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life. I did. Several others I know did.

This still happens all the time. Given that you're no longer on those apps, I assume you're getting your perspective from internet anger outlets like Reddit where people who aren't having success on those websites complain about them, but people continue to find partners and get married. I was at such a wedding very recently.

> But it was a more innocent world. The internet was still an optimistic place.

I'm sorry, but I think you're underestimating how much you have changed, along with the content you consume.

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Aurornis

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MarkusWandel  6 days ago

20 years ago you didn't get lifetime-banned by an AI for going off the beaten path and experimenting. That's what I was pointing out.

And I did actually run the mail server. A friend set it up for me, SpamAssassin or something else may have been involved. The main thing was, though, you could still send email from your own SMTP server without it being automatically binned because it doesn't come from one of the big, "trusted" email services.

  • ryandrake  5 days ago

    I run my own mail server today for my family, and very rarely have deliverability problems. Bog standard Linux install, exim4, dovecot, SpamAssassin. It's basically set and forget. I've been doing so for over a decade, so I probably built up some pretty good IP reputation, but it's totally possible to run mail yourself.

  • owebmaster  6 days ago

    > 20 years ago you didn't get lifetime-banned by an AI for going off the beaten path and experimenting. That's what I was pointing out

    20 years ago a mod would do that and today they still do for example here in this forum

    • lmm  6 days ago

      From one forum or IRC channel, sure. But you could spin up another, there were plenty. You couldn't get banned "from email" - maybe from one email host if you really pissed off the guy at one ISP, but that would only be a tiny fraction of the people you wanted to email.

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