The yahoo hack's un-discussed REAL problem.

[woodsmoke]

There is all sorts of news about the Yahoo hack but take a look at this headline:

Hackers expose 453,000 mail ids taken from Yahoo Voice,Gmail,Hotmail etc

Now, I have absolutely no clue about how that great variety of stuff was obtained but I'll make a wager of a virtual dollar that at least part of the problem is...

CROSSLINKING e-mail addys by the companies to SOMEHOW...DESPERATELY hope to get a part of the "other company's users" into their group.

The very day that Yahoo/Google, etc. wanted "another e-mail" address "for security" to get me my password reset.....

I started getting an item that appeared on one, suddenly popping up in the other, so that now, I get two notifications for ONE e-mail.

I am studiously looking at how to implement, for me, SR's recommendation in another thread and dropping all of this cr**.

http://www.bollywoodtorrents.me/thre...il-Hotmail-etc

wooodsmoke

[SteveRiley]

I have come to seriously appreciate the adage "If you aren't paying for a service, then you're the product, not the customer." The users of Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/Gmail et. al. are the products; the advertisers are the customers. This is probably not news to any of you, of course.

For those who don't wish to take on the burden of running their own email server, any of the paid webmail services is probably much better than Google.

If you do want to run your own, here's a thorough step-by-step. It's the one I used.

[woodsmoke]

you don't mind taking on somewhat herculean tasks do you? lol

And no, I had not thought of it that way so thank you very much.

woodsmoke

[SteveRiley]

Well, I had to do it three times to get it right. Omitted a step here and there. But now that it's running, I pretty much ignore it. It just sits there in my closet, happily sending and receiving mail. I've also installed Tiny Tiny RSS on it, too. Now I can sync my RSS feeds across browsers and my Android devices, just like I did with Google Reader. It's surprisingly easy to de-Google-fy one's self.

[wh0rd]

So Yahoo was really behind the so called Android malware that was found by a Microsoft developer.

[woodsmoke]

wHord

?

woodsmoke

[wh0rd]

wHord

?

woodsmoke

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/tzink/archi...edirected=true

[woodsmoke]

Thanks whORd

Fortunately I haven't had any of that yet.

woodsmoke

[SteveRiley]

It's disengenuous to state that "Yahoo is behind the malware." Perhaps it wasn't your intention, but a plausible way to interpret your statement is that Yahoo is the intentional source of the malware. I'm not sure that's true.

Yahoo, like all popular free email services, is inundated with attacks that continually morph and improve. These services face the unenviable challenge of trying to be easy to use while simultaneously being unattractive to exploit. Security is hard.

[wh0rd]

Yahoo has repeatedly show poor security practices, from revealing RSA keys to other basic security blunders.

[SteveRiley]

Like I said, security is hard. I've spent most of my career working in it, and I don't claim to know everything. The research concerning this particular issue is still ongoing. I'm not ready yet to assign intentional blame to Yahoo.

[oshunluvr]

Ok, I'll jump on the band wagon... Yahoo email is a spam farm. It's become totally unusable.

[ScottyK]

I have come to seriously appreciate the adage "If you aren't paying for a service, then you're the product, not the customer." The users of Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/Gmail et. al. are the products; the advertisers are the customers. This is probably not news to any of you, of course.

For those who don't wish to take on the burden of running their own email server, any of the paid webmail services is probably much better than Google.

If you do want to run your own, here's a thorough step-by-step. It's the one I used.

I currently pay somebody for hosting and email, and It's working for me. However I've always wanted to run my own email server.

Thanks for this great guide to get one going! I might take a crack at it on my next three day weekend.

One question - What kind of hardware do you recommend for this? Is that old P4 2GB box sitting in my closet suitable for the task?

[SteveRiley]

Email servers, even thouse using a SQL database, require few resources. Mine's an old Acer 1420p laptop running Ubuntu 12.04 Server. I manage thing using CLI via SSH, Webmin, PHPMyAdmin, and PostfixAdmin. So I'd say that dusty 2 GiB P4 would work fine.