Spamming and anti-spamming

Fig. 1: Part of the spammers' gender identity spectrum.

I rejoice when I receive spam, because it gives me an opportunity to replenish the budget of my beloved country (where the money for pensions, hospitals, schools, duck houses, and now even Counter-Strike comes from, if you know what I mean). I carefully forward every message I receive from spammers to the FAS, giving it the opportunity to replenish the budget not with a paltry 2-500 thousand rubles fine, but up to 1 million, and then I enjoy the materials of the "investigations" that shed light on the dirty underbelly of "solid business" and its non-binary accomplices. Lies, document forgery, and so on and so forth—just like last year, and before… and something else about the prosthetic paws of regulatory authorities.

A developer, who first encountered generating emails, has almost no chance to write an application, that will do it correctly. Around 40% of emails, generated by corporate applications, are violating some form of standard, and due to this, there are problems with delivery and display. There are reasons for this: emails are technically more difficult than the web, and operating emails is regulated by a few hundred standards, as well as an uncountable number of generally accepted (and not as much) practices, whereas the email clients are more varied and unpredictable than browsers. Testing may significantly improve the situation, but materials that are dedicated to testing the email system, are practically non-existent.

Mail.ru regularly interacts with its users by email. In our projects, all the components responsible for generating emails and even individual mailings, are subject to mandatory testing. In this article, we will share our experience (learning from our mistakes).