Why Some Phishing Emails Are Mysteriously Disappearing

This is even worse than &quot;we don&#x27;t like you so we are no longer selling you our service&quot;, which is already problematic :&#x2F;. Deciding &quot;we know what you are doing with our service, so we are going to keep selling you our service but make it do something different&quot; should probably just be illegal. As it stands, if they really want to do this, I hope they realize it makes them de facto responsible for all email that goes through their service (and if they don&#x27;t, then they are even bigger idiots than I normally paint them to be, as they literally are involved in a similar case in court <i>right now</i>).<p>This is equivalent to &quot;I know you are going to use our invitation service to invite people to a meeting of your local gang, so we have made the emails go out with a typo in the location and phone number field&quot;, which has the same sort of &quot;wait, are you sure it is a gang? how do you define a gang? is the gang even doing something harmful today?&quot; problem that comes with the term &quot;phishing&quot;. While this is much better than them claiming to block &quot;spam&quot; (which I will claim has so nebulous of a definition as to be meaningless), this is still a slightly ambiguous classification of any given communication due to how it interacts with trademark law.<p>Regardless, now that they have shown that they are interested in modifying the behavior of their platform to stop &quot;using the Cloudflare platform for evil&quot; (a direct quote from their blog post), clearly they now also should be using similar techniques to stop people from sending email about drug paraphernalia, and they should stop people from sending email with hate speech, and they should stop sending email about terrorism. <i>They also should, of course, stop people from sending email about software piracy, or sending email about services designed to undermine copyright like SciHub, or sending email advertising &quot;obscene&quot; pornography.</i><p>They have now shown both the ability to do this and an interest in doing this, which is exactly what they recently demonstrated with the Daily Stormer SNAFU, where they showed the ability and interest to block use of their service &quot;for evil&quot;; in that case, the people were &quot;Nazis&quot;, which may or may not be more clear cut than &quot;phishers&quot;, but the scenario is essentially the same... and they are now having to backpedal their actions in court as this is being used as evidence for why they should be responsible for blocking piracy on their platform. The reality is that once you show an ability and an interest in policing content, what kinds of content you are forced to police will be taken from you and given to the state.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;torrentfreak.com&#x2F;daily-stormer-termination-haunts-cloudflare-in-online-piracy-case-170929&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;torrentfreak.com&#x2F;daily-stormer-termination-haunts-cl...</a><p>Cloudflare&#x27;s decision today is going to be devastating not only for them, but for the Internet as a whole (as usual :&#x2F;).

If a mail client does not support dmarc,or happens to move reject policy emails to junk (as opposed to not delivering at all). And the user loses all their money to a phishing campaign,would cloudflare be held responsible?<p>I get the intent but in these situations,no solution is better than a half-cooked solution. If I happened to be a victim in my hypothetical scenario above,sure I would get pissed at my (web)mail client,but also at cloudflare for not terminating the phisher&#x27;s service when they were so sure of the malicious content hosted they went as far as sabotaging dmarc records.<p>From a more practical point of view,most phishing campaings like to use compromised websites or email accounts to send the email. Now the email itself will typically have a link to some nasty site or an attachment that eventually ends up &quot;dropping&quot; a second stage malware from some other nasty site. So, if these nasty sites sit behind Cloudflare,how does it make sense to not hold Cloudlfare responsible? Historically,their defense was &quot;we are just the network transport provider&quot;. But what now? They can sabotage dmarc records but not A records? Their legal team must either be sleeping on the job or so good that an obvious liability like this isn&#x27;t seen as a business risk.

I don&#x27;t understand why it&#x27;s better to surreptitiously alter records for ToS violators rather than simply close their accounts altogether. Seems like the definition of a slippery slope.

Is this equivalent to hell-banning censorship by an infrastructure layer?<p>I understand the positive intent, but it feels wrong to have email content altered by infrastructure layers. A slippery-slope argument may apply.