Re: [44net] Why if you are yahoo.com or gmail.com mail user, you probably won't see this message :-)
The subject line of this message is clearly wrong.
255 of the 821 subscribers to this mailing list use @gmail.com mailboxes.
If there were a problem with gmail, it would have shown up long ago.
I have a bit mixed feelings about it. As a coordinator I get regular mail from gmail users and often experience that my replies do not arrive or get marked as SPAM. I get reminders about requests that I have already processed, and sometimes a message "oh sorry I found your reply in the SPAM folder".
At first I blamed my use of an @amsat.org address, and also using that address as a From: address in my replies. Due to the SPF record on amsat.org it can be expected that such use leads to marking of mail as suspicious.
So I switched to using another alias service (@vrza.nl being offered by one of our amateur radio societies), but the situation did not improve. I still get reports of my mail ending up in the SPAM folder at gmail. But the vrza.nl domain has no SPF record.
Apparently there is some relation to the user receiving the mail. Some users receive all my mail without problem, no matter if sent from @amsat.org @vrza.nl or another source. Others report that it is treated as SPAM for each of those.
Not being a gmail.com user myself, I do not exactly know what features it offers for whitelisting or other special treatment of mail, or maybe what it learns automatically. It could be that sending back and forth several mails eventually leads to an address getting on the whitelist automatically. The same could be true for mail server IP addresses (like a mailinglist server), and it could be that knowledge built in the past also affects the results of new SPAM criteria added later.
It is all a bit opaque, and when you want reliable and predictable mail service, using those mailservices certainly is not the best choice... or at the least check the SPAM folder regularly. (but I have also received reports of mail being dropped and not placed there)
Rob
Doing some DNS digging it appears that amsat.org's DKIM records are invalid (It's returning an SPF record). (and it is a CNAME record, not a TXT record).
;amsat.org._domainkey.amsat.org. IN TXT
;; ANSWER SECTION: amsat.org._domainkey.amsat.org. 3329 IN CNAME amsat.org. amsat.org. 3260 IN TXT "v=spf1 a a: ip4:67.227.252.196 ip4:64.91.254.28 ip4:64.91.254.149 ~all"
vrza.nl publishes neither a SPF or DKIM record.
Further research indicates that Google doesn't necessarily mark every piece of mail as spam if it fails spf and dkim checks. Google uses the data as part of an algorithm to determine the "reputation" of the sender. If the reputation is good despite failing SPF and DKIM checks the mail will not be marked as spam.
*I apologize again for starting this thread*, It was based off of issues I and another site were having with emails going to google users being marked as SPAM. Turns out our hosting provider is using an old version of mailman that doesn't incorporate more nuanced handling of SPF, DKIM, DMARC enabled mail.
-Neil
-Neil
On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 4:05 PM Rob Janssen pe1chl@amsat.org wrote:
The subject line of this message is clearly wrong.
255 of the 821 subscribers to this mailing list use @gmail.com mailboxes.
If there were a problem with gmail, it would have shown up long ago.
I have a bit mixed feelings about it. As a coordinator I get regular mail from gmail users and often experience that my replies do not arrive or get marked as SPAM. I get reminders about requests that I have already processed, and sometimes a message "oh sorry I found your reply in the SPAM folder".
At first I blamed my use of an @amsat.org address, and also using that address as a From: address in my replies. Due to the SPF record on amsat.org it can be expected that such use leads to marking of mail as suspicious.
So I switched to using another alias service (@vrza.nl being offered by one of our amateur radio societies), but the situation did not improve. I still get reports of my mail ending up in the SPAM folder at gmail. But the vrza.nl domain has no SPF record.
Apparently there is some relation to the user receiving the mail. Some users receive all my mail without problem, no matter if sent from @amsat.org @ vrza.nl or another source. Others report that it is treated as SPAM for each of those.
Not being a gmail.com user myself, I do not exactly know what features it offers for whitelisting or other special treatment of mail, or maybe what it learns automatically. It could be that sending back and forth several mails eventually leads to an address getting on the whitelist automatically. The same could be true for mail server IP addresses (like a mailinglist server), and it could be that knowledge built in the past also affects the results of new SPAM criteria added later.
It is all a bit opaque, and when you want reliable and predictable mail service, using those mailservices certainly is not the best choice... or at the least check the SPAM folder regularly. (but I have also received reports of mail being dropped and not placed there)
Rob
44Net mailing list 44Net@mailman.ampr.org https://mailman.ampr.org/mailman/listinfo/44net
On Mon, 2018-11-12 at 16:53 -0600, Neil Johnson via 44Net wrote:
Doing some DNS digging it appears that amsat.org's DKIM records are invalid (It's returning an SPF record). (and it is a CNAME record, not a TXT record).
;amsat.org._domainkey.amsat.org. IN TXT
I've yet to see a DKIM signature from amsat.org. What you are seeing is a wildcard RR.
-Jim P.
When I retired, I switched email servers from UCSD.EDU to my own domain, and mail from me was occasionally marked as spam by gmail. That gradually stopped. But mail from me as brian@ampr.org that was NOT in reply to a message I'd received was FREQUENTLY marked as spam by gmail. Now, a year later, that is rare. I believe this shows that Google is constantly adjusting its spam filtering mechanism, and that some part of that adjustment is automated.
Microsoft's email service (with all the names it goes by) has a reputation of occasionally just discarding inbound mail with no notification to either the sender or the recipient. I have proven this with certain email contents such as long lists of IP addresses in the body of the message; the message just vanishes. Attachments seem to be better tolerated, gzip'd or bzip'd attachments seem to get through most of the time.
Throwing the baby out with the bathwater seems to be tolerable to customers of these services. Or it could be they don't know what they're missing; ignorance can be bliss.
In any case, that's why I run my own mail server instead of using gmail; if something goes wrong, I know who to blame and can usually figure out how to fix it. - Brian
On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 11:05:11PM +0100, Rob Janssen wrote:
The subject line of this message is clearly wrong.
255 of the 821 subscribers to this mailing list use @gmail.com mailboxes.
If there were a problem with gmail, it would have shown up long ago.
I have a bit mixed feelings about it. As a coordinator I get regular mail from gmail users and often experience that my replies do not arrive or get marked as SPAM. I get reminders about requests that I have already processed, and sometimes a message "oh sorry I found your reply in the SPAM folder".
At first I blamed my use of an @amsat.org address, and also using that address as a From: address in my replies. Due to the SPF record on amsat.org it can be expected that such use leads to marking of mail as suspicious.
So I switched to using another alias service (@vrza.nl being offered by one of our amateur radio societies), but the situation did not improve. I still get reports of my mail ending up in the SPAM folder at gmail. But the vrza.nl domain has no SPF record.
Apparently there is some relation to the user receiving the mail. Some users receive all my mail without problem, no matter if sent from @amsat.org @vrza.nl or another source. Others report that it is treated as SPAM for each of those.
Not being a gmail.com user myself, I do not exactly know what features it offers for whitelisting or other special treatment of mail, or maybe what it learns automatically. It could be that sending back and forth several mails eventually leads to an address getting on the whitelist automatically. The same could be true for mail server IP addresses (like a mailinglist server), and it could be that knowledge built in the past also affects the results of new SPAM criteria added later.
It is all a bit opaque, and when you want reliable and predictable mail service, using those mailservices certainly is not the best choice... or at the least check the SPAM folder regularly. (but I have also received reports of mail being dropped and not placed there)
Rob
44Net mailing list 44Net@mailman.ampr.org https://mailman.ampr.org/mailman/listinfo/44net
On 13/11/18 10:12, Brian Kantor wrote:
When I retired, I switched email servers from UCSD.EDU to my own domain, and mail from me was occasionally marked as spam by gmail. That gradually stopped. But mail from me as brian@ampr.org that was NOT in reply to a message I'd received was FREQUENTLY marked as spam by gmail. Now, a year later, that is rare. I believe this shows that Google is constantly adjusting its spam filtering mechanism, and that some part of that adjustment is automated.
Gmail users can help train the filter. Simply take any mail wrongly marked as spam out of spam, and Gmail will use this as a training input. If enough affected people do it enough times, the spam filter does eventually learn.
Microsoft's email service (with all the names it goes by) has a reputation of occasionally just discarding inbound mail with no notification to either the sender or the recipient. I have proven this with certain email contents such as long lists of IP addresses in the body of the message; the message just vanishes. Attachments seem to be better tolerated, gzip'd or bzip'd attachments seem to get through most of the time.
Another thing is simple scripted email posters, as commonly used by scripts are also often victims of Microsoft mail deletion. I proved this many years ago when clients of a training company I worked for at the time were complaining that they weren't getting booking information. It soon became apparent that all of the affected clients had a Hotmail address, and testing with Hotmail showed that their service silently deleted the automatic emails from our booking system.
And just so there's no mistaking my opinions: I think DMARC is a misbegotten failed abortion that should have a stake driven through its heart. - Brian
+1
On Nov 12, 2018, at 17:22, Brian Kantor Brian@bkantor.net wrote:
And just so there's no mistaking my opinions: I think DMARC is a misbegotten failed abortion that should have a stake driven through its heart.
- Brian
44Net mailing list 44Net@mailman.ampr.org https://mailman.ampr.org/mailman/listinfo/44net
On Mon, 2018-11-12 at 15:21 -0800, Brian Kantor wrote:
And just so there's no mistaking my opinions: I think DMARC is a misbegotten failed abortion that should have a stake driven through its heart.
The only thing worse is wildcard DNS records. ;-)
(and stripping PGP sigs from emails)
-Jim P.
Oddly enough, I find that every single email from this list winds up not being placed in any logical mailbox. It can’t be found in my inbox or my junk mail, I have to find it in my “All Mail” special mailbox that shows mail from all boxes. I suspect that I have some sort of incorrect setting myself that is automatically moving it somewhere and not an issue with gmail itself.
This is why I am moving to my own mail server. I should probably update my subscription to this list.
On 13/11/18 11:53, Bryce Wilson via 44Net wrote:
Oddly enough, I find that every single email from this list winds up not being placed in any logical mailbox. It can’t be found in my inbox or my junk mail, I have to find it in my “All Mail” special mailbox that shows mail from all boxes. I suspect that I have some sort of incorrect setting myself that is automatically moving it somewhere and not an issue with gmail itself.
This is why I am moving to my own mail server. I should probably update my subscription to this list.
I've never had a problem. Gmail filtering is very good, if you know how to use it.
As for AMSAT's wildcard DNS records: the man who currently maintains the amsat.org DNS is not a subscriber to this list; I no longer do it.
As for stripping attachments from this mailing list, it's done because so many submitters have never figured out how to make their mailers send ONLY PLAINTEXT and so we were getting immense amounts of duplicate HTML crap, as well as pictures, business cards, and who-knows-what-else. The 'confidentiality' lawyer-droppings that so many submitters unwittingly attach to their postings are bad enough. Mailman doesn't have a way to filter them out, YET. The stupidity of a paragraph claiming that a message is confidential when it's posted to a mailing list with 800+ subscribers should be obvious. - Brian
On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 07:48:19PM -0500, Jim Popovitch via 44Net wrote:
On Mon, 2018-11-12 at 15:21 -0800, Brian Kantor wrote:
And just so there's no mistaking my opinions: I think DMARC is a misbegotten failed abortion that should have a stake driven through its heart.
The only thing worse is wildcard DNS records. ;-)
(and stripping PGP sigs from emails)
-Jim P.
Brian I agree, however some use their company email for everything and dont have a choice about the content of the signature. I would suggest to everyone that using your company email is not a good idea. For me it is my company so no big deal, but I use my call sign domain name for ham radio related email communications. BTW not everyone lives in a plain txt world or has an easy way to make the change in their email client. Most people don't even see the attached chain that are on gmail it just sows up as three dots in a grey oval. While it chews bandwidth most current mail clients don't show the chain unless you drill down and try to read the info. Lin N4YCI
On 13/11/18 09:05, Rob Janssen wrote:
Not being a gmail.com user myself, I do not exactly know what features it offers for whitelisting or other special treatment of mail, or maybe what it learns automatically. It could be that sending back and forth several mails eventually leads to an address getting on the whitelist automatically. The same could be true for mail server IP addresses (like a mailinglist server), and it could be that knowledge built in the past also affects the results of new SPAM criteria added later.
Gmail has an automated spam filter, which supposedly learns from the vast body of email that flows through Gmail. It's not bad, but being somewhat reliant on learning from user reactions and traffic patterns, it does make a mistake every now and then.
However, the good news is you can override the spam filter by creating a filter that finds list posts and in the filter set the action "Never send to Spam", in addition to any other filtering actions you'd like to take. That is your whitelist.
It is all a bit opaque, and when you want reliable and predictable mail service, using those mailservices certainly is not the best choice... or at the least check the SPAM folder regularly. (but I have also received reports of mail being dropped and not placed there)
That I haven't seen with Gmail, but it is very common with Hotmail.
We ran our own mail server for years using linux and a spam filtering software I can't remember. While I would prefer to have my email on my own box the abilities of Gmail are pretty amazing. I see far less spam than before what I do see is a bunch of people that don't know their own email address giving my email to their friends, school, kids school, car dealership, accountant (yes got someones tax return), pharmacy notifications. My biggest gripe is the number of companies that don't conduct email verification before signing someone up for something.
Of course if I would just pay for the services to host my domains email addresses then I would not have to deal with this instead of spoofing the outbound address.
BTW a company that I conduct contract work for uses Gmail and it works great as well, but has many of the features to administer users content such as the required signature, logo, required photo ect. But all of this is quite off topic for the list as it seems to work for gmail, yahoo ect. Lin N4YCI
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Brian Kantor -
Jim Popovitch -
John Ricketts -
Lin Holcomb -
Neil Johnson -
Rob Janssen -
secret.memail.com＠gmail.com -
Tony Langdon