As one of the last independent nonprofit hosts of online community dialogue and civic participation in local communities, major email providers in the name of fighting spam and spoofing are directly impinging upon our freedom of assembly online.
This is a big big deal and part of why I proposed the Open Groups in the Knight News Challenge on Internet freedom: https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/2014/submissions/open-groups Yahoo Just implemented a change which turns every post from a Yahoo member to our mailling-list based platform into a poison pill causing bounced messages that then disable mail delivery for perhaps hundred of our users (on Gmail etc. because DMARC allows Yahoo to tells Gmail, etc. to reject us). We are still assessing the damage, but we don't have a budget for this! Update: Yahoo email anti-spoofing policy breaks mailing lists http://www.infoworld.com/d/security/yahoo-email-anti-spoofing-policy-breaks-mailing-lists-240068 Yahoo Addresses a Security Problem by Breaking Every Mailing List in the World http://www.circleid.com/posts/20140408_yahoo_addresses_a_security_problem_by_breaking_every_mailing_list/ It is ironic that Yahoo is doing this because every few months they have a wave of security problems where people's hacked accounts are used to post what looks like legit email to our forums and then that causes Gmail and others to put more of our forum messages mistakenly into spam folders and it put spam links on our website causing search engines to like us less. Microsoft A number of months ago we determined that essentially anyone on Hotmail, Outlook.com, MSN mail, etc. can't join our service without whitelisting us in obscure settings. Email confirmations aren't getting through. Our new Norbiton forum in the UK discovered that despite us manually adding lot of particularly older net users, the mail is blocked completely unless you white list your account. We happen to have a Microsoft employee in the UK trying to help us get off some mystery block list. Gmail Gmail is streaky, but about a year ago they started directing far more mail into people's spam folders (almost exclusively false positives). As most of our users are on Gmail, missed messages totally confusing people as some receive messages and others wonder if they missed part of the dialogue. Gmail also introduced tabs which made our forums less visible to users. Location matters. Like the Facebook Page reach decline, will we be given the "opportunity" to pay for our messages to be more visible in mailboxes some day? Big picture - if we are forced to host on Facebook Groups, Google Groups, etc. and abandon our open source, creative commons, syndication approach (we syndicate posts into Facebook Page and Twitter because we have that freedom), in order to reach and connect our communities for democratic participation the freedom of independent assembly and innovation will be dead. Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.org Twitter: http://twitter.com/democracy Tel/Text: +1.612.234.7072 -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at [email protected].
