David Andrews via Mailman-Users writes:
> We do send out some fund-raising messages, all our chapters and
> affiliates do some, but I don't think they are excessive and a
> small part of the overall volume.
Unfortunately these "algorithms" aren't algorithms with predicatable
results. They're machine learning models aka statistics (but don't
get me started). That is, that they operate off correlations between
characteristics of mail traffic streams and spam reports. That means
that anybody can be subject to a "spurious correlation" and get
identified as a spam source. It happens a lot. Happened to me a
couple weeks ago (fortunately that correspondent had a less
persnickety alternate email).
I've noticed that the fake-Democrat campaign fund scammers are all
getting tagged as spam by Gmail these days. Ditto Gazan go-fund-mes
on BlueSky. Unfortunately, that means that such statistical
models are likely to treat any fund-raising language as a spam
signal.
> We did improve things technically some, and tried to control things
> in a way to make them happy.
Good for you! That's not easy work. There are two things I would
suggest that you may not have done yet.
1. Implement the Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) protocol. This
basically allows your MTA to testify "I received this mail and the
signatures checked out when I got it". As far as I can tell, the
biggest email hubs (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!) both implement it
themselves and respect other sites that implement it.
2. As Rick Wilson likes to say, "We're all prisoners of the
algorithm, my friends, so smash that 5-star button and write a
review." The email equivalent is asking your subscribers to add
your lists to their address books or whitelists. Not only are
they far more likely to get your mail themselves, but I've been
told that it can improve your overall reputation, at least for
Google.
> In addition to MS blocking us, all the providers for whom they
> process mail blocked us, They removed their ban, that is Microsoft,
> but said they could do nothing about the others.
As Jayson pointed out, while MSFT and Google process mail for a few
services specific to their corporate groups and a lot of business
domains, they don't seem to do it for other freemail providers such as
telephone companies.
Yahoo!, on the other hand, does manage other major freemail domains,
to my knowledge at least AOL, and possibly some telcos. Jayson
evidently knows what he's talking about, I'm just confirming the
general trend of what he's saying.
Two more suggestions that are a lot more work:
3. All of the big three (MSFT, Google, Yahoo!) have some kind of
registration for bulk mailers which allows them to get a report on
their general reputation.
4. For your own sending domains, you can also use DMARC reporting to
find out if people are abusing your domain as the From address.
For partners with their own domains who send through your lists,
you may be able to get them to add you to their DMARC reporting.
Monitoring all that is a big job, though. So is figuring out what to
do about it if you get a signal that your reputation is depreciating.
> Things seem to have changed in the past six months. These providers
> seem to be much more sensitive to things.
To be honest, I don't think that's true. I think in *general*,
they've gotten better at spam vs. ham classification.[1] The thing
is, the spammers have also gotten better at hiding their nature and
new kinds of spam arise all the time, so the big providers are
continuously updating their models. So there's a sort of random
attack on mailing lists. You just got caught by the most recent
iteration. I know that's small comfort, but there's a pretty good
chance that once you get out of the current doldrums, you'll have
clear sailing for a while.
Footnotes:
[1] And the ones that are known to be terrible at it (AT&T and
Comcast) seem to be getting out of managing freemail provision.
--
GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization)
Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/
Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan
------------------------------------------------------
Mailman-Users mailing list -- mailman-users@python.org
To unsubscribe send an email to mailman-users-le...@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/mailman-users.python.org/
Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3
Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Searchable Archives: https://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users@python.org/
https://mail.python.org/archives/list/mailman-users@python.org/
Member address: arch...@mail-archive.com
