Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Bill Cole via mailop]

On 28 Apr 2019, at 10:19, Leo Gaspard via mailop wrote:


"Bill Cole"  writes:

I know from doing it that limbo-free email can be done well enough
(minimal bad mail being delivered or good mail being rejected) that
paying users will come to prefer it over freemail-like service. That
service model lacks significant economies of scale (and arguably has
net diseconomies of scale,) but by the most objective metrics of 
value

it is a better service model than that of the behemoths.


The current discussion about a mail failing DKIM-verification being
rejected by gmail and unsubscribing most gmail customers from this 
very
mailing list make me wonder whether limbo-free email is actually a 
good

idea: rejection of the mail will likely trigger the mailing lists'
automatic unsubscribing feature.


Note that the bounce processing in Mailman (the MLM for this list) is 
configurable to not unsub members on the first rejection. Why it was set 
to do that is a question for Simon or whoever controls that part of the 
Mailman config.


Another issue in that is the choice to send mail over IPv6. This has 
well-known risks of running into more draconian filtering than sticking 
with IPv4, and the operators of the mailing lists system have clearly 
NOT considered those risks or their mitigation.


Which means that if either the ML's antispam lets a spam through or 
one

of the ML's legitimate email gets falsely spam-detected, then a
rejection will happen and the user will likely get unsubscribed from 
the

ML.

Am I missing something that would prevent such a scenario from 
occuring?


No, but you're missing the consequences of that sort of event in 
contrast to the spam-limbo alternatives.


Dropping mail after receipt (done by MS for some classes of user) is 
obviously bad. The failure is silent and untraceable. It could be weeks 
or months before the recipient notices that anything is wrong. The list 
system never detects anything wrong until such time as the pouring of 
mail into a black hole reaches some threshold of damaging reputation 
with the tender of the black hole. By then it is a horrible mess.


Spam-foldering is hypothetically noticeable by the recipient, but only 
if their spam folder isn't swamped by the worst sorts of spam. If the 
spam folder is full of real spam, recipients still are left not noticing 
the problem until it has become chronic and the sender may never notice 
until general deliverability to that mailbox provider is generally 
terrible.


Rejection of mail from a mailing list usually does not cause immediate 
unsub or even immediate disablement, but it will more often cause 
notices to the recipient that are less likely to carry the same 
spam-like characteristics and so get delivered and seen. On the list 
manager side, a spike in users who are in a bounce handling mode is 
visible if the admin pays attention.



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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Leo Gaspard via mailop]

"Bill Cole"  writes:
> I know from doing it that limbo-free email can be done well enough
> (minimal bad mail being delivered or good mail being rejected) that
> paying users will come to prefer it over freemail-like service. That
> service model lacks significant economies of scale (and arguably has
> net diseconomies of scale,) but by the most objective metrics of value
> it is a better service model than that of the behemoths.

The current discussion about a mail failing DKIM-verification being
rejected by gmail and unsubscribing most gmail customers from this very
mailing list make me wonder whether limbo-free email is actually a good
idea: rejection of the mail will likely trigger the mailing lists'
automatic unsubscribing feature.

Which means that if either the ML's antispam lets a spam through or one
of the ML's legitimate email gets falsely spam-detected, then a
rejection will happen and the user will likely get unsubscribed from the
ML.

Am I missing something that would prevent such a scenario from occuring?

Cheers,
  Leo

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Steve Atkins]

> On Apr 27, 2019, at 8:41 PM, Michael Wise via mailop  
> wrote:
> 
>  
> A very wise individual (not me) once pointed out something non-obvious... it 
> takes longer to clear a good message than it typically does to find something 
> evil with a bad message. Good messages are much more expensive to process.

Messages that are neither particularly good, nor particularly bad, rather just 
mediocre greymail can be more expensive still to deliver accurately.

Even though those are the ones the recipient cares least about - including 
about whether they were delivered, or not, appropriately.

(And the ability to deliver, or not, that particular message correctly may rely 
critically on details about other messages from the same mail stream and 
recipients response to them in the previous month. Or in the next several 
hours.)

Cheers,
  Steve

> Non-obvious, but true.
>  
> Aloha,
> Michael.
> --
> Michael J Wise
> Microsoft Corporation| Spam Analysis
> "Your Spam Specimen Has Been Processed."
> Got the Junk Mail Reporting Tool ?
>  
> -Original Message-
> From: mailop  On Behalf Of Bill Cole
> Sent: Friday, April 26, 2019 11:17 PM
> To: Brandon Long via mailop 
> Subject: Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders
>  
> On 23 Apr 2019, at 1:17, Brandon Long via mailop wrote:
>  
> > On Sat, Apr 20, 2019 at 12:47 PM Bill Cole < 
> > mailop-20160...@billmail.scconsult.com> wrote:
>  
> [...]
> >> 
> >> One fact that is very helpful to understand and yet broadly ignored
> >> when people look at the feasibility of processing-intensive filtering
> >> is the mandate of 
> >> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.3.2.6.
> >> 
> > 
> > Holding a connection open for a long time before admitting you
> > received the
> > message
> > has its own issues, of course.  We've also found that we often have
> > way
> > more resources
> > to receive messages than the senders do to send them, I doubt very
> > many
> > mail senders would
> > react well if we started taking minutes to receive every message.
>  
> Sure, but there's a lot of room below "minutes to receive every message"
> to interrogate complex and suspect messages carefully without troubling
> most senders.  The overwhelming majority of non-bulk legitimate email
> can be cleared very fast, no matter how intensively you examine it,
> because it simply isn't that complex.
>  
> If you are not taking minutes to filter every message asynchronously
> (after which you can only reasonably deliver what you think is spam into
> a spam folder) then doing as good a job synchronously and rejecting mail
> deemed to be spam wouldn't mean taking minutes for every message.
> However, if you have useful filtering tactics that literally take a
> minute for some messages, that shouldn't be considered lethal no matter
> how much it makes a few senders whine.
>  
> And I should note that I'm not trying to be prescriptive for behemoth
> freemail/freemail+ providers. I have a hard time avoiding the use of the
> generic 2nd person so this is not about YOU, Brandon Long, Google
> Incarnate... Spam foldering and other flavors of mail limbo may well be
> the only feasible choice at Google/MS scale but most mail operators are
> nowhere near that scale and should not fall into the trap of mimicking
> service patterns that are ultimately rooted in scaling problems.
>  
> [...]
> > And unfortunately, enterprises often rely on some of these self same
> > tools.  Telling them
> > they can't do something like send/receive attachments is a very quick
> > way
> > for them
> > to choose another provider.  And these are the paying users.
>  
> You might be surprised...
>  
> But that's a digression. I did not say attachments should be absolutely
> prohibited on any mail system, and I don't believe they can or should
> be. I said that most mail providers can and should avoid some of the
> most demanding filtering tasks by being willing to break some edge
> cases, offer workarounds, and use the teachable moments that breakage
> offers.
>  
> Note that Google & MS already have such workarounds in operation. Your
> smartest paying customers who care about governance are already using
> them in preference to tossing around files in email. I am just glad
> (because I still need to earn a living...) that Google & MS have not
> recognized that services which people eagerly pay for that have great
> economies of scale can be used as leverage to raise the quality of a
> service that everyone has mostly conceded to always kinda suck (but at
> least it's cheap...)
>  
> [...]
&

Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Jay Hennigan]

On 4/27/19 12:41 PM, Michael Wise via mailop wrote:
A very wise individual (not me) once pointed out something 
non-obvious... it takes longer to clear a good message than it typically 
does to find something evil with a bad message. Good messages are much 
more expensive to process. Non-obvious, but true.


Makes sense. Once you find something bad, you stop processing.
--
Jay Hennigan - j...@west.net
Network Engineering - CCIE #7880
503 897-8550 - WB6RDV

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Michael Wise via mailop]

A very wise individual (not me) once pointed out something non-obvious... it 
takes longer to clear a good message than it typically does to find something 
evil with a bad message. Good messages are much more expensive to process. 
Non-obvious, but true.

Aloha,
Michael.
--
Michael J Wise
Microsoft Corporation| Spam Analysis
"Your Spam Specimen Has Been Processed."
Got the Junk Mail Reporting 
Tool<http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=18275> ?



-Original Message-
From: mailop  On Behalf Of Bill Cole
Sent: Friday, April 26, 2019 11:17 PM
To: Brandon Long via mailop 
Subject: Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders



On 23 Apr 2019, at 1:17, Brandon Long via mailop wrote:



> On Sat, Apr 20, 2019 at 12:47 PM Bill Cole <

> mailop-20160...@billmail.scconsult.com<mailto:mailop-20160...@billmail.scconsult.com>>
>  wrote:



[...]

>>

>> One fact that is very helpful to understand and yet broadly ignored

>> when people look at the feasibility of processing-intensive filtering

>> is the mandate of

>> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.3.2.6.

>>

>

> Holding a connection open for a long time before admitting you

> received the

> message

> has its own issues, of course.  We've also found that we often have

> way

> more resources

> to receive messages than the senders do to send them, I doubt very

> many

> mail senders would

> react well if we started taking minutes to receive every message.



Sure, but there's a lot of room below "minutes to receive every message"

to interrogate complex and suspect messages carefully without troubling

most senders.  The overwhelming majority of non-bulk legitimate email

can be cleared very fast, no matter how intensively you examine it,

because it simply isn't that complex.



If you are not taking minutes to filter every message asynchronously

(after which you can only reasonably deliver what you think is spam into

a spam folder) then doing as good a job synchronously and rejecting mail

deemed to be spam wouldn't mean taking minutes for every message.

However, if you have useful filtering tactics that literally take a

minute for some messages, that shouldn't be considered lethal no matter

how much it makes a few senders whine.



And I should note that I'm not trying to be prescriptive for behemoth

freemail/freemail+ providers. I have a hard time avoiding the use of the

generic 2nd person so this is not about YOU, Brandon Long, Google

Incarnate... Spam foldering and other flavors of mail limbo may well be

the only feasible choice at Google/MS scale but most mail operators are

nowhere near that scale and should not fall into the trap of mimicking

service patterns that are ultimately rooted in scaling problems.



[...]

> And unfortunately, enterprises often rely on some of these self same

> tools.  Telling them

> they can't do something like send/receive attachments is a very quick

> way

> for them

> to choose another provider.  And these are the paying users.



You might be surprised...



But that's a digression. I did not say attachments should be absolutely

prohibited on any mail system, and I don't believe they can or should

be. I said that most mail providers can and should avoid some of the

most demanding filtering tasks by being willing to break some edge

cases, offer workarounds, and use the teachable moments that breakage

offers.



Note that Google & MS already have such workarounds in operation. Your

smartest paying customers who care about governance are already using

them in preference to tossing around files in email. I am just glad

(because I still need to earn a living...) that Google & MS have not

recognized that services which people eagerly pay for that have great

economies of scale can be used as leverage to raise the quality of a

service that everyone has mostly conceded to always kinda suck (but at

least it's cheap...)



[...]

>> The problem is the business model to which a freemail operation must

>> conform. The freemail adaptations to cost constraints and scale have

>> metastasized via user expectations and cargo-cult system design, but

>> they aren't necessarily the best choices elsewhere.

>>

>

> You speak of freemail as if GSuite and O365 aren't also the largest

> paid

> mail services in the world, with products that are extremely similar

> to

> their consumer free services.



I am acutely aware of that, it is central to my argument. For many years

I have worked for businesses that could loosely be called competitors to

GSuite and O365. I know from doing it that limbo-free email can be done

well enough (minimal bad mail being delivered or good mail being

rejected) that paying users will come to prefer it over freemail-like

service. That service 

Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Luis E. Muñoz via mailop]

On 26 Apr 2019, at 23:16, Bill Cole wrote:

Spam foldering and other flavors of mail limbo may well be the only 
feasible choice at Google/MS scale but most mail operators are nowhere 
near that scale and should not fall into the trap of mimicking service 
patterns that are ultimately rooted in scaling problems.


This. Just this year I've participated in a few architecture meetings 
with prospective mail architects that were blindly trying to mimic what 
the big ones were doing, quite blindly. In addition to what's being 
discussed here, the MS model of tempfailing a second receiver when 
mailboxes are at different POPs was being touted as a best practice.


Best regards

-lem

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Bill Cole]

On 23 Apr 2019, at 1:17, Brandon Long via mailop wrote:


On Sat, Apr 20, 2019 at 12:47 PM Bill Cole <
mailop-20160...@billmail.scconsult.com> wrote:


[...]


One fact that is very helpful to understand and yet broadly ignored 
when
people look at the feasibility of processing-intensive filtering is 
the

mandate of https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.3.2.6.



Holding a connection open for a long time before admitting you 
received the

message
has its own issues, of course.  We've also found that we often have 
way

more resources
to receive messages than the senders do to send them, I doubt very 
many

mail senders would
react well if we started taking minutes to receive every message.


Sure, but there's a lot of room below "minutes to receive every message" 
to interrogate complex and suspect messages carefully without troubling 
most senders.  The overwhelming majority of non-bulk legitimate email 
can be cleared very fast, no matter how intensively you examine it, 
because it simply isn't that complex.


If you are not taking minutes to filter every message asynchronously 
(after which you can only reasonably deliver what you think is spam into 
a spam folder) then doing as good a job synchronously and rejecting mail 
deemed to be spam wouldn't mean taking minutes for every message. 
However, if you have useful filtering tactics that literally take a 
minute for some messages, that shouldn't be considered lethal no matter 
how much it makes a few senders whine.


And I should note that I'm not trying to be prescriptive for behemoth 
freemail/freemail+ providers. I have a hard time avoiding the use of the 
generic 2nd person so this is not about YOU, Brandon Long, Google 
Incarnate... Spam foldering and other flavors of mail limbo may well be 
the only feasible choice at Google/MS scale but most mail operators are 
nowhere near that scale and should not fall into the trap of mimicking 
service patterns that are ultimately rooted in scaling problems.


[...]

And unfortunately, enterprises often rely on some of these self same
tools.  Telling them
they can't do something like send/receive attachments is a very quick 
way

for them
to choose another provider.  And these are the paying users.


You might be surprised...

But that's a digression. I did not say attachments should be absolutely 
prohibited on any mail system, and I don't believe they can or should 
be. I said that most mail providers can and should avoid some of the 
most demanding filtering tasks by being willing to break some edge 
cases, offer workarounds, and use the teachable moments that breakage 
offers.


Note that Google & MS already have such workarounds in operation. Your 
smartest paying customers who care about governance are already using 
them in preference to tossing around files in email. I am just glad 
(because I still need to earn a living...) that Google & MS have not 
recognized that services which people eagerly pay for that have great 
economies of scale can be used as leverage to raise the quality of a 
service that everyone has mostly conceded to always kinda suck (but at 
least it's cheap...)


[...]

The problem is the business model to which a freemail operation must
conform. The freemail adaptations to cost constraints and scale have
metastasized via user expectations and cargo-cult system design, but
they aren't necessarily the best choices elsewhere.



You speak of freemail as if GSuite and O365 aren't also the largest 
paid
mail services in the world, with products that are extremely similar 
to

their consumer free services.


I am acutely aware of that, it is central to my argument. For many years 
I have worked for businesses that could loosely be called competitors to 
GSuite and O365. I know from doing it that limbo-free email can be done 
well enough (minimal bad mail being delivered or good mail being 
rejected) that paying users will come to prefer it over freemail-like 
service. That service model lacks significant economies of scale (and 
arguably has net diseconomies of scale,) but by the most objective 
metrics of value it is a better service model than that of the 
behemoths.



--
Bill Cole
b...@scconsult.com or billc...@apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Available For Hire: https://linkedin.com/in/billcole

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Michael Wise via mailop]

There are many thresholds.

As for your last paragraph … um, been watching the news lately?

ICYMI…



  
https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-email-hack-outlook-hotmail-customer-support/

Aloha,
Michael.
--
Michael J Wise
Microsoft Corporation| Spam Analysis
"Your Spam Specimen Has Been Processed."
Got the Junk Mail Reporting 
Tool<http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=18275> ?



-Original Message-
From: mailop  On Behalf Of Paul Smith
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2019 1:40 AM
To: mailop@mailop.org
Subject: Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders



On 24/04/2019 02:22, John Levine wrote:

>

> But the vast majority of people who would use a system like that would

> be spammers to try to get their unwanted mail delivered.  That's never

> going to happen.



The thing is that Microsoft have the SDNS system already.



But for small senders it's of limited use.



The '100 messages a day' threshold they have means that small senders get zero 
information from it. We have multiple smarthosts which send several thousand 
messages a day, but because they send <100 to Microsoft email addresses, 
they're not listed.



I've had cases where their 'View IP Status' shows no problems, but some of our 
IP addresses are blocked. Even the next day it shows no problems, so if it's 
meant to show the previous day's status, it's still not showing it.



Occasionally we have had IP addresses shown up as blocked on 'View IP Status', 
but it shows no reason or information to help get it unblocked

- so it tells us nothing we didn't already know.



If something showed a basic reason for blocking - "too much reported spam", "IP 
reputation" etc, then it would at least give a bit of help.



We've had IP addresses show as 'green' on their 'View Data' list for days, and 
then suddenly be blocked, and we have no idea why (they weren't sending spam - 
we log all the messages sent) and no useful way to get them unblocked.



> Outlook has no idea who you are, and they have no way to tell you from

> any other mailer whose mail they're not delivering.



When you contact Microsoft about an IP address, THEY should be able to see what 
some recent messages from that IP address were, and why it's been blocked, to 
be able to guess if you're a probable spammer or a legitimate sender who's been 
caught out, and then be helpful or not based on that.







--





Paul Smith Computer Services

Tel: 01484 855800

Vat No: GB 685 6987 53



Sign up for news & updates at 
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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Laura Atkins]

Places like google are really good at separating out individual mail streams. 
The folks who use ESPs but still send a few tens of thousands a month are 
struggling in some cases. And they’re not able to send enough volume to really 
move the dial on the ML filters. 

It’s not just webmail providers who are having issues with the current 
situation. 

Laura

Sent from my iPhone

> On Apr 24, 2019, at 1:29 PM, Mike Hammett  wrote:
> 
> I think a lot of the thought is that "everyone" uses Comcast, Google, 
> Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. for the client side and the other side of the coin is 
> Mailgun, SendGrid, Mandrill, SES, etc. The concept of there being a server 
> with a few hundred users sending a few hundred messages a day in aggregate 
> seems lost.
> 
> 
> 
> -
> Mike Hammett
> Intelligent Computing Solutions
> 
> Midwest Internet Exchange
> 
> The Brothers WISP
> 
> From: "Laura Atkins" 
> To: "Mike Hammett" 
> Cc: mailop@mailop.org
> Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2019 7:00:16 AM
> Subject: Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders
> 
> You’re absolutely right, there is a massive challenge for small senders these 
> days. I even blogged about it a couple weeks ago 
> (https://wordtothewise.com/2019/04/email-filters-and-small-sends/)
> 
> I don’t think it’s permanent, I think the filters will adapt, eventually. I 
> think discussions in places like this (and elsewhere) pointing out the 
> filters seem to work better on high volumes than low volumes are a part of 
> that change. Individual recipients pushing back are crucial. Tell your 
> recipients and your own systems when they get it wrong. 
> 
> laura 
> On 24 Apr 2019, at 12:38, Mike Hammett  wrote:
> 
> Most of the big mailers have those problems with low-volume senders. I doubt 
> it'll ever be fixed.
> 
> 
> 
> -
> Mike Hammett
> Intelligent Computing Solutions
> 
> Midwest Internet Exchange
> 
> The Brothers WISP
> 
> From: "Paul Smith" 
> To: mailop@mailop.org
> Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2019 3:40:29 AM
> Subject: Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders
> 
> On 24/04/2019 02:22, John Levine wrote:
> >
> > But the vast majority of people who would use a system like that would
> > be spammers to try to get their unwanted mail delivered.  That's never
> > going to happen.
> 
> The thing is that Microsoft have the SDNS system already.
> 
> But for small senders it's of limited use.
> 
> The '100 messages a day' threshold they have means that small senders 
> get zero information from it. We have multiple smarthosts which send 
> several thousand messages a day, but because they send <100 to Microsoft 
> email addresses, they're not listed.
> 
> I've had cases where their 'View IP Status' shows no problems, but some 
> of our IP addresses are blocked. Even the next day it shows no problems, 
> so if it's meant to show the previous day's status, it's still not 
> showing it.
> 
> Occasionally we have had IP addresses shown up as blocked on 'View IP 
> Status', but it shows no reason or information to help get it unblocked 
> - so it tells us nothing we didn't already know.
> 
> If something showed a basic reason for blocking - "too much reported 
> spam", "IP reputation" etc, then it would at least give a bit of help.
> 
> We've had IP addresses show as 'green' on their 'View Data' list for 
> days, and then suddenly be blocked, and we have no idea why (they 
> weren't sending spam - we log all the messages sent) and no useful way 
> to get them unblocked.
> 
> > Outlook has no idea who you are, and they have no way to tell you from
> > any other mailer whose mail they're not delivering.
> 
> When you contact Microsoft about an IP address, THEY should be able to 
> see what some recent messages from that IP address were, and why it's 
> been blocked, to be able to guess if you're a probable spammer or a 
> legitimate sender who's been caught out, and then be helpful or not 
> based on that.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> 
> Paul Smith Computer Services
> Tel: 01484 855800
> Vat No: GB 685 6987 53
> 
> Sign up for news & updates at http://www.pscs.co.uk/go/subscribe
> 
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> 
> -- 
> Having an Email Crisis?  We can help! 800 823-9674 
> 
> Laura Atkins
> Word to the Wise
> la...@wordtothewise.com
> (650) 437-0741
> 
> Email Delivery Blog: https://wordtothewise.com/blog   
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Brielle Bruns]

Ahhh its... amusing, watching this thread go on, having run a DNSbl for 
a long time.


*leans back in a rocking chair on her back porch*

Pepperidge Farm 'members a time where DNSbl maintainers were crucified 
for not being 'open enough' about why IPs were listed.  Or not being 
fast enough at responding to requests to remove.  Or the many death threats.



In all honesty, though, why isn't everyone threatening to burn down the 
CEOs house, kill them and their families, etc for 'overly aggressive 
filtering'?  I mean, that was all the rage back in the early 2000s?


Suddenly its perfectly okay for the big companies to do the exact same 
shit and noone bats an eyelash at it?


*goes back to eating her delicious Milano cookies*



On 4/24/2019 4:43 AM, Laura Atkins wrote:


On 24 Apr 2019, at 11:21, Paul Smith > wrote:


On 24/04/2019 10:51, Laura Atkins wrote:



You cut the portion of the previous post I was specifically 
responding to. Specifically this sentence:


“[MS employees should] be able to guess if you're a probable spammer 
or a legitimate sender who's been caught out, and then be helpful or 
not based on that.”


I was pointing out that it’s not that easy . And, given they're 
guessing, perhaps they guessed wrong.


I wasn't suggesting that they unblock an IP address based on a 
'guess', but that if the recent mail from that IP address looks legit, 
they could spend a bit more time on it, and maybe give the sending 
admin a bit more advice - eg 'your SPF records are wrong' or 'the IP 
address has a bad reputation, this is a link to how to resolve that' 
or something rather than their current useless 'not eligible for 
mitigation, now go away, and don't reply to this message' response.


Ah. You’re new here. According to reports by MS employees the use of 
boilerplates is mandated by legal and nothing can be sent that is not 
pre-approved by the legal department.


laura

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(650) 437-0741

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Vittorio Bertola via mailop]

> Il 24 aprile 2019 alle 14.29 Mike Hammett  ha scritto:
> 
> I think a lot of the thought is that "everyone" uses Comcast, Google, 
> Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. for the client side and the other side of the coin is 
> Mailgun, SendGrid, Mandrill, SES, etc. The concept of there being a server 
> with a few hundred users sending a few hundred messages a day in aggregate 
> seems lost.
> 
By the way, this (or, more generally, the centralization trend through which 
small operators and self-hosted servers are increasingly kicked out of several 
major Internet services because everything only works well for big volumes) is 
increasingly seen as a problem both by regulators (in Europe, at least) and by 
many in the Internet's technical leadership. I'll take the opportunity to 
mention this workshop by the Internet Architecture Board:

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf-announce/_bfpW-KxO6twNMsTk_T8PSM537g

which has an open call for papers, and which explicitly mentions email 
centralization due to antispam filters as the #1 example of the problem. 
Contributions are welcome.

Regards,

--

Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
vittorio.bert...@open-xchange.com mailto:vittorio.bert...@open-xchange.com 
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy
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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Michael Rathbun]

On Wed, 24 Apr 2019 11:43:56 +0100, Laura Atkins 
wrote:

>Ah. You’re new here. According to reports by MS employees the use of 
>boilerplates is mandated by legal and nothing can be sent that is not 
>pre-approved by the legal department. 

Occasionally real information may leak through.  When I was doing Office 365
sender-requested IP remediation (back when you had to email the request, and
could eventually get escalated to human handling, unless you couldn't), I
found myself responding to one of the more resolute of the many tin.it users
who saw the rejection messages and wrote in to have the server delisted.

I remarked that I could only follow up on his escalation request if he could
show me evidence that he was in a position to put an immediate stop to the
many thousands of spam messages we saw from tin.it every day.  Until that
person contacted us and the spam stopped, a delisting would last only minutes
or hours before being reinstated.

I was assigned the task of designing a complete sender remediation portal for
Office 365, which I did -- flow charts, procedure documents, web page content,
policy framework, human resources model, the lot.  It was urgent.  Six and a
half years ago.

It was never built.  What's now in place is a wan stopgap.

mdr
-- 
   Those who can make you believe absurdities 
   can make you commit atrocities.
-- Voltaire


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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Mike Hammett]

I think a lot of the thought is that "everyone" uses Comcast, Google, 
Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. for the client side and the other side of the coin is 
Mailgun, SendGrid, Mandrill, SES, etc. The concept of there being a server with 
a few hundred users sending a few hundred messages a day in aggregate seems 
lost. 




- 
Mike Hammett 
Intelligent Computing Solutions 

Midwest Internet Exchange 

The Brothers WISP 

- Original Message -

From: "Laura Atkins"  
To: "Mike Hammett"  
Cc: mailop@mailop.org 
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2019 7:00:16 AM 
Subject: Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders 


You’re absolutely right, there is a massive challenge for small senders these 
days. I even blogged about it a couple weeks ago ( 
https://wordtothewise.com/2019/04/email-filters-and-small-sends/ ) 


I don’t think it’s permanent, I think the filters will adapt, eventually. I 
think discussions in places like this (and elsewhere) pointing out the filters 
seem to work better on high volumes than low volumes are a part of that change. 
Individual recipients pushing back are crucial. Tell your recipients and your 
own systems when they get it wrong. 


laura 



On 24 Apr 2019, at 12:38, Mike Hammett < mail...@ics-il.net > wrote: 


Most of the big mailers have those problems with low-volume senders. I doubt 
it'll ever be fixed. 




- 
Mike Hammett 
Intelligent Computing Solutions 

Midwest Internet Exchange 

The Brothers WISP 

- Original Message -

From: "Paul Smith" < p...@pscs.co.uk > 
To: mailop@mailop.org 
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2019 3:40:29 AM 
Subject: Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders 

On 24/04/2019 02:22, John Levine wrote: 
> 
> But the vast majority of people who would use a system like that would 
> be spammers to try to get their unwanted mail delivered. That's never 
> going to happen. 

The thing is that Microsoft have the SDNS system already. 

But for small senders it's of limited use. 

The '100 messages a day' threshold they have means that small senders 
get zero information from it. We have multiple smarthosts which send 
several thousand messages a day, but because they send <100 to Microsoft 
email addresses, they're not listed. 

I've had cases where their 'View IP Status' shows no problems, but some 
of our IP addresses are blocked. Even the next day it shows no problems, 
so if it's meant to show the previous day's status, it's still not 
showing it. 

Occasionally we have had IP addresses shown up as blocked on 'View IP 
Status', but it shows no reason or information to help get it unblocked 
- so it tells us nothing we didn't already know. 

If something showed a basic reason for blocking - "too much reported 
spam", "IP reputation" etc, then it would at least give a bit of help. 

We've had IP addresses show as 'green' on their 'View Data' list for 
days, and then suddenly be blocked, and we have no idea why (they 
weren't sending spam - we log all the messages sent) and no useful way 
to get them unblocked. 

> Outlook has no idea who you are, and they have no way to tell you from 
> any other mailer whose mail they're not delivering. 

When you contact Microsoft about an IP address, THEY should be able to 
see what some recent messages from that IP address were, and why it's 
been blocked, to be able to guess if you're a probable spammer or a 
legitimate sender who's been caught out, and then be helpful or not 
based on that. 



-- 


Paul Smith Computer Services 
Tel: 01484 855800 
Vat No: GB 685 6987 53 

Sign up for news & updates at http://www.pscs.co.uk/go/subscribe 

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(650) 437-0741 


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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Laura Atkins]

You’re absolutely right, there is a massive challenge for small senders these 
days. I even blogged about it a couple weeks ago 
(https://wordtothewise.com/2019/04/email-filters-and-small-sends/)

I don’t think it’s permanent, I think the filters will adapt, eventually. I 
think discussions in places like this (and elsewhere) pointing out the filters 
seem to work better on high volumes than low volumes are a part of that change. 
Individual recipients pushing back are crucial. Tell your recipients and your 
own systems when they get it wrong. 

laura 
> On 24 Apr 2019, at 12:38, Mike Hammett  wrote:
> 
> Most of the big mailers have those problems with low-volume senders. I doubt 
> it'll ever be fixed.
> 
> 
> 
> -
> Mike Hammett
> Intelligent Computing Solutions <http://www.ics-il.com/>
>  <https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL> 
> <https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb> 
> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions> 
> <https://twitter.com/ICSIL>
> Midwest Internet Exchange <http://www.midwest-ix.com/>
>  <https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix> 
> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange> 
> <https://twitter.com/mdwestix>
> The Brothers WISP <http://www.thebrotherswisp.com/>
>  <https://www.facebook.com/thebrotherswisp> 
> <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSdfxQv7SpoRQYNyLwntZg>
> From: "Paul Smith" mailto:p...@pscs.co.uk>>
> To: mailop@mailop.org <mailto:mailop@mailop.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2019 3:40:29 AM
> Subject: Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders
> 
> On 24/04/2019 02:22, John Levine wrote:
> >
> > But the vast majority of people who would use a system like that would
> > be spammers to try to get their unwanted mail delivered.  That's never
> > going to happen.
> 
> The thing is that Microsoft have the SDNS system already.
> 
> But for small senders it's of limited use.
> 
> The '100 messages a day' threshold they have means that small senders 
> get zero information from it. We have multiple smarthosts which send 
> several thousand messages a day, but because they send <100 to Microsoft 
> email addresses, they're not listed.
> 
> I've had cases where their 'View IP Status' shows no problems, but some 
> of our IP addresses are blocked. Even the next day it shows no problems, 
> so if it's meant to show the previous day's status, it's still not 
> showing it.
> 
> Occasionally we have had IP addresses shown up as blocked on 'View IP 
> Status', but it shows no reason or information to help get it unblocked 
> - so it tells us nothing we didn't already know.
> 
> If something showed a basic reason for blocking - "too much reported 
> spam", "IP reputation" etc, then it would at least give a bit of help.
> 
> We've had IP addresses show as 'green' on their 'View Data' list for 
> days, and then suddenly be blocked, and we have no idea why (they 
> weren't sending spam - we log all the messages sent) and no useful way 
> to get them unblocked.
> 
> > Outlook has no idea who you are, and they have no way to tell you from
> > any other mailer whose mail they're not delivering.
> 
> When you contact Microsoft about an IP address, THEY should be able to 
> see what some recent messages from that IP address were, and why it's 
> been blocked, to be able to guess if you're a probable spammer or a 
> legitimate sender who's been caught out, and then be helpful or not 
> based on that.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> 
> Paul Smith Computer Services
> Tel: 01484 855800
> Vat No: GB 685 6987 53
> 
> Sign up for news & updates at http://www.pscs.co.uk/go/subscribe 
> <http://www.pscs.co.uk/go/subscribe>
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Word to the Wise
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(650) 437-0741  

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Mike Hammett]

Most of the big mailers have those problems with low-volume senders. I doubt 
it'll ever be fixed. 




- 
Mike Hammett 
Intelligent Computing Solutions 

Midwest Internet Exchange 

The Brothers WISP 

- Original Message -

From: "Paul Smith"  
To: mailop@mailop.org 
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2019 3:40:29 AM 
Subject: Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders 

On 24/04/2019 02:22, John Levine wrote: 
> 
> But the vast majority of people who would use a system like that would 
> be spammers to try to get their unwanted mail delivered. That's never 
> going to happen. 

The thing is that Microsoft have the SDNS system already. 

But for small senders it's of limited use. 

The '100 messages a day' threshold they have means that small senders 
get zero information from it. We have multiple smarthosts which send 
several thousand messages a day, but because they send <100 to Microsoft 
email addresses, they're not listed. 

I've had cases where their 'View IP Status' shows no problems, but some 
of our IP addresses are blocked. Even the next day it shows no problems, 
so if it's meant to show the previous day's status, it's still not 
showing it. 

Occasionally we have had IP addresses shown up as blocked on 'View IP 
Status', but it shows no reason or information to help get it unblocked 
- so it tells us nothing we didn't already know. 

If something showed a basic reason for blocking - "too much reported 
spam", "IP reputation" etc, then it would at least give a bit of help. 

We've had IP addresses show as 'green' on their 'View Data' list for 
days, and then suddenly be blocked, and we have no idea why (they 
weren't sending spam - we log all the messages sent) and no useful way 
to get them unblocked. 

> Outlook has no idea who you are, and they have no way to tell you from 
> any other mailer whose mail they're not delivering. 

When you contact Microsoft about an IP address, THEY should be able to 
see what some recent messages from that IP address were, and why it's 
been blocked, to be able to guess if you're a probable spammer or a 
legitimate sender who's been caught out, and then be helpful or not 
based on that. 



-- 


Paul Smith Computer Services 
Tel: 01484 855800 
Vat No: GB 685 6987 53 

Sign up for news & updates at http://www.pscs.co.uk/go/subscribe 

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Laura Atkins]

> On 24 Apr 2019, at 11:21, Paul Smith  wrote:
> 
> On 24/04/2019 10:51, Laura Atkins wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> You cut the portion of the previous post I was specifically responding to. 
>> Specifically this sentence: 
>> 
>> “[MS employees should] be able to guess if you're a probable spammer or a 
>> legitimate sender who's been caught out, and then be helpful or not based on 
>> that.” 
>> 
>> I was pointing out that it’s not that easy . And, given they're guessing, 
>> perhaps they guessed wrong. 
> I wasn't suggesting that they unblock an IP address based on a 'guess', but 
> that if the recent mail from that IP address looks legit, they could spend a 
> bit more time on it, and maybe give the sending admin a bit more advice - eg 
> 'your SPF records are wrong' or 'the IP address has a bad reputation, this is 
> a link to how to resolve that' or something rather than their current useless 
> 'not   eligible for mitigation, now go away, and don't reply to this 
> message' response.
> 
Ah. You’re new here. According to reports by MS employees the use of 
boilerplates is mandated by legal and nothing can be sent that is not 
pre-approved by the legal department. 

laura

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Paul Smith]

On 24/04/2019 10:51, Laura Atkins wrote:



You cut the portion of the previous post I was specifically responding 
to. Specifically this sentence:


“[MS employees should] be able to guess if you're a probable spammer 
or a legitimate sender who's been caught out, and then be helpful or 
not based on that.”


I was pointing out that it’s not that easy . And, given they're 
guessing, perhaps they guessed wrong.


I wasn't suggesting that they unblock an IP address based on a 'guess', 
but that if the recent mail from that IP address looks legit, they could 
spend a bit more time on it, and maybe give the sending admin a bit more 
advice - eg 'your SPF records are wrong' or 'the IP address has a bad 
reputation, this is a link to how to resolve that' or something rather 
than their current useless 'not eligible for mitigation, now go away, 
and don't reply to this message' response.


If they DO unblock an IP address, then they're quick enough to block it 
again if necessary (which is the right thing to do).




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Paul Smith Computer Services
Tel: 01484 855800
Vat No: GB 685 6987 53

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Laura Atkins]

> On 24 Apr 2019, at 10:20, Brian Kantor  wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 09:59:20AM +0100, Laura Atkins wrote:
>> 
>> Have you ever handled delivery support for an ISP? 
>> 
>> If you haven’t I respectfully suggest that you might want to talk to a few 
>> of the folks who do the work about their actual working environment before 
>> making such sweeping statements about how they should act. Whether you like 
>> it or not, MS is well ahead of most other ISPs in terms of the free support 
>> they offer to non-customers. 
>> 
>> I mean, how much time and effort does your company spend building tools, 
>> processes and even entire websites for use by non-customers? 
>> 
>> laura 
> 
> I would, in turn, suggest that your view might be a tiny bit narrower
> than perhaps is appropriate.  In today's environment, EVERYONE is
> a Microsoft customer, even if they don't directly pay Microsoft for
> a particular good or service.
> 
> If you can afford it, offering good service to fellow professionals
> whose pennies don't clink directly into your coffer yields some
> rewards for your firm.
> 
> Noblesse oblige?  No, not so much as "enlightened self-interest".
> And if anyone can, certainly Microsoft can afford it.

You cut the portion of the previous post I was specifically responding to. 
Specifically this sentence: 

“[MS employees should] be able to guess if you're a probable spammer or a 
legitimate sender who's been caught out, and then be helpful or not based on 
that.” 

I was pointing out that it’s not that easy . And, given they're guessing, 
perhaps they guessed wrong. 

My point was that while it seems easy to identify the “spam” from the “not 
spam” if you have a limited view of mail, there are a lot of grotty corners 
where the person handling the ticket is stuck making judgement calls. The 
volume is high and scaling is hard. Maintaining a functional deliverability 
desk isn’t as easy as looking at data and “guessing right". Folks who’ve not 
been in the trenches dealing with compliance don’t always understand how hard 
it is. If you think a little data will help you sort out the “good guys” from 
the “bad guys” then perhaps you don’t realize how complicated it is. I’ve been 
doing it for 20 years now, have established multiple compliance desks, and 
worked closely with others who have done son. I am still regularly confronted 
with cases where I can’t identify if the sender is just a little misguided or 
someone who is actively doing bad things. 

Do I guess? I have to. Do I get it wrong? Sometimes, yes. I recently got snowed 
by someone actively claiming to be a stand up business person who just wanted 
to create the best mail sending platform only to discover significant spammy 
behavior he was actively concealing from me. Will Microsoft guess wrong? 
Absolutely. I’m pretty sure the folks handling incoming tickets don’t have the 
same 20 years of experience I do. Expecting anyone to always get it right is 
folly. 

laura 

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Brian Kantor]

On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 09:59:20AM +0100, Laura Atkins wrote:
> 
> Have you ever handled delivery support for an ISP? 
> 
> If you haven’t I respectfully suggest that you might want to talk to a few of 
> the folks who do the work about their actual working environment before 
> making such sweeping statements about how they should act. Whether you like 
> it or not, MS is well ahead of most other ISPs in terms of the free support 
> they offer to non-customers. 
> 
> I mean, how much time and effort does your company spend building tools, 
> processes and even entire websites for use by non-customers? 
> 
> laura 

I would, in turn, suggest that your view might be a tiny bit narrower
than perhaps is appropriate.  In today's environment, EVERYONE is
a Microsoft customer, even if they don't directly pay Microsoft for
a particular good or service.

If you can afford it, offering good service to fellow professionals
whose pennies don't clink directly into your coffer yields some
rewards for your firm.

Noblesse oblige?  No, not so much as "enlightened self-interest".
And if anyone can, certainly Microsoft can afford it.

Kind regards,
- Brian


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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Laura Atkins]

> On 24 Apr 2019, at 09:40, Paul Smith  wrote:
> 
>> Outlook has no idea who you are, and they have no way to tell you from
>> any other mailer whose mail they're not delivering.
> 
> When you contact Microsoft about an IP address, THEY should be able to see 
> what some recent messages from that IP address were, and why it's been 
> blocked, to be able to guess if you're a probable spammer or a legitimate 
> sender who's been caught out, and then be helpful or not based on that.

Have you ever handled delivery support for an ISP? 

If you haven’t I respectfully suggest that you might want to talk to a few of 
the folks who do the work about their actual working environment before making 
such sweeping statements about how they should act. Whether you like it or not, 
MS is well ahead of most other ISPs in terms of the free support they offer to 
non-customers. 

I mean, how much time and effort does your company spend building tools, 
processes and even entire websites for use by non-customers? 

laura 

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Paul Smith]

On 24/04/2019 02:22, John Levine wrote:


But the vast majority of people who would use a system like that would
be spammers to try to get their unwanted mail delivered.  That's never
going to happen.


The thing is that Microsoft have the SDNS system already.

But for small senders it's of limited use.

The '100 messages a day' threshold they have means that small senders 
get zero information from it. We have multiple smarthosts which send 
several thousand messages a day, but because they send <100 to Microsoft 
email addresses, they're not listed.


I've had cases where their 'View IP Status' shows no problems, but some 
of our IP addresses are blocked. Even the next day it shows no problems, 
so if it's meant to show the previous day's status, it's still not 
showing it.


Occasionally we have had IP addresses shown up as blocked on 'View IP 
Status', but it shows no reason or information to help get it unblocked 
- so it tells us nothing we didn't already know.


If something showed a basic reason for blocking - "too much reported 
spam", "IP reputation" etc, then it would at least give a bit of help.


We've had IP addresses show as 'green' on their 'View Data' list for 
days, and then suddenly be blocked, and we have no idea why (they 
weren't sending spam - we log all the messages sent) and no useful way 
to get them unblocked.



Outlook has no idea who you are, and they have no way to tell you from
any other mailer whose mail they're not delivering.


When you contact Microsoft about an IP address, THEY should be able to 
see what some recent messages from that IP address were, and why it's 
been blocked, to be able to guess if you're a probable spammer or a 
legitimate sender who's been caught out, and then be helpful or not 
based on that.




--


Paul Smith Computer Services
Tel: 01484 855800
Vat No: GB 685 6987 53

Sign up for news & updates at http://www.pscs.co.uk/go/subscribe

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[John Levine]

In article <058514aa25614fc0923be875ddc8d...@ex1.obs.local> you write:
>It would really help to have for example an interface for mail system admins 
>you can sign-up to, to diagnose
>what triggered this.
>Some program you can subscribe to, filling some agreement or I don't know what.

But the vast majority of people who would use a system like that would
be spammers to try to get their unwanted mail delivered.  That's never
going to happen.

Outlook has no idea who you are, and they have no way to tell you from
any other mailer whose mail they're not delivering.


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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Brandon Long via mailop]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 4:27 AM Laura Atkins  wrote:

>
> On 23 Apr 2019, at 06:26, Brandon Long via mailop 
> wrote:
>
>
> > The second is that it is impractical to ascertain whether a message is
>> > spam or not during delivery time in all cases.  A decade ago, the reason
>> > was because we had to OCR images contained in power point presentation
>> > spam, now there are services where anti-malware services are opening
>> > Word files on clean VMs, or anti-phishing/malware where the service has
>> > to follow each link through a headless web browser with full javascript
>> > running.
>>
>> Why not get the message, give the sender a proper "please come again
>> later", do OCR or whatever resource intensive scanning and allow or
>> block the file based on a hash the next time it comes in?
>>
>
> How long til the message comes through again?  RFC 5321 says to wait
> at least 30 minutes, do you think your enterprise users want to wait at 30
> minutes
> for the message?
>
>
> I’ve recently heard reports from a reliable source that they are seeing
> links followed / clicked (usually all the links in a message) a few hours
> before the mail is actually delivered. What appears to be happening is that
> some corporate filters are rejecting after DATA, but taking a copy of the
> message and doing some deep content inspection. If the content passes, then
> it’s accepted on a subsequent delivery attempt.
>
> Temp failing is a long established way to handle spamfiltering. I don’t
> think Google does much of it at SMTP time. But other places have
> aggressively adopted “temp fail” as one of their spam fighting mechanisms.
>

We temp fail a lot of messages as a throttling method, not as a grey mail
style, but for specific types of messages and sources where we think
there's a good chance it's spam but aren't sure.  Its mostly a volume
control thing, whereas phishing/malware often is spear style, with a very
limited set of targets.

Brandon
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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Bill Cole]

On 23 Apr 2019, at 1:26, Brandon Long via mailop wrote:


and also unfortunately, enough people now think of email
as unreliable,


As they always should and always should have, at least for email 
crossing administrative borders. The major root causes of unreliability 
in email have evolved over time but it has never been wise to assume 
that it never fails to operate as designed.


Looping back to the nominal Subject: the "spam folder" is a contributor 
to unreliability that users can see and understand. It has utility for 
mail system operators (ultimately by reducing support costs) but it is 
not clear that there is net benefit for all participants in email, 
especially if you consider the psycho-social side effects.


--
Bill Cole
b...@scconsult.com or billc...@apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Available For Hire: https://linkedin.com/in/billcole

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Laura Atkins]

> On 23 Apr 2019, at 06:26, Brandon Long via mailop  wrote:

> > The second is that it is impractical to ascertain whether a message is
> > spam or not during delivery time in all cases.  A decade ago, the reason
> > was because we had to OCR images contained in power point presentation
> > spam, now there are services where anti-malware services are opening
> > Word files on clean VMs, or anti-phishing/malware where the service has
> > to follow each link through a headless web browser with full javascript
> > running.
> 
> Why not get the message, give the sender a proper "please come again
> later", do OCR or whatever resource intensive scanning and allow or
> block the file based on a hash the next time it comes in?
> 
> How long til the message comes through again?  RFC 5321 says to wait
> at least 30 minutes, do you think your enterprise users want to wait at 30 
> minutes
> for the message? 

I’ve recently heard reports from a reliable source that they are seeing links 
followed / clicked (usually all the links in a message) a few hours before the 
mail is actually delivered. What appears to be happening is that some corporate 
filters are rejecting after DATA, but taking a copy of the message and doing 
some deep content inspection. If the content passes, then it’s accepted on a 
subsequent delivery attempt. 

Temp failing is a long established way to handle spamfiltering. I don’t think 
Google does much of it at SMTP time. But other places have aggressively adopted 
“temp fail” as one of their spam fighting mechanisms. 

laura

-- 
Having an Email Crisis?  We can help! 800 823-9674 

Laura Atkins
Word to the Wise
la...@wordtothewise.com
(650) 437-0741  

Email Delivery Blog: https://wordtothewise.com/blog 







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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[G. Miliotis]

On 23/4/2019 08:26, Brandon Long via mailop wrote:

and also unfortunately, enough people now think of email
as unreliable,


I wonder why that is.

--GM


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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Laura Atkins]

Fascinating discussion the last few days.

> Yes, as our spam filtering has improved, that does reduce the amount that 
> user's spend in their spam
> folder, and we get less signal.  No one said this was easy. 

My own experience suggests that there’s possibly a sweet spot in terms of 
getting good signal. But that both extremes lead to poor signal. 

Ineffective filters lead to too much spam in the user’s inbox and you get a 
situation that many are complaining about here - the users report things that 
are clearly not spam as spam (1:1 non commercial mail, for instance). I go 
through my mail in the morning junking the 20 - 50 spams that came through 
overnight and sometimes I miss and hit the wrong thing. In my case there’s no 
sender consequence as I don’t run a FBL. 

Too effective filters lead to too little legitimate mail in the users spam 
folder and no one ever digs in and looks until there’s a missing mail. 

Spam is a goldilocks problem, clearly. 

laura 

-- 
Having an Email Crisis?  We can help! 800 823-9674 

Laura Atkins
Word to the Wise
la...@wordtothewise.com
(650) 437-0741  

Email Delivery Blog: https://wordtothewise.com/blog 







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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Sébastien Riccio]

Sébastien RICCIO
SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR
P  +41 840 888 888
F  +41 840 888 000
M sric...@swisscenter.com

> Nobody ever said it was fair.  But I would suggest that if you want to run a 
> mail system, you'll have to figure out how to deal with all of the other msil 
> > systems who you hope will accept the mail you send them.

Yes, that's what we're doing or at least what we try to do. But when messages 
don't get through and we contact outlook about it, the answer is only the same, 
to refer to their best practices/guidelines, which we already apply. There is 
now real answer as why the mail has been considered junk.

It would really help to have for example an interface for mail system admins 
you can sign-up to, to diagnose what triggered this.
Some program you can subscribe to, filling some agreement or I don't know what.

In the current state it's impossible to understand why legit mails are junked 
or not, it looks random.
 
SR

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Brandon Long via mailop]

On Sat, Apr 20, 2019 at 4:03 AM Thomas Walter  wrote:

> Hey Brandon,
>
> On 19.04.19 23:31, Brandon Long via mailop wrote:
> > For one, when you're only solution is to reject, the only way to get a
> > signal that you're rejecting the mail wrong is manual review, which is
> > impractical at best, and difficult to correlate with the opinion of the
> > actual receiver.  The spam/not spam signal from users is the best
> > information you have on what your users want, even if the bad actors try
> > to game the signal and a lot of user's use it as a hammer instead of the
> > softer touch.
>
> you are forgetting that users are stupid. As I've mentioned before I
> have to deal with abuse messages daily because users press "Junk"
> instead of "Delete" buttons. They don't understand the difference
> between "Junk" and "Trash" or they sort a regular mail response to junk
> because they don't like the answer they get.
>

You're welcome to think your users are stupid.  Its not a great way to keep
users.

They do what they do for very good reasons, and some of those reasons may
not
correspond to how you want them to act.  There's various things you can do
to
try and change them, or change the product.  Complaining is great for
commiserating,
but doesn't help your product.

> The second is that it is impractical to ascertain whether a message is
> > spam or not during delivery time in all cases.  A decade ago, the reason
> > was because we had to OCR images contained in power point presentation
> > spam, now there are services where anti-malware services are opening
> > Word files on clean VMs, or anti-phishing/malware where the service has
> > to follow each link through a headless web browser with full javascript
> > running.
>
> Why not get the message, give the sender a proper "please come again
> later", do OCR or whatever resource intensive scanning and allow or
> block the file based on a hash the next time it comes in?
>

How long til the message comes through again?  RFC 5321 says to wait
at least 30 minutes, do you think your enterprise users want to wait at 30
minutes
for the message?

Worst thing I have seen were mails that got moved to spam out of my
> inbox where I had seen them before - and suddenly they were just gone.
>

Yes, that's a pretty terrible user experience, not one you should be seeing
at Gmail at least.

> Even without these things, often we aren't sure that something's spam,
> > so we rely on the folks always checking their email and clicking spam to
> > inform us on messages we've already received but haven't been looked at
> yet.
> >
> > Those also mean, there's no saying its rejected even if we put the
> > message in the spam folder.
>
> You guys probably don't have to deal with the "but where is my mail" -
> "did you check the spam folder" support tickets? If a mail gets properly
> rejected, the sender - who is the one that wants his mail to be
> delivered into the recipients inbox - knows something is wrong and can
> try again, contact the recipient in a different way or ask his
> postmaster to look into it (who has nice logs of the event).
>

GSuite admins also have nice logs of what happens.  And "where is my email"
is one of our number one issues, I had a lot of intensive ideas on trying to
work on that, but it turns out the answers to that question are lot wider
than
you might think... and also unfortunately, enough people now think of email
as unreliable, and so people claim to not receive messages they actually did
receive, which just adds even more fun to the whole thing.

Brandon
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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Brandon Long via mailop]

On Sat, Apr 20, 2019 at 12:47 PM Bill Cole <
mailop-20160...@billmail.scconsult.com> wrote:

> On 19 Apr 2019, at 17:31, Brandon Long via mailop wrote:
>
> > I just don't think this is practical.
>
> It could be, were it not for the tragic conceptual cancer of "email is
> free like beer."
>
> > For one, when you're only solution is to reject, the only way to get a
> > signal that you're rejecting the mail wrong is manual review, which is
> > impractical at best, and difficult to correlate with the opinion of
> > the
> > actual receiver.
>
> "Impractical" in this case is a result of mandating economies of scale.
>
> > The spam/not spam signal from users is the best
> > information you have on what your users want, even if the bad actors
> > try to
> > game the signal and a lot of user's use it as a hammer instead of the
> > softer touch.
>
> Yes, vetting and training users is judgment-intensive and
> wisdom-intensive work. Charging users for the service they get helps
> with the vetting of some sorts of bad behavior but convincing
> well-meaning people to not be childish is harder.
>
> It is a serious challenge to find and/or develop enough of the right
> people to handle that, and it has almost no economy of scale, unlike
> basic technical ops.
>
> > The second is that it is impractical to ascertain whether a message is
> > spam
> > or not during delivery time in all cases.  A decade ago, the reason
> > was
> > because we had to OCR images contained in power point presentation
> > spam,
> > now there are services where anti-malware services are opening Word
> > files
> > on clean VMs, or anti-phishing/malware where the service has to follow
> > each
> > link through a headless web browser with full javascript running.
>
> There are multiple approaches to that, none of them cheap.
>
> One fact that is very helpful to understand and yet broadly ignored when
> people look at the feasibility of processing-intensive filtering is the
> mandate of https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.3.2.6.
>

Holding a connection open for a long time before admitting you received the
message
has its own issues, of course.  We've also found that we often have way
more resources
to receive messages than the senders do to send them, I doubt very many
mail senders would
react well if we started taking minutes to receive every message.

Also, you don't NEED to do that in 2019. Email is a ridiculous medium
> for file sharing, both technically and for security, so you can
> explicitly choose to deprecate it, hamper it, and offer alternatives.
> OCR is hard, but determining that an image is essentially the whole
> message is not. Determining whether JavaScript is malicious is hard,
> rejecting mail with embedded JavaScript is easy.
>

Sorry if I wasn't clear, this was evaluating the web sites that were linked
to from
the message.  The better you get at figuring out if a message is malware,
the more
indirection used.  Banning links in messages seems like a non-starter.

And unfortunately, enterprises often rely on some of these self same
tools.  Telling them
they can't do something like send/receive attachments is a very quick way
for them
to choose another provider.  And these are the paying users.

Sure, these policies will alienate some senders and some recipients, and
> maybe even some customers willing to pay for less restrictive, more
> dangerous, and less useful email service. If a provider wants to satisfy
> all possible users at a cost low enough to service a large fraction of
> them for free, this isn't feasible.
>

What you end up with isn't email, then.  Turning email into store & forward
"talk"
isn't that useful when you're competing with dozens of different walled
garden
messaging services.

The problem is the business model to which a freemail operation must
> conform. The freemail adaptations to cost constraints and scale have
> metastasized via user expectations and cargo-cult system design, but
> they aren't necessarily the best choices elsewhere.
>

You speak of freemail as if GSuite and O365 aren't also the largest paid
mail services in the world, with products that are extremely similar to
their consumer free services.

Brandon
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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Brandon Long via mailop]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2019 at 4:22 PM Jay Hennigan 
wrote:

> On 4/19/19 2:31 PM, Brandon Long via mailop wrote:
> > I just don't think this is practical.
> >
> > For one, when you're only solution is to reject, the only way to get a
> > signal that you're rejecting the mail wrong is manual review, which is
> > impractical at best, and difficult to correlate with the opinion of the
> > actual receiver.  The spam/not spam signal from users is the best
> > information you have on what your users want, even if the bad actors try
> > to game the signal and a lot of user's use it as a hammer instead of the
> > softer touch.
>
> I agree with the utility of spam folders in general. In the case of
> webmail you can also deliver to the inbox with a visual indicator of
> spam before the mail is opened.
>

Why is this limited to webmail?  Anything you can do with webmail you can do
with a thick client.   I don't see many clients that work this way.

> Even without these things, often we aren't sure that something's spam,
> > so we rely on the folks always checking their email and clicking spam to
> > inform us on messages we've already received but haven't been looked at
> yet.
>
> This feedback is only really available for webmail, so you don't need a
> separate spam folder. If unsure, deliver to inbox with a visual
> "Suspected spam" flag on the individual message. Mail not flagged as
> spam should have a clickable "This is spam" or better yet, "Report as
> spam" button. This should be very distinct from the "Delete" action to
> minimize false positives, perhaps even with a confirmation dialog box.
>

There's nothing to prevent client spam/not-spam markings from being synced
to the server and used to train.  Many of the popular clients have
standardized
on one of two imap keywords for that.  Gmail listens to IMAP clients making
spam
decisions.  When iOS makes access to the report junk easier, we see an
increase
in manual spam markings (took us a while to figure out what was going on).

Mail that is flagged as spam can have a "This is not spam" button to
> provide user feedback against false positives.
>
> In other words, you can get the feedback from the recipient as well as
> flag suspected spam to the recipient without the need for a separate
> spam folder. Based on that feedback as well as existing other metrics a
> decision can be made to hard reject similar mail in the future either
> globally or per recipient.
>

This is indeed a mechanism to not have a spam folder.

It also seems to be either a terrible idea, or a its papering over a
terrible anti-spam system.

We've invested a lot of effort already in splitting people's inboxes out
into separate categories
to attempt to reduce the clutter, bring spam back into the inbox is the
opposite of that approach.
With priority inbox, we try to highlight what's important as well... and
spam isn't it.

And that's on top of the fact that user's interacting with spam/phishing is
dangerous.

When last I ran my own personal system, I was leaking a dozen or more spam
messages a day
through to my inbox, and finally decided to throw in the towel because I
just didn't see the point
of interacting with it even that much.

Yes, as our spam filtering has improved, that does reduce the amount that
user's spend in their spam
folder, and we get less signal.  No one said this was easy.

Brandon
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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Michael Rathbun]

On Mon, 22 Apr 2019 19:19:09 -0600, Dave Warren  wrote:

>I strongly disagree here, the freemail providers have a product (your 
>eyeballs) to sell to their customers (the advertisers). Their customers 
>aren't particularly interested in advertising on a service without users.

Indeed.  However you, as a sender rather than a product, function as
potentially a source of content that might entice frequent visits from the
product.  Of course, the chances are about 98:1 that you are someone that the
recipient will want someone to shovel out and hose off the deck.

mdr
-- 
There's a funny thing that happens when you know the correct
answer.  It throws you when you get a different answer that
is not wrong.-- Dr Bowman (Freefall)


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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 4/22/19 2:00 AM, Sébastien Riccio wrote:
> 
> They also come back with the argument that they've sent the same mail from 
> their "free-but-user-is-the-product"  mail account and that it reached his 
> customers inbox without problem.
> So then it is our fault if he loses business, because he uses our paying 
> professional hosting, despite we're following all recommendations/rfc and 
> spend a lot of time on keeping our servers spam free.
> 
> ...
> 
> Am I the only one to see here dominant position abuse that is going to kill 
> small ISP/ESP businesses? 

No, but there's nothing you can do about it. The web is also a
wholly-owned Google subsidiary these days and has the same problem. My
advice: find a hobby that doesn't involve a computer, and leave
web/email to the next generation who haven't realized what a waste of
time it is yet.

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Dave Warren]

On 2019-04-22 08:11, Michael Rathbun wrote:

Neither you nor your customer are customers of the freemail provider.


Agreed.


The provider has close to zero economic incentive to pay attention to your needs
and desires.  



I strongly disagree here, the freemail providers have a product (your 
eyeballs) to sell to their customers (the advertisers). Their customers 
aren't particularly interested in advertising on a service without users.


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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[John Levine]

In article <14fa4dfed24c46f398666a0efddca...@ex1.obs.local> you write:
>> No, it means that Gmail sends vast amounts of mail and most of it is not 
>> spam.  A one message test from a
>system that sends billions of messages a day is hardly statistically 
>significant.
>
>Yes okay. But I still don't get how it can be fair.

Nobody ever said it was fair.  But I would suggest that if you want to
run a mail system, you'll have to figure out how to deal with all of
the other msil systems who you hope will accept the mail you send
them.

R's,
John

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Michael Rathbun]

On Mon, 22 Apr 2019 09:02:19 -0400, Bryan Blackwell 
wrote:

>I'd just like to point out that there are some - perhaps not many, but some - 
>of us who deliver mail where the subscriber most certainly is the customer.  
>My list server at corvair.org was paid for entirely by individual subscribers, 
>and the ongoing maintenance is funded by the club.

Correct, but irrelevant.

Neither you nor your customer are customers of the freemail provider.  The
provider has close to zero economic incentive to pay attention to your needs
and desires.  It's their playing field, their bat and ball, and their rules.
Senders need to find out what they (the providers) want and behave
accordingly.

People who fail to recognize this aspect of the operation tend to walk into
walls a lot.  

mdr
-- 
 "There are no laws here, only agreements."  
-- Masahiko


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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Bryan Blackwell]

On Apr 21, 2019, at 4:21 PM, Michael Rathbun  wrote:
> 
> o  your customers (the advertisers) pay you to have warm bodies look at their
> adverts.  Folks who never log in don't look at diddly.
> 
> o  The vast majority of accounts that have not engaged in the past 180 days
> are abandoned, and represent costs from which no benefit can ever accrue.
> 
> If a tiny number of folks don't want open tracking (or, as in my case, hardly
> ever load images), then they can remember to engage somehow every few months,
> or, optionally, get stuffed if the mail was something they want.  You (the
> provider) don't care -- REMEMBER:  those folks are the product, not the
> customer.

I'd just like to point out that there are some - perhaps not many, but some - 
of us who deliver mail where the subscriber most certainly is the customer.  My 
list server at corvair.org was paid for entirely by individual subscribers, and 
the ongoing maintenance is funded by the club.

--Bryan
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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[G. Miliotis]

On 21/4/2019 22:39, Thomas Walter wrote:

And force people like me to resubscribe every 90 to 180 days, because I
don't allow tracking nonsense in emails?


Lists should send a warning "You have been inactive for 90 days, you 
will be unsubscribed when you reach 180 days" message. I get those quite 
often nowadays.


--GM


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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Sébastien Riccio]

> No, it means that Gmail sends vast amounts of mail and most of it is not 
> spam.  A one message test from a system that sends billions of messages a day 
> is hardly statistically significant.

Yes okay. But I still don't get how it can be fair. Our systems sends quite 
some volume of mails which is 99% not spam.

Our customer buy a domain name, host his website at us and use our mail 
service, to represent, let's say, his lawn mower business.
He spend money for a web designer that builds him a very nice website.

During a week he's presenting his products to a garden exposition and collect 
mail addresses from interested customers that ask him to send them a pricelist. 
He gives also gives out flyers with his website address on it.

So he uses his fresh new mail addresses that we host for him to contact these 
customers. In the same time he receives contact requests from his website 
contact form for informations about a product, and also answer these mails.

After a week or two some of his maybe future customers calls him saying asking 
if he don't want to do business because they are still waiting informations 
from him.
So our customer gets back to us and ask what is going on. So we find out most 
of the missed businesses opportunities are due to mail send to outlook/Hotmail 
mail addresses (that used to also happen with yahoo, but not gmail). We check 
the logs and all mails are accepted by outlook mta's.

We have then to explain that it probably went to spam box and that most people 
don't bother take a look at it, plus they are automatically deleted after a few 
days so then it appears like the mail was never delivered.

They also come back with the argument that they've sent the same mail from 
their "free-but-user-is-the-product"  mail account and that it reached his 
customers inbox without problem.
So then it is our fault if he loses business, because he uses our paying 
professional hosting, despite we're following all recommendations/rfc and spend 
a lot of time on keeping our servers spam free.

We fill out forms at MS to understand to raise the problem and understand why 
this is happening and the answer is always the same. "we can't guarantee the 
deliverability but you should subscribe to SNDS, JMRP etc (we did since a long 
time). Recipient should put the sender address in safe senders... No real 
information about why it happens.

Putting the sender in safe senders before the first contact. Really, in 2019, 
when sending a mail to a new contact, you must first contact them another way 
to tell them to whitelist you, before sending anything ? At this point it would 
be better to go back to fax if we can't guarantee a mail has been delivered.

Am I the only one to see here dominant position abuse that is going to kill 
small ISP/ESP businesses?

I've read some good ideas to help improve this situation here, for example 
delivering to inbox but with a warning "This might be spam" instead of moving 
to a never read junk box.
This would already be a step ahead...

Regards,

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Michael Rathbun]

On Sun, 21 Apr 2019 22:40:57 +0200, Thomas Walter  wrote:

>As a "free" mail system provider, I'd disable those abandoned accounts
>and not rely on the email senders to track their recipients and stop
>sending mails.
>
>Is there anything wrong with telling the sender: "550 Mailbox abandoned
>for X months" instead of accepting truckloads of poop for them?

Other than having to do something custom to an MTA which I may not have the
ability to modify (and thereby allow the sender to export to me some of his
costs for using my system for his own benefit) nothing at all.  In some
particular situations may very likely make good sense.

Analogous to "nobody should be allowed to dump untreated industrial waste into
public waterways", I would say that major providers taking action to force
senders to adopt responsible policies that benefit everybody who runs a mail
system, is something I will generally cheer on.

>This is a lot easier than forcing any kind of tracking on the senders,
>because you actually know if a mailbox is being looked into or not. And
>it would solve all the other issues you mention.

Receiving systems should feel free to "force" any condition they wish onto
those presenting mail to their systems, consistent with agreement(s) they may
have with their own users.  In my case, I find that dropping an inactive or
bogus account into the "Spam Trap" list (which causes the sender to addresses
on the list to be blocked before HELO for up to several weeks) is a satisfying
pastime.  Then again, nobody's P statement will be in the least affected by
my doing this.

mdr
-- 
 "There are no laws here, only agreements."  
-- Masahiko


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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Thomas Walter]

On 21.04.19 22:21, Michael Rathbun wrote:
> That's your option, certainly.  However, if you run a large "free" mail
> system,
> 
> o  you discover that up to 80% of the mail you finally accept, filter and
> deliver (store) goes to accounts that have been abandoned.  You paid to
> analyze, transport, and store poop that can't be used as fertilizer.

As a "free" mail system provider, I'd disable those abandoned accounts
and not rely on the email senders to track their recipients and stop
sending mails.

Is there anything wrong with telling the sender: "550 Mailbox abandoned
for X months" instead of accepting truckloads of poop for them?

This is a lot easier than forcing any kind of tracking on the senders,
because you actually know if a mailbox is being looked into or not. And
it would solve all the other issues you mention.

Thomas

-- 
Thomas Walter
Datenverarbeitungszentrale

FH Münster
- University of Applied Sciences -
Corrensstr. 25, Raum B 112
48149 Münster

Tel: +49 251 83 64 908
Fax: +49 251 83 64 910
www.fh-muenster.de/dvz/

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Michael Rathbun]

On Sun, 21 Apr 2019 21:39:48 +0200, Thomas Walter  wrote:

>And force people like me to resubscribe every 90 to 180 days, because I
>don't allow tracking nonsense in emails?

That's your option, certainly.  However, if you run a large "free" mail
system,

o  you discover that up to 80% of the mail you finally accept, filter and
deliver (store) goes to accounts that have been abandoned.  You paid to
analyze, transport, and store poop that can't be used as fertilizer.

o  your customers (the advertisers) pay you to have warm bodies look at their
adverts.  Folks who never log in don't look at diddly.

o  The vast majority of accounts that have not engaged in the past 180 days
are abandoned, and represent costs from which no benefit can ever accrue.

If a tiny number of folks don't want open tracking (or, as in my case, hardly
ever load images), then they can remember to engage somehow every few months,
or, optionally, get stuffed if the mail was something they want.  You (the
provider) don't care -- REMEMBER:  those folks are the product, not the
customer.

>This whole discussion is becoming more and more depressing somehow.

Understandably.

mdr
-- 
 alt.metaphorical.dude.abides.abides.abides
 -- Chucky


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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Thomas Walter]

On 21.04.19 21:15, Michael Rathbun wrote:
> Check whether your "non-spam" email is sent only to accounts that have
> subscribed, opened or clicked in the last 90 to 180 days.  Utterly and
> absolutely suppress EVERY record that fails that test.  It is becoming more
> and more difficult simply to get your stuff to acceptance at the border if you
> ignore this stricture.  

And force people like me to resubscribe every 90 to 180 days, because I
don't allow tracking nonsense in emails?


This whole discussion is becoming more and more depressing somehow.

Regards,
Thomas Walter

-- 
Thomas Walter
Datenverarbeitungszentrale

FH Münster
- University of Applied Sciences -
Corrensstr. 25, Raum B 112
48149 Münster

Tel: +49 251 83 64 908
Fax: +49 251 83 64 910
www.fh-muenster.de/dvz/

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Michael Rathbun]

On Sun, 21 Apr 2019 04:52:42 +, Sébastien Riccio
 wrote:

>We noticed that near 100% of the complaints are legit mails, almost none of 
>them are real SPAM.

Here's another real-world perspective:  I have an antique Yahoo! account that
still, after 25 inactive years, gets a wide variety of unsolicited email.

If the mail in the inbox is a confirmation message (click here to confirm) I
simply move it to the "bogus sign ups" folder.  Nothing further happens unless
the sender continues to mail even when there has been no confirmation, at
which point everything they originate goes to the bin.

If the mail in the inbox is a "Thanks for signing up, you will be hearing from
us regularly" sort of email, it gets the "Spam" button.  If the sender
receives the FBL message and unsubscribes me, then they have a small hit on
reputation, but I don't get any more mail.  If no unsubscribe happens, then
100% "Spam" button treatment.

Anything else generally gets the "Spam" button, usually without being read.

Going regularly to the spam folder are significant quantities of "legitimate"
email -- notices from the Illinois State Department of Motor Vehicles; monthly
statements from Dish Network; eleven deserving (I suppose) environmental
charities, museums and cultural groups; Notices of Activity/Account Alerts for
MD Rahman from CitiBank, interesting newsletters and whatnot.  In addition,
tonnes of valuable information on erectile dysfunction cures, walk-in tubs,
woodworking plans, and several multi-million-dollar fund transfer
administrative messages.

In the case of CitiBank, they occasionally get their stuff out of the spam
folder, but that of course means 100% "Spam" button treatment from me and
others, and within a few days they are back in the doghouse.  I've spent a
total of at least an hour on the phone with CitiBank to try to get them to
stop sending sensitive customer information to a total stranger to no avail,
so I happily trash every CitiBank message I see, no matter what the platform.

On a slightly different topic...

Check whether your "non-spam" email is sent only to accounts that have
subscribed, opened or clicked in the last 90 to 180 days.  Utterly and
absolutely suppress EVERY record that fails that test.  It is becoming more
and more difficult simply to get your stuff to acceptance at the border if you
ignore this stricture.  One client who still hasn't grasped the magnitude of
this had ALL of his Y! mail on infinite deferment starting about 1.5 weeks
ago, and appears to enjoy a 1.2% inbox rate at gmail.  The times continue to
change.

mdr
-- 
  Oh, when there’s too much of nothing
  No one has control.
 -- Bob Dylan


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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[G. Miliotis]

On 21/4/2019 07:52, Sébastien Riccio wrote:

We also receive sometime a batch of complaints from the same outlook.com 
recipient, for mails dated a few years ago. Like if the user was doing some 
cleanup in his inbox and instead of deleting message he declares them as .. 
guess it... junk!


This one at least is easy to solve. Just disable the 'junk' button for 
mails older than a week.


If you were using a local mail client, doing this would make total 
sense, you're training your local filter. For webmail, it's just 
pointless. Freemail providers should be using a different paradigm for 
users because it's no longer email as it was designed to be and we 
expect it to work due to scale and business model.


--GM



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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[John Levine]

In article  you write:
>We noticed that near 100% of the complaints are legit mails, almost none of 
>them are real SPAM.

If you don't send much spam, that's typical.  On my small system,
nearly all of the spam reports are people who apparently want to leave
a discussion list about folk dancing.  I don't know why they are less
able to read the unsub instructions than people on all of my other
lists.

Now and then actual spam leaks through a list when a bot uses a stolen address
book to send spam with a list subscriber's From address, and I get reasonable
spam reports about those.


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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[John Levine]

In article <91d42e7a8e5a4f11a460e310ab40d...@ex1.obs.local> you write:
>How is the filter relevant here ? Doesn't that shows there are some special 
>treatment/whitelisting agreement between big ESP?

No, it means that Gmail sends vast amounts of mail and most of it is
not spam.  A one message test from a system that sends billions of
messages a day is hardly statistically significant.


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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Sébastien Riccio]

Hi,

Another "funny" thing that I don't understand how junk mail are processed.

Just a little test I've done:
I freshly open a new gmail account and send a spam (took some spam example we 
receive and pasted it into the mail) to my outlook.com mailbox from it.
Resuit: I receive it in outlook INBOX.

I mark it as junk at outlook, wait a few minutes, and send another mail same 
source same recipient.
It ends up again in the INBOX.

How is the filter relevant here ? Doesn't that shows there are some special 
treatment/whitelisting agreement between big ESP?

In the meantime legit mails from our customers are rejected. I really would 
like to understand how this is possible.


Sébastien RICCIO
SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR
P  +41 840 888 888
F  +41 840 888 000
M sric...@swisscenter.com

Sébastien RICCIO
SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR
P  +41 840 888 888
F  +41 840 888 000
M sric...@swisscenter.com

-Original Message-
From: Sébastien Riccio 
Sent: dimanche, 21 avril 2019 06:53
To: mailop@mailop.org
Subject: RE: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

Hello,

> you are forgetting that users are stupid. As I've mentioned before I have to 
> deal with abuse messages daily because > users press "Junk"
> instead of "Delete" buttons. They don't understand the difference between 
> "Junk" and "Trash" or they sort a regular mail response to junk because they 
> don't like the answer they get.

This, exactly! To keep our servers clean we're of course subscribed to as many 
as feedback loops as we can, including outlook.com's one and are daily 
monitoring them.

We noticed that near 100% of the complaints are legit mails, almost none of 
them are real SPAM.

It is basically people receiving messages from an ex boyfriend that they don't 
want to talk to anymore, or some informational lists they subscribed to but 
they are too lazy to use the unsubscribe link, instead they mark it as junk.
Or mails from associations they were in, but they aren't anymore. Instead of 
notifying the sender to remove them from the members contact list, they mark it 
as junk again.

We also receive sometime a batch of complaints from the same outlook.com 
recipient, for mails dated a few years ago. Like if the user was doing some 
cleanup in his inbox and instead of deleting message he declares them as .. 
guess it... junk!

So then despite we're doing our best to follow recommendations and keep 
everything clean, legit mail we send start to end up in junk mailbox, box which 
outlook users is ready maybe one every month. But then there's another problem 
here, mail staying in junk mailbox are cleaned at least every 30 days or I even 
seen something talking about 10 days.
So they completely miss them and, we are the bad guys because we're not able to 
ship a mail to outlook.com.

There is really something wrong here and a solution has to be found.


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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Sébastien Riccio]

Hello,

> you are forgetting that users are stupid. As I've mentioned before I have to 
> deal with abuse messages daily because > users press "Junk"
> instead of "Delete" buttons. They don't understand the difference between 
> "Junk" and "Trash" or they sort a regular mail response to junk because they 
> don't like the answer they get.

This, exactly! To keep our servers clean we're of course subscribed to as many 
as feedback loops as we can, including 
outlook.com's one and are daily monitoring them.

We noticed that near 100% of the complaints are legit mails, almost none of 
them are real SPAM.

It is basically people receiving messages from an ex boyfriend that they don't 
want to talk to anymore, or some informational lists they subscribed to but 
they are too lazy to use the unsubscribe link, instead they mark it as junk.
Or mails from associations they were in, but they aren't anymore. Instead of 
notifying the sender to remove them from the members contact list, they mark it 
as junk again.

We also receive sometime a batch of complaints from the same outlook.com 
recipient, for mails dated a few years ago. Like if the user was doing some 
cleanup in his inbox and instead of deleting message he declares them as .. 
guess it... junk!

So then despite we're doing our best to follow recommendations and keep 
everything clean, legit mail we send start to end up in junk mailbox, box which 
outlook users is ready maybe one every month. But then there's another problem 
here, mail staying in junk mailbox are cleaned at least every 30 days or I even 
seen something talking about 10 days.
So they completely miss them and, we are the bad guys because we're not able to 
ship a mail to outlook.com.

There is really something wrong here and a solution has to be found.


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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Mark Lunn]

I managed to hit ‘spam’, on our own mail in error on yahoo. It’s easily done.

Sent from my iPhone

> On 20 Apr 2019, at 18:57, Jay Hennigan  wrote:
> 
>> On 4/20/19 4:01 AM, Thomas Walter wrote:
>> 
>> you are forgetting that users are stupid. As I've mentioned before I
>> have to deal with abuse messages daily because users press "Junk"
>> instead of "Delete" buttons. They don't understand the difference
>> between "Junk" and "Trash" or they sort a regular mail response to junk
>> because they don't like the answer they get.
> 
> Webmail layouts are also stupid. Coupled with stupid users, this makes things 
> much worse. "Junk" and "Delete" should be very distinct. "Report as spam" 
> would be IMHO a much better label than "Junk", and an "Are you sure" dialog 
> box confirmation for "Report as spam" would also help.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Jay Hennigan - j...@west.net
> Network Engineering - CCIE #7880
> 503 897-8550 - WB6RDV
> 
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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Bill Cole]

On 19 Apr 2019, at 17:31, Brandon Long via mailop wrote:


I just don't think this is practical.


It could be, were it not for the tragic conceptual cancer of "email is 
free like beer."



For one, when you're only solution is to reject, the only way to get a
signal that you're rejecting the mail wrong is manual review, which is
impractical at best, and difficult to correlate with the opinion of 
the

actual receiver.


"Impractical" in this case is a result of mandating economies of scale.


The spam/not spam signal from users is the best
information you have on what your users want, even if the bad actors 
try to

game the signal and a lot of user's use it as a hammer instead of the
softer touch.


Yes, vetting and training users is judgment-intensive and 
wisdom-intensive work. Charging users for the service they get helps 
with the vetting of some sorts of bad behavior but convincing 
well-meaning people to not be childish is harder.


It is a serious challenge to find and/or develop enough of the right 
people to handle that, and it has almost no economy of scale, unlike 
basic technical ops.


The second is that it is impractical to ascertain whether a message is 
spam
or not during delivery time in all cases.  A decade ago, the reason 
was
because we had to OCR images contained in power point presentation 
spam,
now there are services where anti-malware services are opening Word 
files
on clean VMs, or anti-phishing/malware where the service has to follow 
each

link through a headless web browser with full javascript running.


There are multiple approaches to that, none of them cheap.

One fact that is very helpful to understand and yet broadly ignored when 
people look at the feasibility of processing-intensive filtering is the 
mandate of https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.3.2.6.


Also, you don't NEED to do that in 2019. Email is a ridiculous medium 
for file sharing, both technically and for security, so you can 
explicitly choose to deprecate it, hamper it, and offer alternatives. 
OCR is hard, but determining that an image is essentially the whole 
message is not. Determining whether JavaScript is malicious is hard, 
rejecting mail with embedded JavaScript is easy.


Sure, these policies will alienate some senders and some recipients, and 
maybe even some customers willing to pay for less restrictive, more 
dangerous, and less useful email service. If a provider wants to satisfy 
all possible users at a cost low enough to service a large fraction of 
them for free, this isn't feasible.


The problem is the business model to which a freemail operation must 
conform. The freemail adaptations to cost constraints and scale have 
metastasized via user expectations and cargo-cult system design, but 
they aren't necessarily the best choices elsewhere.



--
Bill Cole
b...@scconsult.com or billc...@apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Available For Hire: https://linkedin.com/in/billcole

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Jay Hennigan]

On 4/20/19 4:01 AM, Thomas Walter wrote:


you are forgetting that users are stupid. As I've mentioned before I
have to deal with abuse messages daily because users press "Junk"
instead of "Delete" buttons. They don't understand the difference
between "Junk" and "Trash" or they sort a regular mail response to junk
because they don't like the answer they get.


Webmail layouts are also stupid. Coupled with stupid users, this makes 
things much worse. "Junk" and "Delete" should be very distinct. "Report 
as spam" would be IMHO a much better label than "Junk", and an "Are you 
sure" dialog box confirmation for "Report as spam" would also help.




--
Jay Hennigan - j...@west.net
Network Engineering - CCIE #7880
503 897-8550 - WB6RDV

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Thomas Walter]

Hey Brandon,

On 19.04.19 23:31, Brandon Long via mailop wrote:
> For one, when you're only solution is to reject, the only way to get a
> signal that you're rejecting the mail wrong is manual review, which is
> impractical at best, and difficult to correlate with the opinion of the
> actual receiver.  The spam/not spam signal from users is the best
> information you have on what your users want, even if the bad actors try
> to game the signal and a lot of user's use it as a hammer instead of the
> softer touch.

you are forgetting that users are stupid. As I've mentioned before I
have to deal with abuse messages daily because users press "Junk"
instead of "Delete" buttons. They don't understand the difference
between "Junk" and "Trash" or they sort a regular mail response to junk
because they don't like the answer they get.

> The second is that it is impractical to ascertain whether a message is
> spam or not during delivery time in all cases.  A decade ago, the reason
> was because we had to OCR images contained in power point presentation
> spam, now there are services where anti-malware services are opening
> Word files on clean VMs, or anti-phishing/malware where the service has
> to follow each link through a headless web browser with full javascript
> running.

Why not get the message, give the sender a proper "please come again
later", do OCR or whatever resource intensive scanning and allow or
block the file based on a hash the next time it comes in?

Worst thing I have seen were mails that got moved to spam out of my
inbox where I had seen them before - and suddenly they were just gone.

> Even without these things, often we aren't sure that something's spam,
> so we rely on the folks always checking their email and clicking spam to
> inform us on messages we've already received but haven't been looked at yet.
> 
> Those also mean, there's no saying its rejected even if we put the
> message in the spam folder.

You guys probably don't have to deal with the "but where is my mail" -
"did you check the spam folder" support tickets? If a mail gets properly
rejected, the sender - who is the one that wants his mail to be
delivered into the recipients inbox - knows something is wrong and can
try again, contact the recipient in a different way or ask his
postmaster to look into it (who has nice logs of the event).

If you sort something into a spam folder, that most people don't bother
to look into, mails just get lost.


Thomas

-- 
Thomas Walter
Datenverarbeitungszentrale

FH Münster
- University of Applied Sciences -
Corrensstr. 25, Raum B 112
48149 Münster

Tel: +49 251 83 64 908
Fax: +49 251 83 64 910
www.fh-muenster.de/dvz/

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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Michael Peddemors]

On 2019-04-19 6:11 p.m., Luis E. Muñoz via mailop wrote:

On 19 Apr 2019, at 16:21, Jay Hennigan wrote:

This feedback is only really available for webmail, so you don't
need a separate spam folder.

There's also some signaling when using IMAP. Moving email to the spam 
folder (or using the \Spam flag) can be considered equivalent to 
pressing the TiS button.


Best regards

-lem


Wish those were standardized though (flags and who/what modifies them, 
Junk/Spam etc.) Talk on the IETF 'extra' about looking into that tho..




--
"Catch the Magic of Linux..."

Michael Peddemors, President/CEO LinuxMagic Inc.
Visit us at http://www.linuxmagic.com @linuxmagic
A Wizard IT Company - For More Info http://www.wizard.ca
"LinuxMagic" a Registered TradeMark of Wizard Tower TechnoServices Ltd.

604-682-0300 Beautiful British Columbia, Canada

This email and any electronic data contained are confidential and intended
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Please note that any views or opinions presented in this email are solely
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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Luis E. Muñoz via mailop]

On 19 Apr 2019, at 16:21, Jay Hennigan wrote:
This feedback is only really available for webmail, so you don't need 
a separate spam folder.


There's also some signaling when using IMAP. Moving email to the spam 
folder (or using the \Spam flag) can be considered equivalent to 
pressing the TiS button.


Best regards

-lem
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Re: [mailop] The utility of spam folders

[Jay Hennigan]

On 4/19/19 2:31 PM, Brandon Long via mailop wrote:

I just don't think this is practical.

For one, when you're only solution is to reject, the only way to get a 
signal that you're rejecting the mail wrong is manual review, which is 
impractical at best, and difficult to correlate with the opinion of the 
actual receiver.  The spam/not spam signal from users is the best 
information you have on what your users want, even if the bad actors try 
to game the signal and a lot of user's use it as a hammer instead of the 
softer touch.


I agree with the utility of spam folders in general. In the case of 
webmail you can also deliver to the inbox with a visual indicator of 
spam before the mail is opened.


Even without these things, often we aren't sure that something's spam, 
so we rely on the folks always checking their email and clicking spam to 
inform us on messages we've already received but haven't been looked at yet.


This feedback is only really available for webmail, so you don't need a 
separate spam folder. If unsure, deliver to inbox with a visual 
"Suspected spam" flag on the individual message. Mail not flagged as 
spam should have a clickable "This is spam" or better yet, "Report as 
spam" button. This should be very distinct from the "Delete" action to 
minimize false positives, perhaps even with a confirmation dialog box.


Mail that is flagged as spam can have a "This is not spam" button to 
provide user feedback against false positives.


In other words, you can get the feedback from the recipient as well as 
flag suspected spam to the recipient without the need for a separate 
spam folder. Based on that feedback as well as existing other metrics a 
decision can be made to hard reject similar mail in the future either 
globally or per recipient.


--
Jay Hennigan - j...@west.net
Network Engineering - CCIE #7880
503 897-8550 - WB6RDV

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