Re: [mailop] Do we need Spam folders?
On 2019-10-14 at 18:02 -0700, Brandon Long via mailop wrote: > I mean, we do offer with sectioned inbox to move other messages out of > the default view (since we're using > labels, everything is still in the label, just different views), so we > could offer that for spam as well... but frankly, > why? We also had "bundles" in Inbox, which is could also have been > used for spam... but why? > > Having a spam folder has been the standard user interface design for > 20 years at this point. Increasing user's cognitive > load for using email doesn't help anyone. It would likely mean we'd > have to have much smaller spam folders, we'd likely need > to spend more effort on prioritizing spam (how spammy is it)... The spam folder is a magic one. Once upon a time, it was a normal folder, where messages matching a few static rules would place things. Nowadays, moving a message inside or outside of that folder, has sideffects such as training to [not] treat it as spam and even send a complaint through a FBL. But users are not aware of that. We should (the community in general) improve the interfaces/documentation for that (a taught task, though). Most users still won't read, but a few do! Cheers ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] Do we need Spam folders?
Yes, it is. Suppose you bought service/product X, but didn't receive the confirmation email. Note: You are an end user, and don't have access to the server logs. ;) Did the have an issue sending you the mail? Was it rejected locally as spam? Is it pending that their financial department actually approves the operation? For the case where it ended up detected as spam: a) if it was filed into a Spam folder, the user can find it there directly b) if it was rejected at smtp-level, you would need to hope that the sender cared and implemented some logic to do something with it, rather than ignore delivery errors. The email sender probably doesn't care contacting you -it is *you* who requested to be mailed- and is likely to assume that you provided a wrong email address. In fact, from their point of view, your email address is invalid, since they can't write to you (they are blocked by the spam filter).7 As such, the spam folder provides a self-service option that benefits sysadmins and smart users. It is true that there are other options. For instance, you might share with your users a excerpt of the mail log, so that they can see what mails to them are rejected (but beware, some will start requesting to see the rejected message!). Also, you are also assuming that senders will view and understand NDR. I recently got a user noting that they were contacted externally whose email they weren't able to receive (but could with an external account). The mail log showed a clear inline rejection: message too big. This was the *first* email sent. I can only guess, but I suppose it included a big attachment or image. It should have been trivial to retry without that, perhaps sending only a link to it, since _email is not the right tool for sharing files_. You got a very good point at: > Most users are really bad in managing that. I would expand that to: some people doesn't know how to handle mail (efficiently). It should be an obligatory subject on all schools nowadays. However, I'm afraid most people don't know how to change their MUA default mail view (eg. to a threaded view) nor how to create email rules. I have felt silly for asking the obvious "Have you checked the spam folder?", with the receiving not only not having done that apparently-not-so-obvious step, but not even aware they had a spam folder at all! (and yes, the mail was there) And yet some people doing silly things when determining spam [supposedly] are technical people that should know better. Personally, my problem is the opposite: I receive a good number of spam mails from purposefully unfiltered email addresses, and even for clear spam campaigns we have the issue that we may be contacted by someone about receiving such spam, which is a query that should be answered rather than discarded as spam. We are outliers, though. ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] Gmail marking email from me as spam
On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 4:08 AM Jaroslaw Rafa wrote: > Dnia 14.10.2019 o godz. 13:23:30 Brandon Long via mailop pisze: > > > > Modern spam filters are a combination of good and bad signals, but if you > > have no good signal... then we only have the bad ones. > > Well, I could see at least few potential "good" signals - I wonder if you > use these, and if yes, why don't they overcome the vague indication of "bad > neighborhood". > > 1) the sending server consistently uses the same sender e-mail addresses > (and most of all one address) - these aren't multiple random addresses like > spammers usually do. You can see a strong, clear correlation and > consistency between the sending IP and the sender e-mail addresses used. > eh, not a great signal. Lots of spam comes from the same sender email address, especially if you consider more "grey" spam types (ie, marketing mail) 2) Gmail users are actually engaging in e-mail exchanges with the sender, > they do reply and emails are sent back and forth instead of just deleting > or > ignoring the message > Yes, and that is a signal that we do use. It's also typically why you are less likely to go to the spam label when going back with the same people. OTOH, you'd be surprised the lengths spammers will go to to try and games this signal up front before their campaign. 3) I'm subscribed to several mailing lists hosted on Google Groups, I write > quite a lot of messages to these groups (using the same sending IP and > e-mail address), these are accepted and distributed and don't go to users' > Spam folders. Spam washing through Google Groups is it's own problem. We could probably use a signal there using ARC to pass through the original authentication, but using the ARC signals is still a work in progress. Brandon ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] Gmail marking email from me as spam
On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 4:36 AM Michael Orlitzky via mailop < mailop@mailop.org> wrote: > On 10/14/19 9:29 PM, Brandon Long via mailop wrote: > > > > > > On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 3:54 PM Michael Orlitzky via mailop > > mailto:mailop@mailop.org>> wrote:. > > [snip] > > > > They don't care if you or anyone else can send/receive mail, ... > > > > > > It seems like Gmail wouldn't last long as an email provider if no one > > could send/receive email to it. > > > > I don't believe that either (it's right out of the EEE playbook), but > it's not quite what I said. I said "Google doesn't care," and for that > the proof is in the pudding. > > We've been delivering mail to gmail all day every day since it was born. > Bazillions of messages over however many years. Had thousands of > delivery/spam problems (on both ends) that the world is better off > having resolved. And yet, after all those years, messages, and problems > -- you're the closest thing to a real human "gmail support" person that > I've ever encountered. Even so, the best you can do is to tell this guy > that perhaps maybe if he potentially switches hosting providers then > probably in all likelihood it could fix his issue in theory with any luck. > > So while you personally seem like a nice dude and I know you're trying > to help, the fact that you ultimately can't (and that begging on mailop > is tier 1 support in the first place) just cements my impression that > Google as an organization doesn't care. > Given the denominator involved, that doesn't actually sound that bad. And what do you think I can do about it? Whitelist his IP? And if so, for how long? I'm sure he's a nice dude and all, but this is the internet, he could be anything. The only thing that actually works in the long term is trying to account for these types of issues in the system, and there's no simple fix here. Otherwise, you're right, Google doesn't do personalized response very much, and certainly not for this. The typical answer is that it doesn't scale... but that's obviously not accurate, the problem is that it scales linearly. Microsoft clearly tries to staff to handle postmaster workload at some scale, and I'm curious sometimes how big a staff that is. That said, they also have a much larger paid product than we do, so maybe the "sender to consumer" support requests aren't that much more on top of the "sender to O365" requests, and they just absorb it. Brandon ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
[mailop] Barracuda Point of Contact
Hello, I’m hoping to find a contact at Barracuda to chat about an issue we’re seeing. If you could please contact me off list it would be appreciated. Thanks, Dustin Taylor Technical Program Manager AWS – Digital User Engagement [signature_88271687] ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] Do we need Spam folders?
on Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 12:58:51PM -0700, Brandon Long via mailop wrote: > I used to think, when I ran my own server, that five or so spam messages a > day, what's the big deal... until I just got tired of it. It was often > more than the actual useful messages in my mailbox every time I checked. I've had the same email address since oh, 1996 or so? I've run my own email services since 1997, and have invested a great deal of time into making sure my filters are good, at one point for our company and its hosting clients and nowadays for a very small userbase (think in terms of single-digits). We block according to a wide variety of criteria, and quarantine/flag on some others. We eat our own dog food and don't rely on anyone else's filters, though we do query a few for stats purposes and the very occasional quarantine exception. Yesterday (FSVO "yesterday") we blocked 12 messages for being sent from known-bad ASNs alone (after a couple of months in which said ASNs sent 288 that we let in and tried to send another thousand or so). That's out of a total of 310 rejections today. And that doesn't count the 6 419s we got from random sources, the several offers of sales lead lists and contact lists, SEO offers, loan/financing offers and other garbage, that we quarantined and blacklisted. This out of a total mail load of 649 messages - not bad compared to the bad old days when spam accounted for over 95% of all inbound, but bear in mind I've also got about a full quarter of IPv4 blocked at the packet level, so I should also include in that number another 59 unique IPs that made port 25 connections, bringing us up to 708, or around 60% spam/ham if you don't account for any filtering at all. And the vast majority of the ham was from lists, such as this one. So for practical purposes, non-list mail was probably still in that 95% neighborhood. Dealing with the stuff I had to quarantine ate up at least half an hour, in various chunks, while I'm in Montreal at M3AAWG to talk to other people who are either trying to send or block or manage and should be down on the floor talking to them instead of sitting in a hotel room. And that's NOW. Imagine what a waste of time it's been over the past 23 years, given that we have already invested in filtering (14+K lines of sendmail m4 code, a dataset of classifications for ~96.3% of IPv4's PTR space for filtering and quarantining, a set of ~90K blacklisted domains, etc., etc.) and for the most part ONLY have to handle the edge cases (419s, cold calls, and new idiots) and imagine how tired I am of it. And I've never had a userbase more than a few hundred or several thousand if you include the various mailing lists we hosted over the years, which we still had to provide filtering for. Everyone has different spam loads and tolerances, as you mentioned. To extrapolate from an obviously VERY light load to anyone else's actual experience is misguided. It just smacks of "JHD" and comes off as the sort of dismissive and disrespectful attitudes we've been trying for decades to rid ourselves and our various communities of. As for whether we still need spam folders, I can see all sides - you do risk missing FPs, and senders need feedback (or not, depending on if you think the sender is legit), and users deal with their own spam tolerances in wildly different ways. We still have a quarantine folder, mostly because I would rather waste my own time than both mine and that of the other users I serve. Without quarantine, they have to forward the stuff they think is spam to me AND I have to deal with it. YMMV. I make no claim to understand what a Yahoo! or GMail have to deal with. -- hesketh.com/inc. v: +1(919)834-2552 f: +1(919)834-2553 w: http://hesketh.com/ Internet security and antispam hostname intelligence: http://enemieslist.com/ ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] Do we need Spam folders?
> The problem isn't lack of honoring the bounce. The problem is what > to make out of it when multiple recipients are present. that's quite rare usually it's 1:1 > Also, assuming that a reject after DATA is strictly content-related > is, well, an assumption. historically it could/did happen with sendmail and low disk space ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] Do we need Spam folders?
> What MTAs do not honor this? sorry, i don't know what's sending when this happens > How does 550 after DATA result in backscatter? perhaps because domain is 'old' spammers sometimes spam from $random@ those messages hit various providers which do *not* check dmarc, but then forward (either as a forwarding service or an internal system) to places that do check dmarc that causes bounces to be generated inside their systems which come back to me sometimes i go for days without seeing them, sometimes i get 100s an hour now i added code to detect this at the smtp level and 5xx respond > Not returning a 250 OK after DATA is still well within limits of the > SMTP dialog. How else are you supposed to reject a mail that could > be saved because of its size or because it has a virus? most software is pretty terrible more frequent of a problem are things that don't retry on a 4xx from greylisting ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] Do we need Spam folders?
I agree with Laura, Brandon and Michael. Spam folders give receivers options and adding user features to them only adds confusion for most users. On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 6:13 AM Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop wrote: > Dnia 15.10.2019 o godz. 09:44:10 Paul Smith via mailop pisze: > > > > However, our spam filter actually sends me an email containing a > > list of filtered emails every day, to prod me to take a look. It's > > sorted and colourised by 'spamminess', so the most likely to be > > false positives are shown at the top. So, two seconds before I > > delete that message lets me look for something that may not be > > actual spam. I don't have to do anything (like click on a 'spam > > folder') to check this, I get it thrown at me. Now, I do know that > > some people don't like this (we actually get some people reporting > > this daily email as spam), but we keep telling them that one day > > they'll be happy they were prompted to take a look - usually they > > are. > > > > So, I think a similar 'daily spam report' should at least be a > > default option, even if people can turn it off if it annoys them. > > I've seen many systems that don't even have it as an option that can > > be turned on. The sorting by spamminess is important - a spam folder > > is generally sorted by date or whatever, which means you have to > > look through it all. If it's sorted by spamminess, then a quick > > glance can catch the majority of false positives. > > Great idea. Actually, I haven't seen it implemented anywhere at major email > providers. Maybe they actually should? > -- > Regards, >Jaroslaw Rafa >r...@rafa.eu.org > -- > "In a million years, when kids go to school, they're gonna know: once there > was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub." > > ___ > mailop mailing list > mailop@mailop.org > https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop > -- Lili Crowley Postmaster Verizon Media ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] Gmail marking email from me as spam
On 10/14/19 9:29 PM, Brandon Long via mailop wrote: > > > On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 3:54 PM Michael Orlitzky via mailop > mailto:mailop@mailop.org>> wrote:. > [snip] > > They don't care if you or anyone else can send/receive mail, ... > > > It seems like Gmail wouldn't last long as an email provider if no one > could send/receive email to it. > I don't believe that either (it's right out of the EEE playbook), but it's not quite what I said. I said "Google doesn't care," and for that the proof is in the pudding. We've been delivering mail to gmail all day every day since it was born. Bazillions of messages over however many years. Had thousands of delivery/spam problems (on both ends) that the world is better off having resolved. And yet, after all those years, messages, and problems -- you're the closest thing to a real human "gmail support" person that I've ever encountered. Even so, the best you can do is to tell this guy that perhaps maybe if he potentially switches hosting providers then probably in all likelihood it could fix his issue in theory with any luck. So while you personally seem like a nice dude and I know you're trying to help, the fact that you ultimately can't (and that begging on mailop is tier 1 support in the first place) just cements my impression that Google as an organization doesn't care. ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] Gmail marking email from me as spam
Dnia 14.10.2019 o godz. 13:23:30 Brandon Long via mailop pisze: > > Modern spam filters are a combination of good and bad signals, but if you > have no good signal... then we only have the bad ones. Well, I could see at least few potential "good" signals - I wonder if you use these, and if yes, why don't they overcome the vague indication of "bad neighborhood". 1) the sending server consistently uses the same sender e-mail addresses (and most of all one address) - these aren't multiple random addresses like spammers usually do. You can see a strong, clear correlation and consistency between the sending IP and the sender e-mail addresses used. 2) Gmail users are actually engaging in e-mail exchanges with the sender, they do reply and emails are sent back and forth instead of just deleting or ignoring the message 3) I'm subscribed to several mailing lists hosted on Google Groups, I write quite a lot of messages to these groups (using the same sending IP and e-mail address), these are accepted and distributed and don't go to users' Spam folders. All this with quite a long history. Doesn't this mark a legitimate sender? -- Regards, Jaroslaw Rafa r...@rafa.eu.org -- "In a million years, when kids go to school, they're gonna know: once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub." ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] Do we need Spam folders?
Dnia 15.10.2019 o godz. 09:44:10 Paul Smith via mailop pisze: > > However, our spam filter actually sends me an email containing a > list of filtered emails every day, to prod me to take a look. It's > sorted and colourised by 'spamminess', so the most likely to be > false positives are shown at the top. So, two seconds before I > delete that message lets me look for something that may not be > actual spam. I don't have to do anything (like click on a 'spam > folder') to check this, I get it thrown at me. Now, I do know that > some people don't like this (we actually get some people reporting > this daily email as spam), but we keep telling them that one day > they'll be happy they were prompted to take a look - usually they > are. > > So, I think a similar 'daily spam report' should at least be a > default option, even if people can turn it off if it annoys them. > I've seen many systems that don't even have it as an option that can > be turned on. The sorting by spamminess is important - a spam folder > is generally sorted by date or whatever, which means you have to > look through it all. If it's sorted by spamminess, then a quick > glance can catch the majority of false positives. Great idea. Actually, I haven't seen it implemented anywhere at major email providers. Maybe they actually should? -- Regards, Jaroslaw Rafa r...@rafa.eu.org -- "In a million years, when kids go to school, they're gonna know: once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub." ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] Gmail marking email from me as spam
Dnia 14.10.2019 o godz. 23:59:23 Michael Rathbun via mailop pisze: > > >What defines spam is the *contents* of the message... > > Actually, no. Content is largely irrelevant. We almost never terminate a > hosted customer due to content. The major consideration is always consent of > the recipient. Didn't I already explain in detail what I mean by "content"? It *does* include consent. My first point is that it is the content that the recipient *does not want*. -- Regards, Jaroslaw Rafa r...@rafa.eu.org -- "In a million years, when kids go to school, they're gonna know: once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub." ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] Do we need Spam folders?
On 15.10.19 10:44, Paul Smith via mailop wrote: > Ditto. Yesterday, I got 400 emails. About 200 were spam that was > filtered, about 15 were spam that wasn't filtered, the rest I wanted at > one level or another. No way do I want 200 spam messages shoved into my > Inbox. So instead of rejecting these 200 mails directly and inform the sender that you didn't see them, you rather go through a list (doesn't matter if it's folder content or an email with details) daily and check them? And possibly miss an important one? And provide resources for them to be handled on your site? If you reject them, it's the sending MTAs problem (which might be abused and the postmaster learns about it this way). Even false positives would be handled by the sender who can either contact you in a different way or fix the reason for the false positive and resend the mail? Or you can just whitelist them if you are sure they are not bad guys? Here I thought, us IT guys are lazy and love to have someone else do the work? Why don't you in this case? ;-) 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/ ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] Status of Mailspike BL (Anubis Networks)
Hi, I replied off-list to Joel. For the record we had a issue in our spam traps between 09/27 and 10/10. Basically the reputation engine wasn't getting the correct feedback from our spam traps and therefore affected the RBL performance. The tests performed by Joel were in this time window and explains the performance drop. Regards, José Borges Ferreira > On 14 Oct 2019, at 20:19, Joel M Snyder via mailop wrote: > > Folks: > > In our anti-spam testing this month, Mailspike's bl.mailspike.net RBL > efficacy dropped to 1.7% in detecting "bad reputation" spam IPs. That's > substantially lower than their average. None of the other 38 BLs that we > monitor have any significant fluctuation. > > I'm wondering if anyone out there has any information on Mailspike/Anubis? > There's a fairly recent blog entry on their web site, so it doesn't seem like > they've gone out of business in the last 10 days. > > Any info would be appreciated. > > jms > -- > Joel M Snyder, 1404 East Lind Road, Tucson, AZ, 85719 > Senior Partner, Opus One Phone: +1 520 324 0494 > j...@opus1.comhttp://www.opus1.com/jms > > ___ > mailop mailing list > mailop@mailop.org > https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] Do we need Spam folders?
On 14/10/2019 19:39, Philip Paeps via mailop wrote: On 2019-10-14 06:07:31 (-0700), Thomas Walter via mailop wrote: Do we even need Junk/Spam-Folders? I mean how much mail gets through the first "block directly" level on your site? Every now and then a wave comes through and results in a bad mail or two more, but can't people handle 3 or 5 spams in their inbox per day? While I'm clearly not a representative sample of the average email user, 3 or 5 spam messages per day is two orders of magnitude short of the mark on a bad day for me. So ... Yes: we need spam folders. Ditto. Yesterday, I got 400 emails. About 200 were spam that was filtered, about 15 were spam that wasn't filtered, the rest I wanted at one level or another. No way do I want 200 spam messages shoved into my Inbox. However, our spam filter actually sends me an email containing a list of filtered emails every day, to prod me to take a look. It's sorted and colourised by 'spamminess', so the most likely to be false positives are shown at the top. So, two seconds before I delete that message lets me look for something that may not be actual spam. I don't have to do anything (like click on a 'spam folder') to check this, I get it thrown at me. Now, I do know that some people don't like this (we actually get some people reporting this daily email as spam), but we keep telling them that one day they'll be happy they were prompted to take a look - usually they are. So, I think a similar 'daily spam report' should at least be a default option, even if people can turn it off if it annoys them. I've seen many systems that don't even have it as an option that can be turned on. The sorting by spamminess is important - a spam folder is generally sorted by date or whatever, which means you have to look through it all. If it's sorted by spamminess, then a quick glance can catch the majority of false positives. -- 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 ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] Do we need Spam folders?
On 14 Oct 2019, at 23:39, Thomas Walter via mailop wrote: On 15.10.19 00:34, Chris Wedgwood via mailop wrote: Doesn't "550 Requested action not taken: We don't like you." apply after DATA? it does most severs honor this but not all (i experience this sometimes, my domain somtimes gets a lot of backscatter) What MTAs do not honor this? How does 550 after DATA result in backscatter? The problem isn't lack of honoring the bounce. The problem is what to make out of it when multiple recipients are present. Also, assuming that a reject after DATA is strictly content-related is, well, an assumption. Best regards -lem ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] Do we need Spam folders?
On 15.10.19 00:34, Chris Wedgwood via mailop wrote: >> Doesn't "550 Requested action not taken: We don't like you." apply >> after DATA? > > it does > > most severs honor this but not all > > (i experience this sometimes, my domain somtimes gets a lot of > backscatter) What MTAs do not honor this? How does 550 after DATA result in backscatter? Not returning a 250 OK after DATA is still well within limits of the SMTP dialog. How else are you supposed to reject a mail that could be saved because of its size or because it has a virus? 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/ ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
