5 ms·

That's the consequence of machine learning and allowing people to mark stuff as spam. 80% of all spam reports I get are for legitimate mails. A surprisingly lar

by 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago

That's the consequence of machine learning and allowing people to mark stuff as spam. 80% of all spam reports I get are for legitimate mails. A surprisingly large amount of them are people who mark their own mails as spam.

josephcsible 4y ago
I don't think this is why. In my experience, when this happens, it's universally because the message failed at least one of SPF, DKIM, or DMARC.
- theK 4y ago
  While these factors can cause a quarantine or even silent disposal, empirical evidence suggests that there are custom mechanisms (ie spam filters) downstream that do the larger part of the filtering. I have been running private Mail servers since the early 2000s and this last decade has certainly not been nice to folks that want to self host. I cannot even send my mother in law email because Google just plainly denies delivery with no way to circumvent. Funnily enough mass mailing from the same account 10000 other gmail addresses has delivery metrics just like doing it with mailchimp. I think it is safe to say that big email hosting has grown so complex internally that the companies themselves can’t really make sense of it any more. Edit: to preempt possible “you are doing it wrong” comments, my Mail server setup checks out in every conceivable test suite and email content as well :-)
  - 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
    It's not just you, and it's not just people who are self-hosting. The agressive spam filtering at Gmail/Hotmail is an industry-wide issue and while most of us get by, there's no denying that there's a lot of false positives. The Mailop mailing list has a nice note about it on their Best Practices page: > If you want to send mail to recipients who have accounts at big email providers, be aware that all of the above cannot guarantee that these providers won’t reject your mail, put it straight into recipient’s spam folder or just silently discard it - they just impose their own rules on anyone and you virtually can’t do anything about it.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
  Failed SPF/DKIM/DMARC doesn't trigger abuse reports through feedback loops. Marking messages as spam does. These are cases where one party has decided to mark one or more emails as spam. None of the emails in question are bulk messages -- it's all sent from properly authenticated domains and most of the mails are from ongoing conversations. A lot of it's correspondence between private individuals, others between businesses. Giving people a Junk button is a bad idea at scale. There's been a lot of discussion about this being a linguistical issue (that people don't realise Trash and Junk are different things), but I regularly see people marking entire conversations as Junk when they're angry about not getting an invoice's due date moved, or when arguing with a family member. The worst part is that people don't realise the Junk button often triggers a report to the sender's ESP. The contents of the reported emails are usually included, and in most cases the reports are read by someone else. All this is also processed by spam filters, regardless if it's simple SpamAssassin/Bayes setups, or more advanced systems at Hotmail/Gmail.

josephcsible 4y ago

I don't think this is why. In my experience, when this happens, it's universally because the message failed at least one of SPF, DKIM, or DMARC.

theK 4y ago
While these factors can cause a quarantine or even silent disposal, empirical evidence suggests that there are custom mechanisms (ie spam filters) downstream that do the larger part of the filtering. I have been running private Mail servers since the early 2000s and this last decade has certainly not been nice to folks that want to self host. I cannot even send my mother in law email because Google just plainly denies delivery with no way to circumvent. Funnily enough mass mailing from the same account 10000 other gmail addresses has delivery metrics just like doing it with mailchimp. I think it is safe to say that big email hosting has grown so complex internally that the companies themselves can’t really make sense of it any more. Edit: to preempt possible “you are doing it wrong” comments, my Mail server setup checks out in every conceivable test suite and email content as well :-)
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
  It's not just you, and it's not just people who are self-hosting. The agressive spam filtering at Gmail/Hotmail is an industry-wide issue and while most of us get by, there's no denying that there's a lot of false positives. The Mailop mailing list has a nice note about it on their Best Practices page: > If you want to send mail to recipients who have accounts at big email providers, be aware that all of the above cannot guarantee that these providers won’t reject your mail, put it straight into recipient’s spam folder or just silently discard it - they just impose their own rules on anyone and you virtually can’t do anything about it.
2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
Failed SPF/DKIM/DMARC doesn't trigger abuse reports through feedback loops. Marking messages as spam does. These are cases where one party has decided to mark one or more emails as spam. None of the emails in question are bulk messages -- it's all sent from properly authenticated domains and most of the mails are from ongoing conversations. A lot of it's correspondence between private individuals, others between businesses. Giving people a Junk button is a bad idea at scale. There's been a lot of discussion about this being a linguistical issue (that people don't realise Trash and Junk are different things), but I regularly see people marking entire conversations as Junk when they're angry about not getting an invoice's due date moved, or when arguing with a family member. The worst part is that people don't realise the Junk button often triggers a report to the sender's ESP. The contents of the reported emails are usually included, and in most cases the reports are read by someone else. All this is also processed by spam filters, regardless if it's simple SpamAssassin/Bayes setups, or more advanced systems at Hotmail/Gmail.