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Microsoft is failing to deliver emails that mention newclimate.org
- ano-ther 3y agoInteresting. I just sent myself a test mail from and to an O365 account which included the URL of the article. As the article claims, it doesn’t get delivered. Not even in the spam folder. Other email between the same addresses goes through without problems. EDIT: the Exchange admin center has the email quarantined with reason “malware”, discovered through “URL detonation reputation”.
- qmarchi 3y agoConfirmed this on sending a link to the article to myself and didn't receive it. O365 Hosted, but non-governmental.
- sokoloff 3y agoSame behavior here. Sent 4 test mails, 2 from and 2 to an O365 enterprise account. Both directions containing a different URL were delivered. Both directions containing the URL of this article were not delivered (though the from O365 did get put into sent items folder).
- giancarlostoro 3y agoI wonder if its some sort of spam detection tool being aggressive?
- throwanem 3y agoMicrosoft is infamous for exactly this behavior among folks who self-host their MTAs. At least with Gmail you can usually figure out where the false positive is and try to do something about it via postmaster tools. Once Hotmail blackholes you, though, that's it forever as far as I could ever tell. This wasn't the only reason why I switched to Fastmail after 17 years of selfhosting, but it was among them.
- arp242 3y agoUsed to work a lot with email, and found all email providers to be workable for false positives (not necessarily "great", but workable/acceptable). Except Outlook 365. Even Google/gmail is tons better at handling these types of things, and that's saying a lot.
- TheNewsIsHere 3y agoA lot of large scale email providers are making it more and more difficult to run your own email infrastructure without also owning/controlling the IP range in which your sending servers are issued their IPs. I understand the logic, but most of us don’t have control of the IP allocations in which our email servers sit. Proofpoint was the one that got me to move to Fastmail. They had filtered the entire IP allocation in which my mail server sat at a major cloud provider. Their stance was I could either use whatever email service that provider had, demonstrate control over the entire IP range (just to de-list one IP), or move my server to another IP that wasn’t filtered. I understand the logic to an extent, but those of us who have enjoyed running our own email services are sort of left in no-man’s-land.
- vasdae 3y agoDare I ask what is the "climate change community" is? Lobbyists?
- ceejayoz 3y ago> Hundreds of governmental and non-governmental organisations working on climate change appear to be experiencing disruption to email communication when their communications contain any reference to the NewClimate URL. Anyone emailing something that contains their URL. This includes the IPCC report, which is fairly significant if you're a climate researcher: > No organisation using Microsoft email services can currently send the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report of Working Group 3 as an attachment to anyone else (newclimate dot org URL appears 11 times in the report). The same applies to hundreds of other relevant scientific papers and reports from any organisations, where NewClimate URLs appear on the reference lists.
- darthrupert 3y agoThey don't seem to be climate change denier kooks, which by the name of the org (NewClimate) might lead one to fear.
- K0balt 3y agoIndividuals and organizations involved in climate change communication, investigation, or any other aspect of interacting with information regarding climate change.
- SoftTalker 3y agoAssuming (as is most likely) that this is some kind of unintentional behavior of a spam filter, it really highlights the risk of depending on these few, huge centralized services for email.
- imoverclocked 3y agoYeah, it's true that having all email in a few very large baskets is risky. However, running an email server is also not without risk and requires significant IT investment at any kind of reasonable scale. Keeping up with all of the auth mechanisms, spam, block lists, security vulnerabilities etc takes real focus. It's not something an IT shop with a just single guy should take up... I think the real risk is relying on email at all anymore. The underlaying protocol dates back to the era of "let's see if we can get bits to move at all" which predates any kind of "how do we know what we are getting is authentic" style of design. There are plenty of other avenues for communication that don't succumb to the many inherent pitfalls of email.
- johannes84 3y agoI am honestly confused what big risks you believe to be connected to running your own email server, and what you think would be a significant IT investment? For context, I have been running a Debian mailserver (postfix + spamassassin + dovecot) with autoupdates - and occasional major version updates - for family and friends since 2007. Barring the occasional period of being preferentially delivered to the spam folder, I have not experienced any problems. My major benefit: I am sure that if a mail is sent to me, I will receive it. The system is running on one of the cheapest root servers from Hetzners used server market, and it also runs an odd set of other websites and VMs, so the IT investment is limited. I also consider the administration and update tasks as a form of continuing education in my profession.
- Terretta 3y agoDo you distill your own alcohol as well? I wonder if those who say they're "honestly confused" why someone would let someone else do undifferentiated heavy lifting for them are not really confused.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- K0balt 3y agoThis is going to be very interesting to see the mechanics of this, since Microsoft claims newclimate.org is not on any blacklist….yet an individual organization can appeal to Microsoft to have the url unblocked and apparently it makes it work, but only for their organization. That seems on its face like an impossible contradiction to me. Interesting to me that this also blocks sending the IPCC report even as an attachment. This certainly seems oddly targeted, but I doubt that Microsoft is intentionally to blame. More likely their infrastructure is compromised and someone is selling blacklisting as as service lol.
- outside1234 3y agoOr there is an out of control ML algorithm here or...
- ender341341 3y ago> This is going to be very interesting to see the mechanics of this, since Microsoft claims newclimate.org is not on any blacklist….yet an individual organization can appeal to Microsoft to have the url unblocked and apparently it makes it work, but only for their organization. > That seems on its face like an impossible contradiction to me. I could see some sort of whitelist that overrides some sort of machine learning based blocking. Not to say it's super reasonable but that's the only reasonable thing I could think of, with perhaps not applying it wholesale being that it would allow spammers to just include a link in background color to bypass spam protection or something
- johnea 3y agoThis is exactly why organizations should run their own email servers...
- upofadown 3y agoIn general you should avoid doing your email through giant providers like Microsoft and Google. They just don't care. Smaller providers are more interested in ensuring that everything is actually working.
- nullindividual 3y agoThis is generally not practical for medium to large companies.
- UberFly 3y agoSo true. Also running your own mail server can be a nightmare with bigger problems.
- Avamander 3y agoBoth approaches have their downsides. The small providers can get caught in the gears of large providers or even smaller providers using idiotic RBLs (sometimes a single one that causes a permanent reject). Nobody dares block Gmail or O365 however. But you won't have an undiagnosable spam filter. Depends on your risks.
- doctorwho42 3y agoUnfortunately those kind of decisions tend to be left up to C-level individuals who generally only look at the costs associated with that decision. Hell, even MIT has succumbed to this pressure - they are in the process of migrating the entire campus from an onsite hosted Microsoft exchange server system to cloud hosted microsoft 365 email system. To the laments of the users and the IT staff who have to support it. From a system that has served a massive user group like MIT successfully with little downtime for over a decade to a system that has already caused multiple issues - even when they are still migrating people after 6 months...
- happytiger 3y agoNot very subtle. I’m sure it will be chocked up to “a misfiring spam filter” but after John Stewart’s unceremonious firing from Apple for his truth seeking content plans one begins to wonder.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoTo be blunt, I don't understand how people who work in technology, and who often see the result of bugs when dealing with an enormous amount of complexity, are so quick to jump to conspiracy theories when the "misfiring spam filter" is infinitely more probable. To emphasize, I think New Climate's blog post does correctly highlight the fact that when "the algorithms" go haywire, it feels like it takes multiple acts of God to get a human to actually fix the issue. But I'm just tired of the lazy appeal to "What The ELiTes DoN't WanT You TO KnOw!!!" whenever a bug pops up (and, ironically, who the "elites" are solely depends on what tribe you identify with - in this case, if you're pro-CO2 reduction, the elites are evil corporate masters seeking more use of fossil fuels for their profits, and if you're on the other side the elites want to use climate change as an excuse to stifle the economy and keep the peons in their place).
- WD40forRust 3y agoThe elite are the group of people you can't question or criticize in front of some normal person without destroying your reputation.
- happytiger 3y agoNo group should be protected from being the subject of open conversation in an open society.
- SoftTalker 3y agoYeah I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think it's a bug, or they are trying out some "AI" on their spam filter and it needs better training. But it also illustrates what could happen. Microsoft or Google could decide to silence email on certain topics, or they could conceivably be ordered to do so. Would they refuse? Doubtful. And they are so big and handle such a large percentage of email that it would have a real impact.
- annoyingnoob 3y agoI have an O365 account in one of Microsoft's Government clouds. I sent an email from my personal (privately run) email to my o365 account with only newclimate.org in the body of the message. The message was sent to Quarantine in the Gov cloud - where it shows as Malware. Microsoft shows "URL detonation reputation, Mixed analysis detection". Seems Microsoft thinks newclimate.org is hosting malware. I sent a second message from my personal account to my O365 account, with just my company's URL in the body. This one was delivered right to the Inbox.
- SoftTalker 3y ago> Microsoft thinks newclimate.org is hosting malware Maybe they are? Not saying intentionally, but perhaps they have been compromised?
- annoyingnoob 3y agoI was trying not to make a judgement call and just report my findings. In my experience with Microsoft's URL detonation, it could go either way and be a false positive or be real. In one case where I had a definite false positive, opening a ticket with Microsoft resolved the issue within a few hours. Both myself and the entity with the false positive are government cloud customers, maybe our experience would be different in the commercial cloud. Interestingly, this issue seems to affect anyone using Microsoft hosted email without regard to which cloud you are using. Different data centers, separate implementation, but some shared data apparently.
- martinskou 3y agoGetting support for something like this at Microsoft is impossible. They don't care at all. They will reply with standard responses from some supporter without any access or knowledge of the inner working of the system. I do understand the ideer of letting a large IT organisation handle you email. Working email is a high priority, if not Microsoft or Google can make it work, who can? But as soon as there are any problems a little out of the ordinary, its clear that choosing something like Microsoft or Google is a really bad idear. It's not possible communicate with anyone who know anything. As more and more are moving their solutions to Microsoft and Google, they will be in a position to strangle any smaller providers. They are a thread to the free internet!
- distract8901 3y ago"Have you tried SCF /scannow?"
- worewood 3y ago"make sure all windows updates are installed" "Update your drivers" "Have you tried a clean install?"
- nitinreddy88 3y agoIf you are O365 customer, open support ticket and I am pretty sure they have 48H SLA to respond or reach out to you.
- john-radio 3y ago"Idea", by the way, since you randomly misspelled it twice, I supply the correction in case you're a very proficient English learner.
- ethanwillis 3y agoSo uh. Well, I'm from the american south and I've heard plenty of people say idear instead of idea. Mostly older people or people with very strong rural accents/dialect. Apparently also a british thing I just found out: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/32630 https://english.stackexchange.com/a/32630
- crop_rotation 3y agoYes outlook does some very poor spam filtering. Case in point, my food delivery email arrive hours later on Outlook, while the same arrive on gmail instantaneously.
- kqnrnq17r 3y agoDo you checked this? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-disables-bad-spam-rule-flagging-all-sent-emails-as-junk/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-di...
- wly_cdgr 3y agoI don't understand why so many of the comments seem inclined to assume this is unintentional. Given the extreme sensitivity of the issue and the extreme amounts of money/power at risk / in play on all sides, it seems highly likely that this is intentional (although not necessarily official MS policy - it could of course also be internal bribery-fueled sabotage and/or a hack).
- sentientslug 3y agoHanlon’s razor. Occam’s razor.
- BirAdam 3y agoI had the exact same thought. However, we’re it intentional, I’d also assume more climate sites would be affected. Still, the thought that MS could be on the payroll of an oil company? Seems banal to me.
- DharmaPolice 3y agoI think it's much more likely to be accidental but its easy to imagine that if someone had a beef with this particular organisation they could easily falsely report many of their mails as spam/malware. After a certain number of unrelated reports the filter is likely automated.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- anonymousnotme 3y agoI have been of the personal opinion that email should be end to end encrypted. This would be another reason why. Think about how much personal information is easily exposed by non-encrypted email. It would be like having the 99.9% of the web sites still using http as opposed https. I have seen more than one doctors office have an agreement that they want you to sign so that they can send one unencrypted email. (Most people don't pay much attention to the agreements that they sign and non-technical users likely don't know that their emails can easily be read by several parties.)
- itsdrewmiller 3y agoI tested this just now from my gmail to my work office365 and received it just fine, fwiw.