Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 11:31 am, Jeff Powell wrote: Looking at the people who have marked group messages as spam:
* 1 person did so 8 times
* 3 people did so 3 times These people (who marked group messages as spam more than twice) hurt entire groups.io email reputation, they are the main cause why email services put messages from groups.io into the Spam folder or bounce them. This affects not only your group, but all groups on groups.io. Please ban these people from your group. I don't believe in education in such cases. Some people are too stubborn or/and too stupid.
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Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
I am new to Groups.IO but have operated lists on many services over the
last twenty-five years.? I would like to offer a couple of
additional thoughts on this subject because I believe the problem is
being made much more difficult than it actually is.
The basic comment starting this thread was the suggestion that users
should be encouraged to never mark a group distribution item as
spam.? The concept is simple, and if you understand how the group
distribution system works and how the spam identification process works
at most ISPs, you will understand why none of your users should ever mark
group distribution messages as spam.? List administrators must
encourage their members to report unwanted messages to them so management
action can be taken at the list level.
Let me start by explaining that most of the ISPs do not do their own spam
identification.? The majority of them, and almost all of the larger
services (AOL is the prime example), use the spam identification services
specifically set up to track the source of spam.? The spam
identifiers (like SPAMCOP and many others) get their raw data from the
ISPs when users mark a message as spam.? The problem that has
evolved is that some of the spam identification sources (unfortunately
some of the ones used by many ISPs) collect the forwarding mail server IP
address as the source of the item marked as spam.? Many of these
services are not sophisticated enough to know the difference between the
actual source of the message and the server that relayed the message onto
the Internet.
Clearly, when the spam identification services can not distinguish
between the source IP and the distribution IP, all of those messages
distributed by companies like Groups.IO look like they are all coming
from the distribution IP.? This results in the distribution IP
address being added to the spam list and all of a sudden many lists on
Groups.IO which are all supported by the same distribution server are
impacted because ISPs (like AOL) will not accept any messages distributed
by the Groups.IO distribution servers.
In summary, because of the unsophisticated analysis performed by many of
the spam identification services, the spam feedback process does not work
correctly for messages distributed by list service providers like
Groups.IO (I use HostMonster for many of my commercial lists and have the
same problem there when users.of other lists start marking messages as
spam and it is the distribution server that gets listed as the spam
source instead of the primary mail server where the message
originated.).
The solution is to insure that only users who want to be on
a list are included (use verification messages or sign-up forms), and
educate your users (and everyone else you can) that messages distributed
by list servers (like Groups.IO) SHOULD NEVER BE MARKED AS SPAM (I think
that was the original suggestion.? Hopefully all now understand
why.).? The task of insuring that none of their customers are
spamming unfortunately falls back on the list service provider (like
Groups.IO) since they must fight the battle of keeping their server IPs
off of the spammer lists.? Good list providers are actively
identifying which list distributions are being tagged as spam and
selectively culling their customers who do not police
themselves.
The bottom-line is that we as list administrators must work
together to manage this problem.? If we each insure that our lists
only contain recipients that want to be included, and if we make it clear
to our members that unwanted messages distributed by the list are to be
reported to the list administrator or moderator rather than marked as
SPAM, then the whole process will work better for all of us.
I suggest that each list administrator read this message twice.?
;-)
Regards,
- JimF
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Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
Xaun Loc, Unfortunately, at least for this discussion, one of the things it
CAN'T tell us is how many of the users on those large services are
using webmail and how many are using various email clients. That's true. Nor can it tell us which may be using a mobile interface, which in some respects may be more like a desktop email client than like the service's web interface. For example, if someone ran the figures for this group, I'd be
counted as a Gmail user, but I typically visit the Gmail web interface
about once a year just to see what they have done to screw it up since
my last visit (such as NOT letting me turn off their spam filtering); Same here, except I visit the web interface more frequently. In part to check into the Spam folder, and sometimes because I'm not at my primary computer but want to send a message. I also use the Gmail app on android, but composing messages there is ... painful, so I usually avoid that. whereas all my mail is handled via POP3/SMTP using an email client. Until tonight I'd say the same. But I just set up this account for IMAP/SMTP access on my primary computer. I decided it was time to find out how that works out for me. Shal
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Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
That's great information.? Unfortunately, at least for this
discussion, one of the things it CAN'T tell us is how many of the users on those
large services are using webmail and how many are using various email
clients.? For example, if someone ran the figures for this group, I'd be
counted as a Gmail user, but I typically visit the Gmail web interface about
once a year just to see what they have done to screw it up since my last visit
(such as NOT letting me turn off their spam filtering); whereas all my mail is
handled via POP3/SMTP using an email client.
Your wish is my command, since the members list download button is where you
pointed me to.? :)
2111 member email addresses downloaded
?? 973 (46%) yahoo.com
?? 574 (27%)
gmail.com
???? 51 (2.5%)
aol.com
???? 48 (2.2%)
hotmail.com
???? 34 (1.5%)
comcast.net
???? 31 mac.com
????
30 sbcglobal.net
???? 25
verizon.net
???? 22 me.com
???? 17
earthlink.net
???? 12 msn.com
????
10 ymail.com
???? 10
att.net
?????? 9
surfnetc.com
?????? 7
icloud.com
?????? 5
yahoo.co.uk
?????? 4
pacbell.net
?????? 4
mindspring.com
?????? 4 - 3 users per domain
(12 users)
????? 18 - 2 users per domain (36
users)
??? 195 - 1 user per domain (195 users)
So, Yahoo addresses are LOT more common than AOL addresses, at least in our
user base. I leave additional analysis to those who are interested.
?
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??????????????????????????????????????????????? Hi, tried to bring this up with mark on the beta, but either it did not get through, or he does not want to deal with it. I changed providers and now with my republic , and have to use hide.me, as when I try to access groups.io, says cannot access the page, have been in touch with my republic, they say it is a google problem, did get in contact with google Australia, and they say, no problem at their end. So any one had a similar or same problem, and how to fix this. Marvin. ? Sent from for Windows 10 ?
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Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
From: Brian Vogel Most e-mail clients and web interfaces (mobile is, indeed, a thing of its
own and would require more research) have relatively straightforward
ways to classify or declassify messages as spam.
I don't think we should be trying to take a tutorial style approach so
much as making users aware that they need to find out how their
e-mail interface of choice can classify/declassify a given message as
being spam and what whitelisting is and that they should consider
using this mechanism for their e-mail interface of choice when they
get the welcome message. This presumes that users are (1) capable of understanding, and (2) willing to expend some effort on their own My own experience suggests that even in relatively motivated groups, one or both of those conditions will often not be met. I also know that many will ignore this information, but at least it will
have been presented. I get really frustrated when people complain that
"well, they don't know that" when you've included the information, in
writing, and it's not buried in a message that looks like a legal contract Prepare to spend a lifetime of being frustrated.
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Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
Apples have email programs that allow you to train the Junk mail to automatically move messages from someone or containing certain words to the junk folder. The rules for doing this can be quite complex.
I use SpamSieve and get almost no spam. it all goes to the spam folder automatically and is deleted in a week.
Sharon.
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On Jan 28, 2017, at 6:06 PM, Brian Vogel <britechguy@...> wrote:
Louise,
I can't speak to how marking as "not spam" might be done on iOS since I have never been merged into the Apple borg and have limited exposure to iPhones and iPads. I would have to believe that there is some way of doing this.
J,
I really have no idea whether there are users who are actually marking messages from the group(s) as spam, but I would not be shocked one bit if some were. This is not to say that the automatic server side or even e-mail client classification is not also taking place as well.
As far as I am concerned basic e-mail literacy requires that you understand the idea of declassifying something that arrives marked as spam, regardless of what did the marking, and also how to do whitelisting. I have to believe that both of these things act as a feedback loop of some sort to the e-mail providers as their spam filters have to have some sort of "learning" mechanism and it sounds like group owners are getting back some pretty detailed information regarding when things are being bounced back as spam and which providers are doing this. That does leave a bit of mystery with regard to who is doing the marking, but it does give a direct indicator as to what companies should be notified that groups.io is a subscription service and anyone receiving any message originating from same had to intentionally subscribe in order for that to happen.
Brian
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Hi all, This week's change log: /g/beta/message/12766Feel free to reply to this topic if you'd like to comment on the changes. Or better yet, if you expect a lot of discussion start a new topic (or rejoin an existing one) about a specific change. o NEW: Now we're tracking deliveries of group notices. This is the big one for me, and likely for anyone who's been having trouble getting new members confirmed and approved. It means the "Email Delivery History" tab when you open a (pending) members page will be more complete - it will tell you whether the initial notices were accepted (successful) or rejected (unsuccessful, bounced) by the (would-be) member's email service. Alas, it won't tell you if the notice went to spam or was otherwise diverted from the member's inbox - those will still appear as successful. But at least you'll know that it was sent and that the problem is on the member's side. o CHANGE: Google has announced they will no longer permit .js attachments, so we're now also blocking them. One more for the list of .com, .exe, .bat, .scr and other banned file types. Sigh. More dysfunction brought about by the intersection of crooks and clueless. This one bugs me because every once in a while I or a coworker forgets and tries to send a test program to a client. BAM! message rejected. Sometimes we've even been blocked as a result and had to go to a client and ask them nicely to have a chat with their IT department (or outside service) about unblocking us. Which always sets up a bunch of tense inquiries from their management. Ok, so wrap it in a .zip file. Nope. Sometimes .zip is banned too, or else they are inspected and the forbidden file type found inside. So you rename the file to some harmless type. But then you have to explain to the client what they have to do to make it work. Uh, I guess I went a little ranty there. One my pet peeves. I hate that this is why we can't have nice things. o CHANGE: Changed the default order of the Emailed Photos album to most recent first. This will probably help out those who've been plagued with duplicates and other dysfunction in the list of Recently Posted Photo section of your group's home page. o CHANGE: We now catch duplicate messages sent to groups. Likewise of interest to those groups that have had this happen on incomming messages. Back to the changelog, anyone have comments about these, or others: o CHANGE: Changed the max number of messages in a digest from 25 to 12. o BUGFIX: If an invite had a name associated with it, we weren't using it when creating a new user. o CHANGE: Tweaked the formatting and sort order of the poll response page. Please call out any you find significant. Shal
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Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
Re gmail's spam filter, it has reliably put almost all of my messages from one mailing list that I'm very interested in into spam, despite my constantly marking them "not spam." So the description "amazingly accurate" is not what I've experienced with gmail. OTOH, I can't compare it with anything else, since gmail is all I use. J
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Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
Jeff, Your wish is my command, since the members list download button is
where you pointed me to. :)
2111 member email addresses downloaded ... Thanks again! I leave additional analysis to those who are interested. Um, ok. Taking the two together, I can compute the percentage of users of each service who've been removed for marking messages as spam: 41.7% msn.com 25.5% aol.com 8.3% hotmail.com 4.2% yahoo.com That way of looking at it makes Yahoo Mail no longer nearly as prominent. It is tempting to conclude that the MSN and AOL interfaces do a relatively abysmal job of guiding their users about managing their spam box and/or are much more likely to to automatically classify group messages as spam. But the numbers are really too thin to support such an aggressive interpretation. It would be shocking if such huge percentages held up taken over all of Groups.io. In fact, I only have a real answer for one: the person who has marked
things as spam 8 times. As far as I can tell she is doing it
deliberately, as part of trying to "manager her email box". I
suggested she not do that, but she continues to do it. Regularly. There's no accounting for some people. She's probably following instructions she was told, or thought she was told. Perhaps with some misinterpretation along the way. There certainly has been enough mythology about managing email, and particularly spam, over the years. And a lot of loose definitions of just what is spam. That said, years ago I worked for an ISP that handled hundreds of
thousands of email accounts. At the time, AOL was notorious for
blacklisting SMTP servers by IP address because they had a spam report
against it. Yahoo Groups fought that battle for years also. It prompted them to create a group dedicated to publishing their IP addresses in the hopes that the tech staff of email services would subscribe and whitelist them. Gmail's spam filters have been amazingly accurate for me, and I
haven't had a problem, but I guess it could happen. Unless they have
a different Bayesian database for each user (which was what the ISP I
worked at did, actually, but we were an oddball in that realm). I don't know that it would be a Bayesian filter, and likely not good old CRM114, but their behavior indicates to me that in the mix of things they consider there is something that more strongly weights ones own marking as spam (or specifically not-spam). When I first started using this gmail address with Groups.io I had many instances of the "New Subscriber" notification go to spam. It didn't take more than a couple of instances of marking them not spam and now they never do. Shal
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Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
Brian, I don't think we should be trying to take a tutorial style approach
so much as making users aware that they need to find out how their
e-mail interface of choice can classify/declassify a given message as
being spam and what whitelisting is and that they should consider
using this mechanism for their e-mail interface of choice ... I agree if the target "we" is all of Groups.io, meaning that I don't think the service needs to provide that level of Email 101 tutorial. Nor would I necessarily list that as a "best practice" for group management. But I don't object if some group owners want to provide that level of tutorial for their members, and I would endeavor to help them do that where I can. In my PTA and alumni groups I pay far more attention to member contact and satisfaction than I ever would in any general email list or group. But that's because these are people I know and have occasional contact with in person. A special case for sure, but probably not extremely uncommon. Shal
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Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
Louise, My basic contention is that if users are educated about the availability of a mark/unmark as spam feature and whitelisting in general terms, and what those are about, that would be sufficient. ?It is well-nigh impossible to do this in a way that is tutorial as there are myriad e-mail client programs and web interfaces to e-mail, and the vast majority support these functions, but the mechanics used vary widely. I don't believe that one can do a "generic tutorial" on these features because the mechanics used vary widely. ?However, alerting users that they need to know about these, describe their purposes, and tell them to have a look at the help for their e-mail interface or to do a web search regarding how their e-mail interface performs these functions is enough. We're never going to get anything near to 100% of users attending to this, but right now it appears that the effort is seldom, if ever, being made to let people know about these functions and why using them is important not only for them, personally, but in assisting spam filtering to be improved by their e-mail providers through collection of information about what has been reclassified by the user and why a user should not ever classify anything as spam that's not really spam. ?There is nothing that ever comes from an e-mail list, to which one must subscribe before ever getting a single message, that should ever be marked by the user as spam. ?In the case of groups.io in particular they should use the "Mute this Topic" feature to stop specific topics that don't interest them or, if they've lost all interest, they should unsubscribe from a group (and this applies to any mailing list service, not just Groups.io). ?Marking messages from mailing lists as spam is a part of a process that can, in the end, have mailing list materials being incorrectly classified by e-mail providers via feedback mechanisms, and that is not desirable.? Brian
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Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 05:18 pm, Shal Farley wrote: One thing that stands out is the preponderance of incidents relating to
Yahoo Mail. It would be interesting to know if that is proportionate to
the overall membership of the group. That is, are yahoo.com addresses
approximately three times as common in your group as aol.com addresses.
Likewise for each of the others you identified.
Your wish is my command, since the members list download button is where you pointed me to. ?:) 2111 member email addresses downloaded ? ?973 (46%) yahoo.com
? ?574 (27%) gmail.com
? ? ?51 (2.5%) aol.com
? ? ?48 (2.2%) hotmail.com
? ? ?34 (1.5%) comcast.net
? ? ?31 mac.com
? ? ?30 sbcglobal.net
? ? ?25 verizon.net
? ? ?22 me.com
? ? ?17 earthlink.net
? ? ?12 msn.com
? ? ?10 ymail.com
? ? ?10 att.net
? ? ? ?9 surfnetc.com
? ? ? ?7 icloud.com
? ? ? ?5 yahoo.co.uk
? ? ? ?4 pacbell.net
? ? ? ?4 mindspring.com
? ? ? ?4 - 3 users per domain (12 users)
? ? ? 18 - 2 users per domain (36 users)
? ? 195 - 1 user per domain (195 users) So, Yahoo addresses are LOT more common than AOL addresses, at least in our user base. I leave additional analysis to those who are interested.
It would be interesting to know what these users experienced, if they
could and would be willing to describe what happened. It would be
interesting to know, for example, if they took no action at all prior to
receiving the "you've been unsubscribe" message. That would confirm the
mounting evidence that in some email services merely allowing a message
to be automatically deleted from the spam folder is sufficient to
trigger a FBL report to Groups.io.
I don't have answers for all of them, obviously. In fact, I only have a real answer for one: the person who has marked things as spam 8 times. As far as I can tell she is doing it deliberately, as part of trying to "manager her email box". I suggested she not do that, but she continues to do it. Regularly. I have no indication from anyone else that they have been removed by messages automatically classified as spam, but it is possible, I guess. I note that at least 19 people have removed themselves (or been removed automatically) via this route, and none of those has come back. They are definitely possible sufferers of this fate. Some of the others that have come back might also have been automatically removed and never mentioned it to the moderators. I honestly don't know. > Until I see some evidence that one user's actions can affect others,
> I am not particularly worried about that.
All I can tell you is that Mark is. Or was.
/g/beta/message/10753
/g/beta/message/11900
I read those messages from Mark and I am still not convinced that there is a problem in which the actions of one person affect the actions of others, at least as far as removal or message delivery is concerned. That said, years ago I worked for an ISP that handled hundreds of thousands of email accounts. At the time, AOL was notorious for blacklisting SMTP servers by IP address because they had a spam report against it. They didn't care that the same IP address might be used by hundreds or thousands of domains that hadn't sent something classified as spam by an AOL user, and getting our servers off their blacklists was just about impossible. This was LOOOONG before the FBL mechanism, and only shows that AOL's email handling wasn't particularly nuanced back then, and I seriously doubt it has gotten any better. As a result, I suppose AOL, Yahoo, and others could be mucking about with message delivery for people based on the actions of others, but so far I cannot prove it. I am fairly certain that the spam filters do get training based on what lots of people report as spam, so if lots of messages from a given group hosted on groups.io get marked as spam by one user, the chances that messages from that group will automatically get marked as spam for other users of the same email service probably goes up. Last I knew most spam filters were statistical in nature, so it's not like marking one message makes it 100% likely that all future messages from the same group get marked as spam, but the chances go up, and the more messages are marked incorrectly, the more those chances rise. That affect, I am pretty certain, is real, and hurts us all. But if the people doing that get removed by the FBL mechanism, at least they don't get to cause it in a big way for lots of their fellow users. However, gmail users - where the FBL mechanism doesn't appear to be implemented - are impacted by people marking things as spam incorrectly. Or at least I think we could be. Gmail's spam filters have been amazingly accurate for me, and I haven't had a problem, but I guess it could happen. Unless they have a different Bayesian database for each user (which was what the ISP I worked at did, actually, but we were an oddball in that realm). I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that eventually the FBL mechanism
will be discarded in favor of one-click, and that the email services
will implement one-click in keeping with the spirit of that part of the
RFC which states that the email service MUST NOT initiate an
unsubscription without user consent (section 3.2). I'd rather it said
"express" or "explicit" or "in each instance" or other words to help
lead them away from ever having it initiated purely by automation.
One can dream. ?:) --jeffp
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Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
I am not able to tell from your email, Brian, as I received it on my iPhone, which part quotes Shal ?and where your message begins. Not sure whether that is the fault of my iPhone but I am not sure what I can do about it from my end. ?Is it just about educating the recipient? Louise
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On 29 Jan 2017, at 00:02, Brian Vogel < britechguy@...> wrote: On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 03:28 pm, Shal Farley wrote: I think the issue is what the users need to be educated about. And that varies with the email service they're using as well as the interface they use to access that service. Desktop web browser, mobile site via mobile web browser, mobile app[1], desktop IMAP/POP application. Others? ?I have to say that I can only partially agree with this, as I don't think what an end user needs to know has much of anything to do with what's going on "under the hood."
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Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
Jeff, As a result of digging into that and this thread, I decided to figure
out how common this is in our group. Thanks for sharing that research! You've turned up some interesting results, and with a group as large as yours the statistics should be more broadly applicable than what I could learn from any of my groups. One thing that stands out is the preponderance of incidents relating to Yahoo Mail. It would be interesting to know if that is proportionate to the overall membership of the group. That is, are yahoo.com addresses approximately three times as common in your group as aol.com addresses. Likewise for each of the others you identified. (It might be nice if things in groups.io were easily exportable by
the moderators and owners... logs, member lists, message history, ... The Members list is easily exportable. On the Members page there's a Download button. For me (in Firefox) it loads a plain text page in the browser. From there I can use Save As function in the File menu, or just Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C to copy the whole thing and then paste it into a blank Excel worksheet. I did this just now with my PTA group, and was reminded that the next step is to use the Text to Columns feature in the Data menu to separate the pasted info into multiple columns. I was then able to use this cell function (in a blank cell off to the right) =COUNTIF(A:A,"*yahoo.com") to learn that my PTA group currently has 82 Yahoo Mail users (out of 343 total members). And clearly some people don't get the hint and do it more than once,
regardless of the fact that they rejoin again (and again... and
again, and more in some cases). It would be interesting to know what these users experienced, if they could and would be willing to describe what happened. It would be interesting to know, for example, if they took no action at all prior to receiving the "you've been unsubscribe" message. That would confirm the mounting evidence that in some email services merely allowing a message to be automatically deleted from the spam folder is sufficient to trigger a FBL report to Groups.io. But the big takeaway for me, here, is that this problem is
significant, and that the message to get back into the group can
(apparently pretty easily) be marked as spam and never be seen by the
user. I don't know how to get around that, but this feedback loop
mechanism is pretty draconian, and the results are ugly. It is draconian, and unfortunately the worst aspect of it (a report following automatic deletion of a message automatically marked as spam) is entirely at the fault of the email service. The question is whether Mark could take a less draconian response to the report than unsubscription, while still protecting Groups.io's reputation with those email services, and that isn't at all clear. I read other posts here about how users doing this can cause problems
for others, but so far I see no evidence for that in our group. You likely wouldn't, as the mechanisms involved are statistical, and I would hope only lightly coupled between users. But what I would hope often has little bearing on what a major email service actually does. Moreover, if a consequence is message delay (rather than rejection or diversion) you might not be able to see the consequence at all. But if there's any evidence to be had, it would be in the Email Delivery History tab of the affected members. That would show outright rejections by that member's email service. Until I see some evidence that one user's actions can affect others,
I am not particularly worried about that. All I can tell you is that Mark is. Or was. /g/beta/message/10753/g/beta/message/11900I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that eventually the FBL mechanism will be discarded in favor of one-click, and that the email services will implement one-click in keeping with the spirit of that part of the RFC which states that the email service MUST NOT initiate an unsubscription without user consent (section 3.2). I'd rather it said "express" or "explicit" or "in each instance" or other words to help lead them away from ever having it initiated purely by automation. Shal
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Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 03:28 pm, Shal Farley wrote: I think the issue is what the users need to be educated about. And that varies with the email service they're using as well as the interface they use to access that service. Desktop web browser, mobile site via mobile web browser, mobile app[1], desktop IMAP/POP application. Others? ?I have to say that I can only partially agree with this, as I don't think what an end user needs to know has much of anything to do with what's going on "under the hood." Most e-mail clients and web interfaces (mobile is, indeed, a thing of its own and would require more research) have relatively straightforward ways to classify or declassify messages as spam. ? I don't think we should be trying to take a tutorial style approach so much as making users aware that they need to find out how their e-mail interface of choice can classify/declassify a given message as being spam and what whitelisting is and that they should consider using this mechanism for their e-mail interface of choice when they get the welcome message. ?I also know that many will ignore this information, but at least it will have been presented. ?I get really frustrated when people complain that "well, they don't know that" when you've included the information, in writing, and it's not buried in a message that looks like a legal contract. ?We can't literally speak to the users and the communication method of the medium we're talking about is text-based. Of course, this is a Catch-22 affair for users who are unsophisticated and who do not ever look in their spam folders to see if something has landed there should not have. ?I don't think that this particular conundrum has an answer, let alone an easy one. Brian
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Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
J, Brian, I'll have to disagree that this is not a user education issue. I think the issue is what the users need to be educated about. And that varies with the email service they're using as well as the interface they use to access that service. Desktop web browser, mobile site via mobile web browser, mobile app[1], desktop IMAP/POP application. Others? [1]: I think under the hood many (most? all?) mobile apps use IMAP protocol just as a desktop application might, but the behavior of mobile apps seems to be distinct enough to count them as a separate category. If one digs into the details enough it may turn out that there's a useful distinction to make between mobile apps that use IMAP for access, and those that use some custom interface to the email servers. Automatic spam classification is not new. Indeed, it is the very point of the Junk/Spam folders that have been in email interfaces for the last couple decades. You'd think by now people would know about the need to declassify
messages automated as spam or to [whitelist] in their email access
method, but many don't. I think that's true. And part of my evidence is that nearly every time I sign up with some commercial service that wants to send me email, the welcome information (whether printed, on the web site, or in an email) advises me to add their address to my address book. Not that that's the right way to whitelist in all interfaces, but common enough I guess. I think that part of the problem is that the filters have gotten good enough (few enough false positives) that people tend to forget about them. So when a systematic delivery problem crops up (such as notices or messages from an email list) the possibility that the messages were diverted to the spam folder doesn't leap to mind. Instead many users assume the sender didn't follow through. It is a natural tendency, when you try something new and it doesn't work, to assume that it is the something new that isn't working. It takes a moment of stepping away from the problem and looking at the bigger picture to realize that something old and familiar might be blocking the new thing. The practice of preclassification by servers came about because of
need and has been a boon. It's not going away and users who don't
understand what's what need to be taught about it. Or at the very least, reminded. Shal
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Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
Louise, ? ? ? ? I can't speak to how marking as "not spam" might be done on iOS since I have never been merged into the Apple borg and have limited exposure to iPhones and iPads. ?I would have to believe that there is some way of doing this. J, ? ? ? ? I really have no idea whether there are users who are actually marking messages from the group(s) as spam, but I would not be shocked one bit if some were. ?This is not to say that the automatic server side or even e-mail client classification is not also taking place as well. ? ? ? ? As far as I am concerned basic e-mail literacy requires that you understand the idea of declassifying something that arrives marked as spam, regardless of what did the marking, and also how to do whitelisting. ?I have to believe that both of these things act as a feedback loop of some sort to the e-mail providers as their spam filters have to have some sort of "learning" mechanism and it sounds like group owners are getting back some pretty detailed information regarding when things are being bounced back as spam and which providers are doing this. ?That does leave a bit of mystery with regard to who is doing the marking, but it does give a direct indicator as to what companies should be notified that groups.io is a subscription service and anyone receiving any message originating from same had to intentionally subscribe in order for that to happen. Brian
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Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
I think both things are happening.? Email services like aol,
yahoo, etc., quarantine messages into a spam folder, and it would
help to educate the user to check that folder with some regularity
since anything left there will eventually be deleted and
considered to be spam.? The other thing that is happening is that
some folks using an email client on their personal device may use
the spam button instead of the delete button once they've read
something without realizing the consequences.? Again education of
the user would be helpful.
Cacky
On 1/28/2017 4:01 PM, J_Catlady wrote:
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Brian,
In that sense I agree. But when Jeff says the user "marked a
message as spam" and follows that by saying they have to be
better trained, it sounds to me as if he's implying that the
user themself marked it as spam. I've heard this line of
reasoning from others, as well, and perhaps I am
misinterpreting.
J
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Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
I presume that folks know that "whitefish" in that last post was supposed to be "whitelist," but just in case . . . I think I have finally figured out how to get my D*^%ED "smartphone" to stop doing autocorrection that I sometimes miss as having occurred (and is not correct, but sure has been automatic)! Brian
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Lena
Shal Farley