Keyboard Shortcuts
Likes
- GroupManagersForum
- Messages
Search
Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
Brian,
I don't think we should be trying to take a tutorial style approachI 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 |
Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
Brian Vogel
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 |
Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
Jeff Powell
On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 05:18 pm, Shal Farley wrote:
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 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.
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.
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).
One can dream. ?:) --jeffp |
Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
¿ªÔÆÌåÓýI 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 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." |
Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
Jeff,
As a result of digging into that and this thread, I decided to figureThanks 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 byThe 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,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 isIt 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 problemsYou 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,All I can tell you is that Mark is. Or was. /g/beta/message/10753 /g/beta/message/11900 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. Shal |
Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
Brian Vogel
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 |
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 declassifyI 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 ofOr at the very least, reminded. Shal |
Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
Brian Vogel
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 |
Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
¿ªÔÆÌåÓýI 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:
|
Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
Brian Vogel
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 |
Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
¿ªÔÆÌåÓýI think it depends on the technology you use. Sometimes it¡¯s not so easy. I can only move emails out of spam to the relevant inbox when using my iPhone or I can delete them if they really are spam. I can¡¯t mark any as Not spam. When I look at those same emails on my macbook they appear in my inbox where I¡¯ve moved them in brown type and can be marked from there as Not spam. I haven¡¯t discovered a way of doing this on my phone. I suppose there are people who do not have access to a computer for mail and rely entirely on their phones or tablets for email?Louise
|
Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
J_Catlady
Brian, J On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 1:27 PM, Brian Vogel <britechguy@...> wrote:
|
Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
Brian Vogel
I'll have to disagree that this is not a user education issue.? Automatic spam classification is not new. You'd think by now people would know about the need to declassify messages automated as spam or to whitefish in their email access method, but many don't. 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. |
Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
J_Catlady
I'm not sure the answer is "user training." My impression is that these users are not themselves marking the messages as spam. It's the email programs that are doing it, which makes the situation even more sinister.? J On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 11:00 AM, Jeff Powell <jrpstonecarver@...> wrote:
|
Re: Group Members Marking Group Messages As Spam
Jeff Powell
I just figured out that a member went missing because they marked a message as spam and didn't see the email to get back in (because it was automatically marked as spam too). As a result of digging into that and this thread, I decided to figure out how common this is in our group. I pulled the activity logs for "reported a message as spam" and "resumed membership" since our group arrived on groups.io. ?Thankfully I could copy/paste them into plain text files for analysis. (It might be nice if things in groups.io were easily exportable by the moderators and owners... logs, member lists, message history, etc. Worth considering at some point.) Anyway: People have marked group messages as spam 65 times. People have resumed membership only 46 times. Looking at the people who have marked group messages as spam:
And obviously 19 people have done it and not come back to the group. The domains where this has happened are:
That is, 41 different yahoo.com addresses have done this, 13 aol addresses, etc. This is since 9/23/16, which is about when we moved over from yahoo groups to groups.io. Clearly we need to do more user training. A lot of people still mark email as spam, and the results are significant. 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). Perhaps I should consider emailing the people who marked messages as spam and didn't come back to see if they want to. Or, honestly, I could ignore that. With 2100 members, if they want to come back they can reapply on their own. 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. 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. We have many yahoo email users, and their messages continue to get through, despite the person who has done this 8 times being a yahoo user, and having 40 other yahoo email users that have done it as well. Until I see some evidence that one user's actions can affect others, I am not particularly worried about that. --jeffp |
Re: Email to group owner not coming through
Barb,
I had already selected to receive all email in the subscriptionsThat's not the part that controls messages sent to the +owner address. Below the Advanced box you should find a list of checkboxes for which type of mod notices you receive (New Member, Pending message, etc.) and below that is the option for Owner Email. And I checked my spam box - they are not there. I noticed that when IYes, it did. Before you added a subgroup your +owner address would have been TemariChallenge+owner @ groups.io (spaces inserted by me). You might try that one, and if it works that would be something to tell support. When you have subgroups the format of your groups email addresses changes. The subgroup name comes first and the overall group name gets put to the right of the @ sign. For the primary group the default name is "Main", but you can change that at the top of the settings page (the "Group Email Address" option). If you change that then the +owner address would change correspondingly. If it doesn't that would also be a support issue. I sent a test email from another email address that I own in case itThat's actually a good experiment. In the "Owner Email" option you have a choice of three settings: "All Emails", "Subscribers Only", and "None". So if you had selected "Subscribers Only" then there could be a difference based on your sending address. But it should have been the other way around: you *would* get the message from your address that is a member of the group, but *not* not from your other one (unless it too happens to be a member). Another thing that may shed some light on what's happening: in your group's Activity page, the Message Activity log should show your attempts to send to the +owner address. The entries would read like: name <email address> sent message "Subject" to owners date/time If entries like that are not showing up that means the problem is on the receiving side of Groups.io - either you misspelled the +owner address or there's a bug in how it is being handled for your group. When you sent your test messages, did you get any form of bounce or erorr notice back in your email interface (the one you sent from)? If those entries are there, then the problem is on the sending side: either Groups.io didn't forward the +owner messages to you, or your email service misdirected them somehow. Shal |
Re: Email to group owner not coming through
Frances,
As you said, it is in Subscription page for each group you belong toIn mine the moderator notices, and the Owner Email option, are below the Advanced Preferences drop-down, but outside it. That is, I don't have to click on and open up the Advanced Preferences to see it. Somehow I would have thought it would be in Settings. I guess thisCorrect. It is in each mod's Subscription page so that each has their own control for it. Something in the Settings page would be one control for all of the group's mods. Shal |
Re: Email to group owner not coming through
I'm pretty sure that the Help address just sends a canned response with information about the group. I don't believe that the owner can change any of that (yet?).
Sounds like you should report your owner address problem to [email protected] so Mark can look into it. It may be a glitch in the main/subgroup email system. Duane PS I'll send a quick message to it so you can see if it gets through. |
Re: Email to group owner not coming through
I had already selected to receive all email in the subscriptions area. I check advanced section and didn't see anything that would affect delivery. This is what I selected: All Emails Receive every message that is sent to [email protected]. On the home page, I found these addresses that still don't work:
And I checked my spam box - they are not there. I noticed that when I added a subgroup, "main" showed up in the name of the group. Wondering if that addition changed anything?? Barb? I sent a test email from another email address that I own in case it didn't go through because I'm sending mail to myself. Weird thought maybe, but I tried it :) |