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Chris, While working on it I found myself wondering if a better response to a
spam notification from an ESP might be to switch the member over to
"web access only / no emails" rather than rather brutally cancelling
their membership. I thought that had been mentioned in beta, but a quick search doesn't turn it up. So perhaps you could. I think the idea, at least initially, is that these reports are (supposed to be) instances of the member marking a message as spam. And in that case removal is appropriate and useful. Unfortunately Mark isn't told how the marking came about. Shal -- Help: /static/helpMore Help: /g/GroupManagersForum/wikiEven More Help: Search button at the top of Messages list
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On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 04:41 pm, Shal Farley wrote:
I think the idea, at least initially, is that these reports are (supposed to be) instances of the member marking a message as spam. And in that case removal is appropriate and useful. Unfortunately Mark isn't told how the marking came about.
I think in the circumstances it is reasonable to conclude that on the balance of probabilities that the member concerned didn't mark the message as spam. Groups.io only sends emails to individuals who have voluntarily joined one or more Groups hosted by it; it thus seems highly unlikely that anyone receiving a Groups.io email would mark a message as spam, and that such a marking was therefore most likely done by the ESP. However Bruce Bowman's post revealed a flaw in the idea of spam reports triggering a default to web - only access rather than a deletion of membership, and on the face of it that flaw could be a show - stopper as far as this suggestion is concerned. Ah well... it was a good idea while it lasted, which wasn't very long. Chris
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Shal; I noticed that you had done quite a lot of work on the draft wiki page, for which many thanks. I was going to take a small step back at this point because I don't want to risk triggering an Edit War, even by accident, although so far I haven't seen anything material that I would change anyway.
However, I have added the "Notice to Member" in the space you left based on the one referred to me yesterday; having just spotted how to insert a horizontal line (I hope!) I am about to put up a copy of the current Notice to Owner & Moderators.
I hope this will prove acceptable.
Regards,
Chris
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Shal; thanks for that. Since you are happy with progress so far here is the link to the draft again so that others can comment should they feel the need: /g/GroupManagersForum/wiki/Removed-for-spamPlease don't anyone edit the Notices to Members or Owners & Moderators as they are as currently as sent out by Groups.io Regards, Chris
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At the risk of beating a dead horse, one last note for the newbies...
A little over a month ago, all of a sudden the entire groups.io domain was being flagged as a phishing site by Norton, AVG, and perhaps others. I had just transferred my group and spent a lot of time convincing my members that we hadn't made a big mistake in abandoning Y!G and all the "red banners of death" they were experiencing were just a false alarm. Mark and many others turned in reports telling these providers that groups.io was fine; nonetheless, at least one internet security provider continued to flag the groups.io web site as a source of malware for more than a week.
As it turned out, a single spam report to Norton/Symantec may have been the source, which propagated through the other providers like wildfire.?
This event convinced me that handling of spam reporting is not something that we can play fast and loose with.?I can't speak for other group owners, but having a member occasionally get bumped off -- and the mild annoyance of reinstating them -- is a small price to pay to avoid a repeat of that.?
Is it irritating? Yes. Complaints of this nature will no doubt continue to filter in here because we're the only ones willing to listen and respond. But to have any real impact, they need to be directed to the source of the problem...one's own ESP.?
Thanks for listening to my rant.
Bruce
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"...a single spam report to Norton/Symantec may have been the source..."? once again, it seems like speculation, do we know if this is definitely true or not???
Isn't having Groups.io being considered a phishing or potential virus site by Norton and other security apps, and so they block the browser from accessing our site, different than simply having an email go into someone's spam account and we immediately unsubscribe them??
"I can't speak for other group owners, but having a member occasionally get bumped off -- and the mild annoyance of reinstating them -- is a small price to pay to avoid a repeat of that."
With the volume of messages about it, it seems like more than a mild annoyance to many folks.? And with the volume of new groups and users coming over all the time, it's only going to get worse.? Time to try out that "mute" feature, I guess.
Barb
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On 2018-03-19 07:05 PM, Bruce Bowman wrote:
At the risk of beating a dead horse, one last note for the newbies...
A little over a month ago, all of a sudden the entire groups.io domain was being flagged as a phishing site by Norton, AVG, and perhaps others. I had just transferred my group and spent a lot of time convincing my members that we hadn't made a big mistake in abandoning Y!G and all the "red banners of death" they were experiencing were just a false alarm. Mark and many others turned in reports telling these providers that groups.io was fine; nonetheless, at least one internet security provider continued to flag the groups.io web site as a source of malware for more than a week.
As it turned out, a single spam report to Norton/Symantec may have been the source, which propagated through the other providers like wildfire.?
This event convinced me that handling of spam reporting is not something that we can play fast and loose with.?I can't speak for other group owners, but having a member occasionally get bumped off -- and the mild annoyance of reinstating them -- is a small price to pay to avoid a repeat of that.?
Is it irritating? Yes. Complaints of this nature will no doubt continue to filter in here because we're the only ones willing to listen and respond. But to have any real impact, they need to be directed to the source of the problem...one's own ESP.?
Thanks for listening to my rant.
Bruce
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The question I have is why are they unsubscribed, rather than set to 'No Email'?
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On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 04:35 am, Jeremy Harrison wrote:
The question I have is why are they unsubscribed, rather than set to 'No Email'?
I floated that idea the other day, but another member of this group pointed out that he had "no emails" disabled, and of course other groups might do the same. Finding an approach that causes the least confusion to the greatest number is not straightforward. Chris
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Hi Chris, I would think that it could be programmed to override this and set to "No Email." Sent a note to the member and owners to rectify the situation. Almost the same as what happens now with sending a rejoin that probably goes to spam & an unsubscribe that goes to the owner.
On Tuesday, March 20, 2018, 7:57:51 AM EDT, Chris Jones via Groups.Io <chrisjones12@...> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 04:35 am, Jeremy Harrison wrote:
The question I have is why are they unsubscribed, rather than set to 'No Email'?
I floated that idea the other day, but another member of this group pointed out that he had "no emails" disabled, and of course other groups might do the same.
Finding an approach that causes the least confusion to the greatest number is not straightforward.
Chris
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On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 06:02 am, Paul Ohio USA wrote:
I would think that it could be programmed to override this and set to "No Email." Sent a note to the member and owners to rectify the situation. Almost the same as what happens now with sending a rejoin that probably goes to spam & an unsubscribe that goes to the owner.
?
I will not attempt to guess what can or cannot be (easily?) programmed. Your point about the "rejoin" message is a good one though; in the most recent incidence on the Group for which I am a moderator the alleged spam went to the user's spam box, and started the trouble, while the rejoin message went to his inbox as normal. If it had gone to spam then he wouldn't have known anything until I emailed him separately from any Group influence. This raises two possibilities (perhaps more), the first being that the member's ESP is entirely capricious in the way it determines something as being spam; the second is that it is not the message from Groups.io per se that upsets it, but something within the email, even the identity (email address) of the originator of the message, i.e. the other member. It's something of a Donald Rumsfeld moment; we don't know what we don't know. Or at the very least I don't... Chris
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I haven't had any trouble with groups.io emails, but I definitely have a few others where this happens.? For examples, I get emails from Panera Bread reward program, sometimes they get through and other times they end up in the spam folder.? Who knows?why.
Barb
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On 2018-03-20 09:19 AM, Chris Jones via Groups.Io wrote:
On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 06:02 am, Paul Ohio USA wrote:
<snipped>
This raises two possibilities (perhaps more), the first being that the member's ESP is entirely capricious in the way it determines something as being spam; the second is that it is not the message from Groups.io per se that upsets it, but something within the email, even the identity (email address) of the originator of the message, i.e. the other member.
It's something of a Donald Rumsfeld moment; we don't know what we don't know.
Or at the very least I don't...
Chris
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On 03/20/2018 01:36 PM, Barbara Byers wrote: sometimes they get through and other times they end up in the spam folder. Who knows why. This gets into threshold scores. Depending upon the specific email vendor, once a certain number (either as a straight number, or as a percentage) flag something as spam, the message is automatically reclassified as spam. Email from Rewards Programs tend to have high "is it spam" scores. It is entirely possible that just one person tossing the message into the spam bucket, pushes the spam score over the threshold, and reclassifies it as spam. (Assuming the algorithms are basically the same as they were a decade ago, a priority of "junk" will score 2 or so points lower than a priority of "urgent". Back in the early days of spam detection, a priority of "urgent first class" would ensure the email was classified as spam. jonathon
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On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 03:30 pm, Walter Underwood wrote:
I¡¯ll add some technical info, including mail providers who are suspected to use p=reject.
I see that Mark included a list of ESPs with which Groups.io has signed up to using a FBL; he included the following in a post on the beta group: We're signed up for the following FBL systems: , , , , I have pasted the "work in progress" version of the wiki page into the Group of which I am a Moderator with the caveat that it is subject to change; better that members have some awareness of the situation than none at all. (If past experience is anything to go by not many will bother to read it anyway; you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink...) Chris
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On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 03:53 pm, Chris Jones wrote:
I have pasted the "work in progress" version of the wiki page into the Group...
I've done something similar...that is, to create a member notice with the appended text. It's called "Some Notes on Spam Filters." So far, I haven't had to send it to anybody, but I suspect it's only a matter of time. I plagiarized much of it from others here on GMF with only minor edits on my part. All credit to them. Hope this helps, Bruce
Recently, many ISPs and email services have implemented a new "feature" that was supposed to reduce spam for their email users. When you mark a message as spam in one of these email services, it sends an unsubscribe request to Groups.io. Unfortunately, Groups.io and similar services must comply with this arrangement or risk having ALL of their messages blocked by that email provider.
Some providers will even do this without your intervention. What does this mean to you? If you mark a message from Groups.io as spam, or leave a message from Groups.io in your spam folder for too long, your email provider could send us an unsubscribe request, forcing Groups.io to unsubscribe you from this group. Groups.io has created a work-around that returns a message with a hyperlink that will immediately resubscribe to our group. The problem is, if that message also lands in your spam folder and you don't notice it, you remain unsubscribed. The options available to prevent this behavior depend on your ISP. The best way, if available, is to "whitelist" the groups.io domain (or [email protected] specifically) so that all group email is forwarded to inbox. Or you may be able to set your spam filter to not hold spam but instead *mark* it as spam and forward it to inbox for you to decide whether to delete it. That way the spam trigger isn't set and you won't lose any messages that your ISP thought could be spam but wasn't.
Another option to try is to change your message delivery options here on the Groups.io site. If you're set to receive individual emails and they're getting sent to spam, you might have better luck with one of the digest modes or a daily message summary. Please be advised that when you let someone or something else make these decisions for you, you may miss out on important information, and you might also be allowing your email service to unsubscribe you from messaging services. Thanks for reading this.
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On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 03:53 pm, Chris Jones wrote:
I see that Mark included a list of ESPs with which Groups.io has signed up to using a FBL; he included the following in a post on the beta group: We're signed up for the following FBL systems: , , , ,
Now that Verizon has offloaded its email responsibilities to AOL (with its customers having the option to retain their Verizon email addresses), I wonder if FBL applies to them too.
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Mark has edited the "removal messages" as suggested. Obviously I have thanked him (profusely!) for his help with this on the betagroup where he announced the change, and I have asked for a copy of the message to members to be posted so that it can be incorporated into the wiki.
I will undertake the necessary edit to add the new format, but I am tempted to keep the old format in place for a little while so that anyone reading the wiki can see how things evolved. The old format can be removed at a later date.
Regards,
Chris
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I have added a list of Service Providers with which Groups.io is known or believed to operate FBLs to the draft wiki.? /g/GroupManagersForum/wiki/Removed-for-spam The sources for the list were posts on this and the beta group, with the arguable exception of rocketmail; its inclusion seemed logical given its ultimate ownership.(Being in the UK my knowledge of US and other worldwide SPs is rather incomplete.) If any members of this group have personal knowledge of other SPs operating FBLs then please edit the list accordingly; the most likely source is anecdotal evidence based on Owners & Moderators seeing members unceremoniously removed from groups they operate. I am still awaiting details of the amended "notice to members", but hope of seeing a copy is beginning to fade. Regards, Chris
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Shal Farley
jeff stai wk6i
Walter Underwood
Bruce
Bill Feidt