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Spam filtering from the "big three" is getting ridiculous...
We all want to fight spamming, it has become the "pain in the ass" of internet, along with DDoSing. But, the spam filters of the big three email providers are getting more strict, that leading to become email-killers and, as it seem, almost allowing just their emails (or emails from companies like mail channels) to get delivered properly and without grey zones to inboxes.
I have a couple of email servers that do have excellent reputation and are indeed clean. I have a very good deliverability from the mail accounts (less than 8-10 on each server). In the last months, I saw incidents of legitimate mails from accounts with minimal activity (5-6 mails per month) ending on spam folder on gmail or outlook. But I guess, OK, it is a personal mail server without lot of outgoing mails per month, so, maybe their filters when they see mails from those servers, handling them nowadays as not known and without reputation of big sending volumes. So, I would not complain to that. I know the disadvantages of running your own mail server, I am good with it, it's my decision.
But, today, I discovered that in my gmail account spam folder, ended there a couple of mails from the biggest ISP in Greece and one of the biggest local ISP in several countries in the Balkans (OTE/COSMOTE) with details about my account and the billing for it. Also, a mail with the monthly statement of my bank account from my Bank, also the biggest in Greece with powerful presence in a lot of other countries close to Greece, Alpha Bank.
So, where is this going to end? Legitimate mails from very big companies like ISPs and Banks with critical details and updates about accounts are ending now in spam. The next step is Gmail or Outlook or Yahoo mail allow only mails from each others? Controlling all the mail communication of the entire world?
Comments
That's the main reason why my company's email is through Google GSuite.
I want to make sure when we send mail it makes it to the recipient.
Googles filters I think are one of the best, I get legitimate email that goes to spam.
Once I click not spam a few time no more issues.
I'll gladly sell MailChannels to your ISP
For my personal domain I’ve got totally free e-mail on outlook exchange. Now, I’ll probably regret saying this but it does suprise me that a lowend community spends so much om mailing solutions. I’ve as far as I know never gotten my mails to any spam folder when being sent from that, literally, free hosting.
Don't use Gmail. Now you know why.
They want you to stay in their ecosystem. Most people use X so you should send through X and pay X for it, says Google and Microsoft without needing to open their mouths.
We have and had multiple issues with GMail, when perfectly legitimate mail (from old domains with good reputation - not a single actual spam message for many years) - is delivered to spam folders at GMail, no matter what.
Apart from actual whitelisting in every separate GMail recipient, nothing helps. Mail is properly authenticated, content analyzers do not ring any bells, yet GMail stubbornly places incoming mail into spam folders.
So no, GMail isn't a good example of correct spam filtering.
I think the saddest thing is that there is absolutely no information on why things are marked as spam. You can follow all the anti-spam measures you want and still get land in spam.
^^ This. I know they will never admit it, but it is the way giants are working. First, give mail with apps, domain handler, lots of goodies and plenty of space for free. Then, when you are big enough, start charging for things that were free till then. And then, when you are the biggest player of the field, protect your profits and number of clients by eliminating the small competitors, trying to show that the best solution is to use your ecosystem exclusively.
Using the excuse "we have to fight spamming", they can strict their filters the way they want and not giving any details.
I am not mentioning my own mail server, but the mails from extremely big companies for the size of several countries, that getting to spam...
Just the ISP does have more than 20.000.000 clients in several countries and over 5 datacenters in Greece and is nowadays a division of Deutsche Telekom (formerly the ISP was the state's public telephone company). So, if you could sell them MailChannels, then, you could also probably buy a good percentage of the stocks of MailChannels!
My least favorite of the big mail servers by far is Hotmail/Live. I've never had any issues sending small numbers of emails to Gmail. Live/Hotmail on the other hand? Those ticket reply emails are the worst kinds of spam.... you must join our program.
That made me smile again, what I read here.
So apparently you have a problem, that your email goes into spam from a big provider.
Did you checked there mailserver configuration ,if its properly configured?
Did you clicked "no spam" so, the algorithmus will learn?
Did you contact them? no?
A lot of people, fuck up the mailserver configuration and cry around.
Instead you come to LET and tell us you have a problem, okay no issues on there, but It seems like, you do not fix the issues but the symptomes.
But, Rescue comes, buy some hosted mail for millions, will fix your problems.
Jarland and Mike is here, to sell you some pills.
It's hard to tell whether there's a conspiracy somewhere at the big email providers (certainly possible), or whether the fight against spam has simply become so intense that they'd prefer to risk making some false positives.
@jvnadr: Not great what you describe, but personally, I would begin to really worry only when those mails don't arrive at all (not even in your spam folder)!
Have you even tried to read my post? What mailserver configuration? On my gmail?
Should a gmail user have to click the "not spam" button, when the mail is comming from the account "[email protected]" or "[email protected]"? Because this is what I reffer to, similar companies in Greece that their main mail accounts are ending to spam folder in GMAIL.
Again, have you even start to read anything I wrote? because the issues are not with my mailserver that I really mention, but from mails sent from a big ISP to my gmail account...
Please, don't try to become again the old Neoon and stick to the behavior you have achieved the last couple of years... You are a better member than that, now!
I agree, but if a mail from such senders won't even delivered even in my spam folder, it will be very difficult to find out...
And there is another thing, too: I am capable enough to search the spam folder or even detect any issues mails that do not end in inbox have.
But internet nowadays is for anyone, even the 70 y/o lady that can barely move properly the mouse in her computer. Even if she is not close to the average user, she still has to read emails regarding to staff she needs (accounts, communications, government updates etc.)
Maybe. But Google, for example, does have offices in Greece with a lot of departments. They sell services to local companies, so, I guess it would be easy for them to whitelist any mail is really coming from ***@cosmote.gr (the domain of the biggest ISP in Greece) or ***@alpha.gr (the biggest Bank in Greece). It's not like the company does not know what Cosmote or Alpha Bank are, like if it was a small country without no physical presence of Google (and even there, they should have some white lists).
Realistically I'm sure you're not wrong. I love a good conspiracy and I can't help but think at the very least someone is smiling at being able to use that legit situation as justification for driving further sales on their platform, but even if they are it doesn't change that the spam fight is real and legitimate. Gmail has had the best spam filters around for a long time and probably still does, but inevitably you're going to see a shift every year or so because spammers are anything but stupid.
Totally agree. Google does have the best spam filters, for sure much better that Outlook and Yahoo (the latter does have nowadays the most lose rules, IMHO).
Also, Google does not throw easily emails at all like Microsoft does, but instead, send them to spam folder, much better policy than not delivered at all.
That's why I really become surprised when I saw those two mails (from such respective companies in Europe) ending in spam folder and not in inbox.
I don't know if the conspiracy theory in real or not, maybe it is just a new escalate of their try to fight spamming. But I hope you agree, there is a thin line between fighting spam and end up blocking a huge amount of legitimate mails in the name of the fight... I hope they have not crossed that line (or are about to cross it) and my experience is just random...
Also, @jarland, from your own experience with mxroute and mailchannels, have you any clue if there is more entire dropping of email delivery on google's platform? Or things are statistically the same as a year or two before?
Outlook managed to flag mail I sent to myself as spam. The funny thing is, both the recipient and sender are outlook accounts. So it's basically flagging their own servers as spam too.
Weird, there's probably a threshold on how spammy a message can be, even on whitelisted (non spammy) domains and adresses.
Could be a false positive but spam rules work on more than just the sender address. Was it a test email? What was the subject and content? If you mark it as not spam does it still go to spam?
They should come on here and ask the advice of experts. I've seen plenty LET experts define what web spam is so they'll be able to transfer their knowledge to email.
If anything it seems like they're accepting more now. Probably to reduce complaints from users, they don't have to care about the outside world (the ones dealing with their backscatter).
In fact if you bomb someone's gmail account with a while loop in bash, you can get their inbound rate limited and they won't receive important emails until you stop. That's how permissive they are. Dangerously so. Had that happen to me.
This is important, if you have legit email incoming to your Gmail/Google/Microsoft accounts adding that from email address to your contact list helps those mail servers learn which emails you deem
not spam.Marking them as 'not spam' also helps. Gmail may also track user open/read rate of emails so if a user never or less frequently opens such email it could slowly be trained to marked as spam (that's probably where the gmail filter for mark 'not spam' comes into play too). Gmail probably assumes legit emails are frequently read and their from addresses are added to your contact list or specifically filtered to be marked as 'not spam'.
Guess that could work against mass email newsletters which are sent on a frequent basis as the targeted recipient may have gotten 100s of emails which are not actually read and not added to their contact list.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126
There are two important factors that, under normal circumstances, help messages arrive in Gmail users' inboxes:
Yes Gmail has basic assumptions of what end user would do for legit and important emails.
Email needs to go away. We need something new.
I've noticed that even through grossly misconfigured mail settings of Google Apps domains Google still favorizes their own mail servers and accepts mail, while for properly configured mail servers from outside, well, well, well, well, we'll see about that.
I'm aware of that, but this never happened before, and I send this type of email all the time. It's basically just a few lines of text + a photo as attachment (meeting notes + picture of whiteboard).
Any of you has this fun issue with Outlook.com/hotmail.com where you get email accepted for delivery (no bounce) and it neither reaches the inbox nor the spam folder, ever, even if added to the recipients whitelist ?
Oh, yes! Especially in servers that has smtp enabled just for sending notes, alerts and logs. I had whitelist the mail and server (all setup with rdns, spf etc.) and after a couple of weeks, all the mails that my server was sending in outlook was dissappearing! No reject, no bounce, just like getting in black hole!
This is something that has never happen with gmail or yahoo mail. Guessing setting up an account just for getting alerts and infos from a couple of private addresses, is not something MS likes...
For years. Tons of similar reports, no acknowledgement from MS. Have confirmed it to be related to two things in two different cases, and never confirmed in the rest. Of those two it was content-type header in one, and domain name in the other. The items causing the /dev/null filter to kick in, that is.
Yeah, but it's quite common it happens, even for non MS emails, some email providers simply just configure their rules to blackhole without giving a bounce.. It's always so damn amazing to debug.
Its happen to me a few time over the year, a pain to identify the issue since its shows as 250 queued mail for delivery in the log.
I've never managed to find what causes Hotmail to do it, I know it not a domain rep issue since if you send the same email from a other ip address using the same domain it works fine.
But what make the whole issue more weird is if you send a email from a other domain on the same server that the domain got discarded on with the exact same content it works fine.