Thank you to those who responded to my plea.
I have digested the e-mail headers and can see no change before and
after my ESP decided that all RFC Editor e-mail and some other IETF
Announce material are junk. (Note that this is one of a number of
classifications that the ESP uses - attempts to sign up to a IETF WG
mail list do not even get to the junk folder, they are discarded with no
DSN message before getting that far).
I have learnt two more things. The ESP website has among its options
one called block and that has an option 'Never block sender' so I have
switched that on. Whether that is the same as 'Never junk' I cannot
say. (Doubtless the answer is somewhere on someone's website but life
is too short to go searching for that).
My other learning is that this classification as 'junk' seems to be
context sensitive. I have more than one e-mail address and receiving an
IETF annuncement e-mail on both, in one case it is classified as junk
and on the other it is not so classifying e.g. RFC Editor e-mails as
junk may depend on what I have received on the e-mail address from
completely unrelated sources. Perhaps one e-mail address for each party
I communicate with is the answer:-(
On that note I shall shut up for 2022 and hope for more fruitful times
in 2023.
Tom Petch
On 27/12/2022 19:45, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
On 27-Dec-22 20:55, Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond wrote:
On 26/12/2022 22:11, John Levine wrote:
With all due respect, you have no clue what it's like to run a large
mail system. I only have some idea from talking to people who do.
While I am no happier than anyone else about filtering mistakes, or
the stream of spam from Gmail accounts that shows up in my inbox every
morning, it is not like they could snap their fingers and fix it. The
large mail systems have dedicated spammers who only attack specific
systems with specific attacks using hacks like targeted BGP injection
so that the traffic is invisible to everyone else.
You're right, I don't personally run a large system, but I do run
small and consult for medium systems, a great many of which are
getting replaced now by going off to gmail & outlook. I understand the
challenges are significant but I also deplore the decision to move to
gmail & outlook for, UK universities for example, who had a computer
systems department in the past but now have subcontracted it to an
outside contractor, who has in its turn subcontracted the email system
to gmail or outlook for purely commercial reasons (and it's less
headache). Email was one of the last means of communication that was
not vendor-specific and this is changing.
The outsourcing mania is not confined to UK universities. I don't think
the problem has much to do with "free" providers. Office365 is not in any
way a free service. I don't know which outsourcer is ultimately responsible
for Tom Petch's issues, or if the issue with involuntary users of email
outsourced to Office365 is general, but I've recently had very surprising
"550 Envelope blocked" rejects when sending from Gmail to such a user.
Gmail is a free service and we users know that makes us part of the
product, but its spam and bogon detection is civilised and trainable.
So far, it has been very rare for it to filter IETF list mail. It does
trap on the order of incoming 100 spams/day, but I don't see more than
~1 false positive per week.
Brian
