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Re: [Nmh-workers] Emails being tagged as spam -- NMH solution???

2015-02-22 12:45:41
Thus said Ralph Corderoy on Sun, 22 Feb 2015 13:53:41 +0000:

Stop sending outgoing mail through  comcast as the smarthost; Gmail is
the smarthost instead.  You won't persuade the rest of  the world that
you're  really  dnc2dnc@gmail.com  unless  your  email  eminates  from
Gmail's servers. As well as publishing DNS TXT records containing SPF,
Google also use DKIM.

If by ``rest of  the world'' you mean Hotmail, Gmail  and Yahoo, you may
be  right, but  what  percentage  of the  other  ``rest  of the  world''
actually rejects  SPF and DK  when their  SMTP receives email?  Not even
Hotmail does  that; I can  sucessfully send an  email using a  MAIL FROM
with a forged hotmail.com/gmail.com address  and they will gladly accept
it, despite the fact that my IP address is not in their TXT record.

This means they are  just using SPF (I guess their  TXT record does have
~all) as a piece of evidence that is used to inform their email filters,
but if SPF and DK were really that useful to ``the rest of the world'' I
suspect they would outright REJECT the email rather than accept it. That
they don't leads me to believe that allowing arbitrary addresses in MAIL
FROM is still a useful thing, even for them.

All this tells me that they don't have very intelligent filtering tools,
and that SPF and DK are just  getting in the way of better approaches. A
simple naive bayesian filter (per user) would probably do better.

In addition,  I took  the liberty  of sending  an email  to @hotmail.com
using  your  domain  of  @inputplus.co.uk  which  has  a  published  SPF
specification:

$ dnstxt inputplus.co.uk
v=spf1 a:ruis.pair.com include:relay.pair.com include:webmail.pair.com -all

Hotmail accepted the message, despite the fact that your domain includes
-all. Guess SPF isn't that useful for inputplus.co.uk after all...

How does this help  Bob? Not much, except to say that  even with all the
ducks in a row, any changes he implements may still not help. Filters at
Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo may or may not still  decide to throw the message in
the Spam folder. Then what?

Andy
-- 
TAI64 timestamp: 4000000054ea1da9



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