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

2015-02-22 13:07:19
Hi Andy,

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?

I don't know.  But I do know the good ones use it to influence the spam
score.

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.

SPF and DKIM results typically combine with Bayesian filtering to give
the score;  Bayesian alone isn't normally sufficient.

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...

You guess wrong.  It is useful.  I'm declaring what's valid and
interested parties can use it, and I've seen they do, to help judge what
they've received.

Did Hotmail accept the message over SMTP, or also deliver it to your
inbox?  What was the detail of their spam judgement, e.g. based on its
headers?  (Using Hotmail as an arbiter of quality!?  Would be
interesting to hear what Gmail does.)

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?

Bob is currently sending mail much like a compromised Comcast-user's PC.
He's aware of that.  Fixing it will *greatly* help his email appear as
ham to his recipients.  Yes, emails sometimes get wrongly classified as
spam.  "Then what?"  Well, it's typically established that it didn't
arrive and the recipient spots it and re-classifies, providing training,
or if it's too late, Bob re-sends and that's used for training.

(BTW, fully-justified text to 72 characters on a TTY is a pain to read,
especially when long `words' are common meaning every space has to be
two spaces on some lines, presumably more sometimes.)

Cheers, Ralph.

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