On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 5:25 PM Liam Proven via cctalk < cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: Liam, As I said I can set up a filter but that does not really solve the problem it compensates for it in the cctalk world only. If you send an email from an old or incorrectly configured mail server to someone in gmail who does not have a filter ready to receive your message it will end up in spam and they won't get it unless they check their spam folder. If I was using a mail server that was causing messages to be dumped into the spam folder due to issues with mail gateway authentication/delivery, I'd want to fix it. Logical that one would want messages to be received and delivered to the inbox of the recipient with the highest percentage possible Bill

On 12/28/2020 2:25 PM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: Googles filters are garbage.? Problem not solved.? I still get plenty of spam markings by Google with the headers or something about the traffic. I get multiple messages that fail the filter rule (same as yours) which stay in the inbox as well. The only filtering system that's worked (so far) is the one in Thunderbird.? Also with the flow into Thunderbird, I don't use any spam filters, and never see any cctalk/tech messages left behind. Useless data, in early days when there was unlimited email storage I thought I'd be clever and subscribe on both my gmail account and my personal alias for cctalk.? Didn't work out that way because so much screwing up by google. thanks Jim

I've had similar problems with gmail (I get my mail via POP3, not over the web). I solved it by "whitelisting" the problem sites. Here's a "how to": https://www.jotform.com/help/404-how-to-prevent-emails-from-landing-in-gmai… --Chuck

Bill Degnan wrote: Bill, I used to do this stuff for a living until about ten years ago. A lot has changed since then. However, my experience as a small mailserver operator now is that few have problems getting mail from me except users of Google mail services. The big problem with Google is for someone whose business is communications, they just don't want to be communicated with. They don't want to know about faults with any of their services. They don't want to know about anyone abusing their services to send spam or to enable spam and they don't do anything about it unless their automated system detects it. Rogue ISPs have increasingly cottoned on to this and an increasing number of them use Google mail services or in some cases just plain gmail.com mailboxes for the abuse addresses they have to register in ARIN/RIPE/APNIC etc. Then they can ignore the incoming abuse reports forevermore while their corporate mail system chuggs along nicely without getting flooded by them. Better still, they can flag all their incoming abuse reports as spam to Google who will eventually decide the senders are actually sending spams, not genuine abuse reports and guess what happens next? Ever tried to phone Google? You end up in a voice mail jail that asks you in intricate detail what you want to talk to them about and then directs you to some useless web forum where people are talking among themselves about the problems they are having with Google. Unless you are calling Google to spend money on advertising that is. I don't know what happens in that case. Google need to review their motto and start living by it. Regards, Peter Coghlan.

On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 11:25:13AM -0500, Chris Zach via cctalk wrote: Well, I do not think goog needs to do anything other than what a business is supposed to be doing, i.e. money, by whatever means the law permits. Like, making ear catching motto to suck in all good-but-naive devs Of course. It makes trouble to other net users and tries to preserve itself by hiding complaints. Life would be easier for it if it actually tried to imitate poorly working spam catcher. Now imagine that there is no "off switch". It can only be persuaded by sending email to it, but since nobody knows the address, the only way is to actually send spammy messages to other people... on gmail... -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **

Well, even with proper DKIM mail and SPF records, Google still sometimes shafts my mail. No idea why, no one to talk to on how to make it better, no options other than "Get a Google mail account". Life like that.

On Wed, Dec 30, 2020 at 10:18:56AM -0500, Chris Zach via cctalk wrote: Why not both? I run my own mailserver which handles most of my email (both incoming and outgoing) and I have a GMail account, mostly for the GSuite, calendar and such. There is one mailing list that I forward via procmail from my private email to my GMail account (for reading on the go) and that works - so far, about 2-4 mails from that setup ended up tagged as spam this year (out of several mails per day, so while annoying, that is below the noise threshold). My mailserver has SPF records and TLS enabled for ... ages. I couldn't be bothered to setup DKIM yet. The only problems I had was when I was responding to an email from someone using hotmail and hotmail refused my reply ... well, I probably don't want to talk to Hotmail users anyway. ?\_(?)_/? Kind regards, Alex. -- "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison

I think this is an unfair characterization of the frustrations people have voiced. I agree individual engineers aren't out to get people with private mail servers, but: Stuff like the link you gave aren't the problem. The problem is when you're doing all of that, and it doesn't work (i.e., you're not part of this "vast majority"). I don't find it reasonable to assume everyone who's voiced frustration with Gmail isn't doing everything in that list already. When you get to that point, after all that sweat and work, there's no one to communicate with to find out which part of that black box of heuristics is still getting its nose out of joint, and it doesn't serve Google's interest to put any bodies towards that sort of communication because it costs money and it's not their problem. Plus, well, the more people who need to communicate with a Gmail user, the path of least resistance is ... Gmail. That works out pretty well for Google. with folks like us? -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Sleep, delicious and profound, the very counterfeit of death. -- Homer -----

Hi Mike, Thanks for chiming in on this. The big problem is bringing it to Google's attention. I spent hours over days looking for something like this (using Google searches) and I failed to find it. I always ended up in blind alleys that assumed I was a Google customer trying to get an email into my mailbox, not a correspondant of a Google customer trying to get an email out. My issue with Google and evil is that they provide no way that I can find to bring abuse of Google facilites (to send spam for example) to their attention so that the abuse can be stopped. For example, someone has been testing my mail server to see if it can be used to relay spam by forging emails as coming from various email addresses in my domain name and addressed to check212014 at gmail.com and attempting to feed these emails into my mail server (which doesn't accept them) from compromised ip addresses. This has happened nearly two hundred times over a period of five years now. I have made numerous attempts to bring this to the attention of Google so that they could put a stop to this check212014 mailbox being used for this abusive purpose yet I have failed. You seem to have the magic touch. Can you let me know how to bring this to Google's attention? (By the way, this doesn't tend to happen with hotmail.com addresses to pick one example. The reason it doesn't is because on the rare occasions when it does, reporting the issue to hotmail or whoever using the standard, easy to find abuse reporting mechanisms results in the problem being stopped and the spammer soon gets fed up having to set up new testing mailboxes every few days so they end up moving over to gmail.com instead where they can keep the same relay testing mailbox for at least 5 years.) Regards, Peter Coghlan.

Anyway, the issue with cctech/talk going to the spam folder as far as GMAIL is concerned is that spectrum.com does not encrypt the messages. I presume that's the mail server domain. Bill On Fri, Jan 1, 2021 at 9:47 AM Dave Wade G4UGM via cctalk < cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

You misunderstand. What is Gmail / Google specific about it is that this is going on for nearly 5 years using the same recipient mailbox because it is so far impossible to let Google know about it so that Google can can delete the mailbox being used to receive the results of the relay testing which would force the spammer create a new receiving mailbox nearly every time they test. Similar probing using receiving mailboxes on other major email providers systems does not last last more than a day or two before the mailboxes get deleted after mail admins reported them. Anyone who tries to do that will rapidly find out that it does not work and they certainly won't have to wait 5 years to find it out. There most certainly is something that Google can do. They can cancel the mailbox that is being used to receive the results of the relay testing, provided it is possible to let Google know that the mailbox is being abused that is. I just don't have that difficulty with other major email providers. Mike reports in another reply that he has unearthed a possible mechanism to let Google know what is happening so maybe the problem has is becoming soluble now. It will be interesting to see if the mechanism he found works. Regards, Peter Coghlan.

On 1/1/21 4:24 PM, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote: There is also the possibility that the bounce recipient is a perfectly legitimate user that is the victim of someone else purposely doing things to cause bounces (and other crap) to be sent to them. If anything, Google is likely to help defend such a user to filter out such junk while allowing legitimate email through. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

Hi Mike, I appreciate the trouble you are going to here. I am prepared to accept your suggestion in good faith. However, I am not a big fan of filling in webforms to report abuse. It is a slow and tedious manual process to have to engage with in comparison to the highly automated abuse I am attempting to deal with. It is difficult to create tools to make it easier for me and less error prone for me to fill in webforms plus I don't easily get to keep a copy of what I have put in the form for filing with the abuse reports I make to other major email providers. So, when I see further abuse of a gmail.com account, I find it difficult to see whether I reported this particular one previously or not and when. I resent having to jump through hoops to help Google do what they should be doing anyway. Many other mail providers are grateful for abuse reports received by whatever means is most convenient to the reporter of the abuse. They regard encouraging abuse reports as a way of minimising the abuse they have to deal with because their abusive customers tend to up sticks and go to another provider when they are repeatedly stopped in their tracks. I appreciate that you are the messenger here and I am trying not to shoot you. It's just that you represent the only feedback most of us have ever got from Google. Anway, I went to https://support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse as you suggested. This form is clearly designed to report spam sent from a gmail.com account, not a gmail.com account being used to receive the results of relay testing. The form has mandatory fields which require me to provide for example "Email headers of the questionable message". I don't have any headers for any of the messages concerned because my mail server rejects every one of them before the sender gets a chance to send headers as per best practice for dealing with unauthorised relay attempts. Even if I had headers, they would not be from an email sent by a gmail.com account. I am betting that when this form finally gets to a real person in Google, it will go straight in the bin because I wasn't able to provide email headers that came from an email sent from a gmail.com account. Nevertheless, I will try it anyway, just to see what happens. By the way, I looked at the other link you suggested earlier for getting mail through to Google: https://support.google.com/mail/contact/bulk_send_new It turns out I had come across this link before some time ago but had forgotten about it. I had formed the impression that this particular one was aimed at commercial mailing list operators who are having difficulty getting their (legitimate) mailshots through to gmail.com customers of theirs, advertising that people have signed up for by ticking the "please send me information about your product" box or the "please put me on your monthly newsletter" box etc. It does not appear it is designed to help out someone who is trying to get an email through to their friend who has a gmail.com account. I also took a look at https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126 which you suggested yesterday. This is definately aimed at well funded commercial senders of email that are sending out thousands of mailshots at a time, not the person in the street who is trying to communicate with a friend or someone with a shared interest. Just look at the original title of the page! It suggests I send messages that have different purposes from different ip addresses for heavens sake. (I can do this but do you think I am going to?) I apologise to my friends on cctalk for going on about this at such length and I don't propose to waste any more of the mailing lists time on this. (Unless everyone is actually sitting on the edge of their seats waiting to know what happens next that is...) Regards, Peter Coghlan.

Bill, As I said, I don't have problems sending mail to Amazon, Microsoft or any of the large (or small) email providers except for gmail.com and other Google email services. It really is just Google. I do have DNS properly configured, SPF in place and no TLS. I can't be bothered setting up TLS just to be able to talk to Google when others report that they still can't get through to Google even when they have TLS. Not only do Google not tell me why they will not deliver my emails to their customers, they don't tell their customers why they block non-spam emails that they want to receive either. The most a Google customer has ever been able to pass on to me that Google given them by way of explaination was something like: "This mail was tagged as spam because messages similar to it were spam" which of course is complete nonsense. Regards, Peter Coghlan.

On 12/30/20 4:35 PM, Cameron Kaiser via cctalk wrote: I'm quite convinced that Google isn't arbitrary. It's just that there are a LOT more variables in play than we know about, much less have control over. Including historical indicators that no longer reflect current values of the same indicators. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

Right. SPF is every bit as good as DKIM, the advantage of DKIM is you can use random servers as long as you sign your messages. Since I am small and run my own mail server, SPF is totally fine and can "prove" that I authorized the email. That's why either is fine for DMARC. But even with that and TLS encryption Google sometimes fucks with me. As I said, since our Govt is using it the result is I am locked out of the legislative process. Google. Well their goal is to make max money. If that screws people over then oh well. But in the meantime setting up SPF/DMARC and TLS on your mail server will fix most problems. Doing SPF checks on email also will cut down on your spam from "Big name" domains. And the reports you get back showing how many fails you have because shit-bags in Russia are trying to spoof your From: will tell you how sad it is out there. CZ

On 12/30/20 9:35 AM, Peter Corlett via cctalk wrote: That's not true. You don't have to do the cryptographic heavy lifting on the classic computer. You can easily do the cryptographic heavy lifting on other more contemporary computers which are used as a smart host for the classic computers. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

On 12/30/20 13:55, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: RFC 6376 mentions a low default bar of RSA512 but one could use libressl, which builds on less powerful computers. N.

My experience is also that Google will not tell me. They used to have web pages detailing what they were looking for years ago but I think it eventually dawned on them that the spammers can read these too. I have made sure my forward and reverse dns entries and the EHLO domain name my mailserver uses are all correct and I have set up SPF records for my domain yet Google still put lots of emails I send to gmail.com and other Google mail service users in their spam folders. Additionally, my experience is that when I find someone abusing Google services to send or otherwise facilitate spam, Google do not provide any way that I can notify them about this abuse. Best advice is to suggest to the sender that they use a different email provider, one that doesn't put their legitimate incoming emails in the bin. Regards, Peter Coghlan.

On Mon, 28 Dec 2020, Nemo Nusquam via cctalk wrote: True Independence of departments? When the spam filter people encounter something that THEY consider spam, they don't feel obligated to give it a pass, just because it comes from another department of their own company.

Folks, I used to manage e-mail filters for our local council. They were "pants". Generally I could spot spam just from the subject line, and for some reason they couldn't. Almost all the lists I am on have been having recent issues with things going to SPAM. I think a lot is because of the demise of Yahoo. ... and Microsoft cleaned up Hotmail a long time ago. I seldom see SPAM from Hotmail addresses. GMAIL more often, but most often it appears to be from a compromised windows machine Dave G4UGM

The IEEE also uses google! One of my NetBSD correspondents simply blocks all mail from google servers on his system! cheers, Nigel Nigel Johnson, MSc., MIEEE, MCSE VE3ID/G4AJQ/VA3MCU Amateur Radio, the origin of the open-source concept! Skype: TILBURY2591 nw.johnson at ieee.org On 2020-12-29 10:04 a.m., Chris Zach via cctalk wrote:

My original email alias was from computer.org.? Then I got a mysterious email saying that they were no longer going to offer computer.org email aliases, so I switched to ieee.org.? I had one site refuse to let me use my ieee.org email address to log on since the initial request came from a google server!? He called it a freemail account! Strange world we live in! cheers, NIgel IEEE member for 20+ years now - so I missed the computer society debacle of which you speak. Nigel Johnson, MSc., MIEEE, MCSE VE3ID/G4AJQ/VA3MCU Amateur Radio, the origin of the open-source concept! Skype: TILBURY2591 nw.johnson at ieee.org On 2020-12-29 10:43 a.m., Chris Zach via cctalk wrote:

Yes, I know.? I have an email from 2005 saying that I was forced to give it up 'a few years ago' with them saying they were being discontinued, but don't have the original email.? I lost some stuff when I converted computer society and printed the ieee address on all my cards, so didn't go back. cheers, Nigel Nigel Johnson, MSc., MIEEE, MCSE VE3ID/G4AJQ/VA3MCU Amateur Radio, the origin of the open-source concept! Skype: TILBURY2591 nw.johnson at ieee.org On 2020-12-29 11:23 a.m., Chris Zach via cctalk wrote: