On 1 May 2014 at 14:57, David Nelson wrote: > I have to say that Gmail has been marking an increasing number of list > emails as spam even though I have the address in my contact list.
I hate to sound like the cynic that I am ;-), but I'm afraid that the spammers have very nearly destroyed email for all of us. Attempts to keep them out seem to be well on their way to finishing the job. There's a lesson in there, I think, but it's WAY off topic for this list, and probably controversial to boot. So we'll drop that one right now. :-) Back to the topic at hand. IMO, your options for usable email (and I don't mean just "usable with the EVDL") are narrowing. I think the "free" (ad-supported) services will soon be untenable. I find it ironic that Yahoo and AOL are so concerned with DMARC policy when they host many webmail accounts held by pirates who've cracked the account logins. (The EVDL's spam filters catch messages from these cracked Yahoo and AOL accounts almost every day.) I think that the days of widely available "free" email are probably winding down. Most folks who want good email will eventually have to pay for it. At this point I'd recommend to those with a little tech savvy that rather than contracting with an email provider, they buy a cheap shared webhosting account, even if they don't expect to ever use the hosting. I've seen plans as low as $5 a month, and there are lots of email-only services that cost that much. (There are come-ons for around $2/mo, but they're usually limited-time promotional deals.) Most such accounts let you create large or unlimited numbers of mailboxes and email forwarders. You can usually access them with a POP3 or IMAP mail client. Most also provide webmail, and without the ads you get on the "free" services. With hosting accounts, you can usually choose whether you use spam filtering, and how aggressive it should be. You can leave your mail unfiltered; when the address starts attracting spam, junk it, and open a new mailbox. If you have to give an address to a website and don't trust it, create a new forwarder. If that source does spam you, or sells your address to a spammer (this happens more often than you might think), just delete the forwarder. Such a service is useful for folks who have EVDL memberships, and/or are members of other email discussion lists. You can have a read-only address for the list, from which you never send email. Since no one but you ever sees this address, you're unlikely to get spam on it as long as you make it a hard-to-guess address. When you post, use a write-only address (one whose mailbox dumps right into the bit bucket). This list, like most, tries to protect your posting address; but let's face it, if someone reads one of your posts and leaves it on his computer, and that computer gets invaded by malware, a spammer is apt to get your write-only posting address. It won't matter to you, though, since you never see incoming spam on that account. The downside of using a cheap hosting accounts for email is that some hosts host spammers. Now and then you'll find your IP address blacklisted. Then you have to file a support request, hoping they throw the bums off and get the blacklist lifted for you. Ah, for the early days of the net, when it was mostly just academics and computer hobbyists, and you could publish your address on the then-new web with the expectation that only reasonable, decent folks would use it. David Roden - Akron, Ohio, USA EVDL Administrator = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = EVDL Information: http://www.evdl.org/help/ = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Note: mail sent to "evpost" and "etpost" addresses will not reach me. To send a private message, please obtain my email address from the webpage http://www.evdl.org/help/ . = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
