On 3/8/22 12:10, Brian Toresdahl via mailop wrote:
What we've seen, corroborated with cases across different sender domains, and different recipient domains, is that emails, as soon as they're delivered, are being immediately unsubscribed. We've had enough independent reports from recipients that they didn't unsubscribe themselves to make me believe them. We've had cases where senders and recipients are on the phone, together, with the recipient actively trying to resubscribe, but each retry is again unsubscribed. So it's like some automated system is unsubscribing recipients against their consent.
Do your emails contain an unsubscribe link configured so that merely visiting that link results in an unsubscribe? Some anti-virus and anti-spam services crawl links embedded in email received.
If so, you'll probably want to modify your process to require that the link displays a web page with a confirmation box that needs to be checked, "Yes, please unsubscribe me."
The one pattern we've noticed is that the recipient domains have a common MX, something like {recipient.domain}.mail.protection.outlook.com <http://mail.protection.outlook.com/>. But it's not across all such recipient domains, just a handful.
That's Microsoft, which is particularly evil when it comes to embedded links. They rewrite them to direct to Microsoft's own servers with tracking code typically ending in .protection.outlook.com and causing anyone following the links to essentially proxy them through Microsoft. Most email recipients aren't aware of this automated man-in-the-middle attack on links delivered via email sent through Microsoft.
This leads me to believe there is some local admin setting available for mail.protection.outlook.com <http://mail.protection.outlook.com/>, allowing admins to enable some sort of "auto-unsubscribe" rule for emails matching some pattern.
Another option would be to reject unsubscribes coming from your links for 60 seconds from when the mail was sent, possibly redirecting to a page that says "Please re-try in 60 seconds" in those rare cases where there's a really fast human on the other end.
-- Jay Hennigan - j...@west.net Network Engineering - CCIE #7880 503 897-8550 - WB6RDV _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
