Re: [mailop] HR 8160 and SB 4409: The "You're not allowed to run political campaign email through your spam filter" act
On Fri, 29 Jul 2022, Justin Scott via mailop wrote: Interestingly any email "operator" with fewer than 500 employees or less than $5 billion in annual revenue is exempt, so clearly targeted at the major providers and not self-hosted operators or small hosting companies, thankfully. Yes, but anyone providing email services for large companies may have to keep an eye open. For example those parameters mean that Boeing, or anyone filtering email for Boeing has to engage with the bill, but Barracuda doesn't have to except when acting for particularly large companies. -- Andrew C. Aitchison Kendal, UK and...@aitchison.me.uk ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] HR 8160 and SB 4409: The "You're not allowed to run political campaign email through your spam filter" act
On Sat, 30 Jul 2022 18:44:10 +, "Larry M. Smith via mailop" wrote: >.. I really don't know, but I tend to discount the belief that this is a >conspiracy against them. Looking over the past seven years' data, I find that exactly one Democrat campaign purchased an address that delivers here. Traffic to that address stopped after the 2016 election. There were two other accounts that opted in to various Democrat candidates' campaigns. They have seen moderate traffic. In the same interval, six addresses that deliver here were used to deliver GOP traffic, and subsequently from a number of organizations that appear to be ideologically allied with other senders to these addressses. Only one of these addresses belongs to a living being that could voluntarily subscribe to those messages. That person did indeed give that email address to the the RNC, which was pushing the Trump campaign in 2015. Interestingly, when the RNC gave a copy of that DB to the former president's operations, they completely left out all of the juice: Name, address, ZIP code, telephone number, contribution history... That address has collected well over seven thousand messages since it was created. With the sender(s) there is apparently no interest in suppressing non-responding addresses after, say six months. In my recent experience in deliverability, one would be utterly astonished if the above characteristics did not result in delivery statistics at Google that differed from the ones complained of by the aggrieved Party. Also, after the outburst from a Legislator that he can EXPECT that postal mail will be DELIVERED!... I would love to ask how much he has paid Google, compared to how much he has paid USPS, such that he could expect a commensurate performance. Unless, of course, this isn't a Free Market Capitalist® situation. mdr -- "There are no laws here, only agreements." -- Masahiko ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] HR 8160 and SB 4409: The "You're not allowed to run political campaign email through your spam filter" act
I think in this case we all know what they're doing and you've hit it dead on. They're targeting Gmail and they're not really interested in anyone else. On 2022-07-30 11:16, Jaroslaw Rafa via mailop wrote: I'm not an American, so it's basically "not my fairy-tale" (as we say in our country), but I can't stop wondering at the use of the word "label" in the proposed regulation. I already asked (in a bit sarcastic tone) in one of the previous emails, what is a "label" in context of email in general. Because there's simply no such thing: if you look at email protocols, or operation of server software, there's no such thing as "label". Spam filters may add a *header* indicating that a message is spam, but is a header a "label" or not? And if the spam filter does not add a header, but just directly moves the message (using sieve for example) to spam *folder* on the server? Is a *physical folder in the filesystem* a "label" or not? "Labels" per se exist only in some implementations of MUAs, most notably in Gmail web interface. So either the regulation is targeted particularly at Google, or it's authors never saw any other email system than Gmail and imagine that a "label" is some universal thing (which wonders me, because don't they have their internal email systems at Congress or governmental institutions?) Another question is, how are the operators supposed to distinguish political messages from non-political ones? The only reasonable method that comes to mind is submitting by political senders in advance to the operators a list of sender addresses that shouldn't be filtered. Operators can then whitelist them. But can't compiling a list of such sender be considered some form of "applying a label"? In that cse the regulation becomes self-contradictory: in order to comply with the regulation and "not apply a label" to political messages, you have first to "apply a label" to senders of those messages, a label that says "don't apply any label to messages from this sender". Just some doubts that - at least for me - show that this entire proposal doesn't make any sense. ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] HR 8160 and SB 4409: The "You're not allowed to run political campaign email through your spam filter" act
On 7/29/2022, Anne Mitchell via mailop wrote: I want to be sure that everyone here is aware of a piece of pending legislation in the U.S. that is in committee in both the House and the Senate right now. It's called the Political BIAS Emails Act of 2022 (BIAS is short for “Bias In Algorithm Sorting”), and it requires that, and I quote: “It shall be unlawful for an operator of an email service to use a filtering algorithm to apply a label to an email sent to an email account from a political campaign unless the owner or user of the account took action to apply such a label.” It is getting relatively very little press, and of course the chances of it passing are greater if nobody knows to oppose it. We've written an article about it, which includes what to do, whom to contact and how, etc., and which includes all relevant links, here: https://www.isipp.com/blog/do-you-want-political-email-to-bypass-spam-filters-and-go-directly-to-your-inbox-congress-does-heres-what-to-do/ Feel free to share - in fact please do, if this thing passes it's the camel's nose under the tent. IIRC, this all started because a research paper somewhere noted that a specific political party seemed to have more deliverability issues than the other prominent party did. Fast forward a bit and there exists a vast conspiracy in anti-spam against that specific political party . I can't speak to all anti-spam systems, but the vast majority of them work on behavioral models and not some list of word that someone has entered into a list somewhere. I have noted that a large number that political party's members seem to be quick to label those that disagree with some its policies and positions as either the enemy or disloyal. Perhaps it is an attitude "I will do what I want, and if you disagree with me, then you are some sort of commie scum," that has resulted in them not following advise offered to them, so that they don't look like a bunch of spammers taking a bump all over everyone's inboxes. .. I really don't know, but I tend to discount the belief that this is a conspiracy against them. SgtChains ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] HR 8160 and SB 4409: The "You're not allowed to run political campaign email through your spam filter" act
I'm not an American, so it's basically "not my fairy-tale" (as we say in our country), but I can't stop wondering at the use of the word "label" in the proposed regulation. I already asked (in a bit sarcastic tone) in one of the previous emails, what is a "label" in context of email in general. Because there's simply no such thing: if you look at email protocols, or operation of server software, there's no such thing as "label". Spam filters may add a *header* indicating that a message is spam, but is a header a "label" or not? And if the spam filter does not add a header, but just directly moves the message (using sieve for example) to spam *folder* on the server? Is a *physical folder in the filesystem* a "label" or not? "Labels" per se exist only in some implementations of MUAs, most notably in Gmail web interface. So either the regulation is targeted particularly at Google, or it's authors never saw any other email system than Gmail and imagine that a "label" is some universal thing (which wonders me, because don't they have their internal email systems at Congress or governmental institutions?) Another question is, how are the operators supposed to distinguish political messages from non-political ones? The only reasonable method that comes to mind is submitting by political senders in advance to the operators a list of sender addresses that shouldn't be filtered. Operators can then whitelist them. But can't compiling a list of such sender be considered some form of "applying a label"? In that cse the regulation becomes self-contradictory: in order to comply with the regulation and "not apply a label" to political messages, you have first to "apply a label" to senders of those messages, a label that says "don't apply any label to messages from this sender". Just some doubts that - at least for me - show that this entire proposal doesn't make any sense. -- Regards, Jaroslaw Rafa r...@rafa.eu.org -- "In a million years, when kids go to school, they're gonna know: once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub." ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] ** CAUTION! SUSPICIOUS EMAIL **Re: HR 8160 and SB 4409: The "You're not allowed to run political campaign email through your spam filter" act
Some questions and thoughts on HR 8160 and SB 4409 and the CAN-SPAM Act... Are operators covered by HR 8160 and SB 4409 still allowed to block emails that do not comply with the CAN-SPAM Act? Of the 7 requirements in the FTC's CAN-SPAM Act compliance guide (https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business), my experience as a recipient has been that political campaigns' emails routinely violate several of the CAN-SPAM Act's requirements. I'm not a lawyer but a law that requires persons to allow the delivery of otherwise law-breaking emails seems at best, wrong. Perhaps the public reporting requirements in HR 8160 and SB 4409 will enable "operators" to provide iron-clad proof of CAN-SPAM Act violations, allowing penalties to be applied directly to the violating political campaigns. Sort of like getting a speeding ticket in the mail because you sped through a speed camera. If HR 8160 and SB 4409 included language mandating operators report CAN-SPAM Act violations, with proof sufficient to assess penalties straightaway, wouldn't that be a good thing? On the one hand, I don't like HR 8160 and SB 4409 because operators are not (and IMHO should not be deemed to be) common carriers. But on the other hand, we all know that CAN-SPAM Act enforcement is abysmal presently, and I suspect that some decent percentage of the garbage emails we all need to filter out would be reduced if senders and their agents (SendGrid, MailGun, etc.) were more fearful of CAN-SPAM Act penalties being assessed routinely. I don't like speed trap cameras personally, but they are effective at reducing accidents in areas where speed is a routine contributor to accidents in that area. Interested to hear what others think. Regards, Mark _ L. Mark Stone, Founder North America's Leading Zimbra VAR/BSP/Training Partner For Companies With Mission-Critical Email Needs - Original Message - From: "Michael Rathbun via mailop" To: "mailop" Sent: Friday, July 29, 2022 8:51:42 PM Subject: ** CAUTION! SUSPICIOUS EMAIL **Re: [mailop] HR 8160 and SB 4409: The "You're not allowed to run political campaign email through your spam filter" act On Fri, 29 Jul 2022 20:42:43 -0400, Brett Schenker via mailop wrote: >"They can say whatever they want, but .. I'm +1 with John. They have a >*lot* to learn about email and how it works" > >Unless the language has changed since I read it, it says you need to report >on how much goes to spam. If you send it to quarantine instead, you can >still report it as 0 going to spam, completely comply with it, and none can >get to the inbox. The Bozometric Tensor is severely strained in the neighborhood of who/whatever drafted this piece. "Label", indeed. mdr -- Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -- Voltaire ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
Re: [mailop] HR 8160 and SB 4409: The "You're not allowed to run political campaign email through your spam filter" act
Is there any hard data? This seems like thesis bait. I'd expect there to be a steady trickle of papers or reports with good data on political spam. Where are they? I hear lots of complaints by conservatives/Republicans that the spam filters are biased against them. If they send more spam, I'd expect more of their mail to get blocked. But that's because they are sending spam, not because the filters are biased. I'd really like to see hard data to back that up or refute it. How about a trial with the house and senate mail systems? :) -- These are my opinions. I hate spam. ___ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
