To my way of thinking, dropping someone else's email,
telling the sender the email is being rejected for having
spam-like characteristics and telling the recipient nothing
seems like it might have legal liability for the for the
user potentially missing vital email.
It also would seem to violate what used to be a basic
expectation of internet email -- that it is either delivered
to the recipient's inbox OR you'll receive a
non-delivery notification (a "bounce").
Furthermore, for me, about 20-25% of the email lists I used
to be on have policies to drop subscribers w/o notice if an
email cannot be delivered.
Some, ~10-15% will drop your email address from all lists hosted on
the server.
Some ~20-25% will send out some sort of probe or notification
of missed messages, many claiming you need to respond to
a notice:
Your membership in the mailing list XXX has been disabled
due to excessive bounces The last bounce received from you was
dated 01-Jan-2017. You will not get any more messages from this
list until you re-enable your membership. You will receive
3 more reminders like this before your membership in the list is
deleted.
Some simply inform you of missed messages. Only "ezmlm" gave
some clue allowing me to track what was happening w/a
message like:
Subject: failure notice
Hi. This is qmail. [not able to deliver. Permanent error.]
<sa-u...@my-domain.org> failed.
Remote host said:
550 5.7.1 This message has been blocked for containing
SPAM-like characteristics.
Some were notifications of a response to a message I
posted in a forum -- an automated form, but certainly not
spam or malware. None of the ones I was able to find
copies of (went to a list-archive), were spam or malware.
The most troublesome are those lists who auto-drop you for
a bounced message (like the linux-kernel mailing list
and other high-volume lists).
Ironically (or maliciously), anytime I've brought a problem
like this to a MSP's support staff, I'm inevitably asked for
a copy of the email or its headers. I can't provide what
never reached me. Then they'll respond that they can't
do anything without a copy of the rejected email (as though
they only work with user emails that were outgoing or
something).
If it is a 'MSP', I'd hope they'd act more responsibly
with emails.
Of note: in my case, I was often told that I could diable
filtering in my account options (it was disabled & had never
been enabled). All of the front-line support
people I've talked to have had no idea that email was also
being filtered on the incoming server, so of course they
had a problem wrapping their head around what was happening
and even though I've been told more than once that filtering
was turned off for my account -- it eventually continues.
Another reason I have asked about this is that if the email
is in an alternate encoding, they decode it to check it and
place the decoded version in my mail stream. Unfortunately
they don't do it right with the result that problems occur
on my email client (T-bird) with the improperly decoded
email (since I don't have the original, I can't tell exactly
why it is bad).
I hope some of those who think it was a good practice to
delete a user's email (because they think it is malware)
might rethink that practice.
I didn't realize email was no longer considered unreliable
primarily due to spam scanning. I wonder if that will
happen for USPS letters: getting permanently dropped due
to the envelop having SPAM-like characteristics (like
most bulk mail).
Thanks for the hints on the headers...
-linda
