At 21:11 28-04-2007, Chris wrote:
On April 9th Embarq, my DSL provider, dropped Earthlink as their
mail provider
and switched over to Synacor while giving everyone an address of
@embarqmail.com. Since then every post that is sent from my system to me is
tagged as [Possible Spam] whether its the output of a cronjob or just a test
message to myself. Its not my box that is doing the tagging, rather its
Synacor thats doing it. A typical spam markup looks like this:
Old-X-Spam-Flag: YES
Old-X-Spam-Score: 7.337
Old-X-Spam-Level: *******
Old-X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=7.337 tagged_above=-10 required=6.6
tests=[AWL=3.209, BAYES_50=0.001, FORGED_RCVD_HELO=0.135,
RCVD_IN_NJABL_DUL=1.946, RCVD_IN_SORBS_DUL=2.046]
Synacor sees your system as one from a dynamic user list
(RCVD_IN_NJABL_DUL, RCVD_IN_SORBS_DUL) which score 3.992. The AWL
addition is enough to get the message over the required score of 6.6.
The above is from the output of the cronjob I run to download the MSRBL
updates. Even a test message I send to myself is tagged as spam:
See whether Synacor supports any form of SMTP authentication (SMTP
AUTH). That should get you around their dynamic user list (DUL) tests.
As another test I sent a message to my old earthlink address since they are
forwarding mail until Oct 31st, the Synacor markup is even more confusing, at
least to me. The subject was changed to reflect [Possible Spam], however that
markup was:
Old-X-Spam-Score: -0.185
Old-X-Spam-Level:
Old-X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.185 tagged_above=-10 required=6.6
tests=[BAYES_40=-0.185]
How/why is the subject being re-written with a score of -0.185?
If I read these headers correctly, they are tagging when the score is
above -10.
I've been in discussion with a Q&A guy from Embarq about this and other
issues, but I don't believe much headway is being made between Embarq and
Synacor. A message to Synacor Tech Support didn't even rate a reply. What, to
me, is seemingly odd is that replies to spam reports that I send to various
abuse addresses, if the reply contains the original spam, the message subject
is changed to [Possible Spam] however the markup shows:
Old-X-Spam-Score: 1.322
Old-X-Spam-Level: *
Old-X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.322 tagged_above=-10 required=6.6
tests=[ADVANCE_FEE_1=0, BAYES_00=-2.599, DEAR_SOMETHING=2.1,
HTML_10_20=1.351, HTML_MESSAGE=0.001, HTML_NONELEMENT_40_50=0.126,
PLING_PLING=0.343]
See my previous comment about tagged_above.
My question is, what is Embarq/Synacor doing? Why is my ISP marking mail I
send to myself as spam? I know where the RCVD_IN_NJABL_DUL and
RCVD_IN_SORBS_DUL markups are coming from according to SORBS:
Your ISP should not be doing such tests for mail from their users.
Any words of wisdom I can send to Synacor would be appreciated if they are in
fact necessary. Any help on understanding why a message that has a score that
says its not spam but has the subject changed to state it is would be
appreciated also.
It may be better to contact Embarq which is your ISP and complain
about valid mail being tagged as spam. Ask them whether you can use
SMTP authentication to solve the problem. If all your mail is being
tagged as possible spam, then the antispam filtering for
embarqmail.com is misconfigured. Forward several examples of
incorrectly tagged messages (without your markups) sent to your email
address to Embarq technical support to show the problem.
Regards,
-sm
