Ever changing filtering

One of the ongoing challenges sending email, and managing a high volume outbound mail server is dealing with the ongoing changes in filtering. Filters are not static, nor can they be. As ISPs and filtering companies identify new ways to separate out wanted email from unwanted email, spammers find new ways to make their mail look more like wanted mail.
This is one reason traps are useful to filtering companies. With traps there is no discussion about whether or not the mail was requested. No one with any connection to the email address opted in to receive mail. The mail was never requested. While it is possible for trap addresses to get on any list monitoring mail to spam traps is a way to monitor which senders don’t have good practices.
New filtering techniques are always evolving. I mentioned yesterday that Gmail was making filtering changes, and that this was causing a lot of delivery issues for senders. The other major challenge for Gmail is the personalized delivery they are doing. It’s harder and harder for senders to monitor their inbox delivery because almost every inbox is different at Gmail. I’ve seen different delivery in some of my own mailboxes at Gmail.
All of this makes email delivery an ongoing challenge.

Outlook 365 having a bad day
Spam disclaimer of the day

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Spam filters and mailbox usage

It’s no secret that I run very little in the way of spam filters, and what filters I do run don’t throw away mail, they just shove it into various mailboxes.
Looking at my mailboxes currently I have 11216 unread messages in my mail.app junk folder, 10600 unread messages in my work spam assassin folder and 29401 messages in my personal spam assassin folder (mail getting more than +7 on our version of spam assassin gets filtered into these folders). I went through and marked all of my messages read back in mid-January. That’s a little over 50,000 messages in a little over 5 months or slightly more than 2700 spams a week.
But these are messages I don’t have to deal with so while they’re somewhat annoying and a bit of “wow, my addresses are everywhere” they’re not a huge deal. I have strong enough filters for wanted mail that I can special case it.

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Filters and windmills

A colleague of mine was dealing with a client who is experiencing some difficulty delivering to the bulk folder. Said client spent much of a one hour phone call repeating “This is not how a free society works!!”
After the call my colleague commented, “I refuse to get ranty about filter systems.”
I know that filters, and the people who write and maintain them, are a frequent scapegoat for senders. The filters are always the problem, not anything the senders do.
Now, I’ll be the last person who will claim spam filters are perfect, they’re not. Filters sometimes do unexpected things, sometimes they do boneheaded things, sometimes they are broken.
We can’t forget, though, that filters perform a vital role in protecting users from malicious emails. Phishing emails, scams, fake products, viruses are a constant threat. Many end users don’t need to worry about this because filters are so good. But an unfiltered account can get thousands of scams and spams a day (ask me how I know).
Most of us in the delivery space can tell when a filter is working as intended and when there’s an underlying problem. And when the filter is working as intended there’s not a lot of use complaining about them. Ranting about filtering systems often delays a resolution. Senders that focus on what they can control tend to have more success reaching the inbox than those senders that focus on ranting about filtering systems.
Tilting at windmills doesn’t get the mail through.

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