After you're done adding hate speech and spamming to my list of alleged criminal offences, can you and others please not post or e-mail me off-list if you have nothing new to contribute to the resolution of the problem? ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ryan Hayes" <ryguillian@gmail.com> To: "Erik L" <erik_list@caneris.com>, nanog@nanog.org Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 2010 5:08:18 PM Subject: Re: What must one do to avoid Gmail's retarded non-spam filtering? Can you please not use the word "retarded" in a pejorative sense? On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 3:15 PM, Erik L <erik_list@caneris.com> wrote:

I realize that this is somewhat OT, but I'm sure that others on the list encounter the same issues and that at least some folks might have useful comments.

An increasingly large number of our customers are using Gmail or Google Apps and almost all of our OSS/BSS mail is getting spam filtered by Google. Among others, these e-mails include invoices, order confirmations, payment notifications, customer portal logins, and tickets. Almost anything we send to customers on Google ends up in their spam folder. This results in a lot of calls and makes much of our automation pointless, never mind all the lost sales.

The problem is compounded by those who use mail clients and do not log in to the webmail at all, since they would never see the contents of the Google spam folder.

We have proper A+PTR records on the edge MTAs, proper SPF records for the originating domain, proper Return-Path and other headers, and so on. There isn't anything that I can think of other than the content itself which would be abnormal, and obviously the content is repetitive and can't be changed much. Is there something obvious which we've missed?

Aside from the following clearly impractical solutions, what can we do? 1. Asking everyone (including those we don't even know yet) to whitelist all of our addresses, to check their spam folders, and to click on "this is not spam" 2. Providing our own free e-mail service to everyone (including those we don't even know yet) and putting up "don't use Google" ads on all of our customer-facing systems

At least this isn't Hotmail where mail is just silently deleted with no NDR after it's accepted by their MTAs.

The call volume has been going up instead of down lately and it's gotten to the point where we're sending MTA log extracts to people to prove to them that we really did e-mail them.

Would greatly appreciate any advice.

Erik