I think at this point we should upgrade the classification of this issue from being Spam-filter-related to being a fundamental interoperability issue of Google Mail and G Suite with regards to email and SMTP. Google has a monopoly on corporate email nowadays (even OPs own domain name is still handled by Gmail). Google still "officially" supports incoming SMTP, but they've otherwise made it non-interoperable with a whole bunch of the operators. Google still rejects email from my own domain name as outlined in a prior message on this list a month or two ago: * https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-October/103817.html Since I am able to receive email from Gmail, but not able to send it back, I'm thinking of implementing my own handling of incoming SMTP unique and specific to Gmail / G Suite — anytime anyone tries to send me email from Gmail / G Suite, I'll accept the message, but instead of providing a 2.0.0 confirmation at the end of the message body, will instead provide a 5.0.0 DSN with an error message explaining to the sender that I won't be able to reply back to them due to the interoperability issues of Google Mail / G Suite on their side. What other choice do I have? I just don't see any other way on how to proceed otherwise. It's especially annoying if you're using a certain platform to communicate with someone (which automatically takes care of the notifications and has its own email gateway), and then they switch the conversation to direct email, but then you're no longer able to reply to their communication. C.

Cute way to promote Google Groups over Mailman. Gotta give 'em credit for being creative :-)

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For some reason Gmail has started blocking mailman administrative emails to someone who's an admin on a list I host. Their SMTP 552 error message points to <https://support.google.com/mail/?p=BlockedMessage>, which implies the "problem" is the URLs in the email, but is otherwise completely unhelpful.

If anyone here has any pull with Gmail postmasters, could you please suggest to them that they whitelist messages that are as consistent and well-known as mailman's admin and moderator messages?

Peace, Though I agree that Gmail spam filtering is top grade, or close to be so, it still sends to spam a statistically significant number of emails from IETF and ICANN mailing lists I'm subscribed to. It depends as well on which account I should receive those emails. While I understand and totally accept that there might be issues with the respective senders' configuration; with mailing lists at least, spam filtering is more of a duty of the mailing list admins. Therefore, it is correct that certain work around the current system is still necessary, and there are edge cases which might cause uncertainty on the sender's side. -- Töma On Thu, Dec 5, 2019, 12:13 AM John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:

In article < CAPKkNb537O5C_FQjh7ucWsF_4USK3EuHcJdkDv-ZJLU8EK1Kmg@mail.gmail.com> you write:

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Google still rejects email from my own domain name as outlined in a prior message on this list a month or two ago:

Google accepts my mail just fine, including from my mailing lists. Their goal is to make their users happy by accepting the mail the users want and not the mail the users don't want.

Perhaps it would be more productive to figure out in what ways your system is different from others. It would also help to stop being coy and tell us the actual IP addresses and domains that are having trouble so people who might want to help can do so.

-- Regards, John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

On Wed, 4 Dec 2019 at 16:38, John R. Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:

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Though I agree that Gmail spam filtering is top grade, or close to be so, it still sends to spam a statistically significant number of emails from IETF and ICANN mailing lists I'm subscribed to. It depends as well on which account I should receive those emails.

Yes, that's mostly the DMARC problem. We're painfully familiar with it.

In this case, the mail origin is DMARC signed, and Gmail accepts all other messages. It simply *appears* to be that they've decided the URLs in mailman's admin/moderator messages are suspicious enough to warrant outright rejection of the message, and not just labelling it as spam or suspicious in the recipient's mailbox. Someone up-thread noted that my personal domain is hosted on google groups. I've noticed in the past that the behaviour of gmail.com can be very different from the behaviour of a paid mail domain like mine... I've seen the same sorts of messages accepted by one and refused by the other on more than one occasion, and it's not always the same one being more strict or restrictive.

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While I understand and totally accept that there might be issues with the respective senders' configuration; with mailing lists at least, spam filtering is more of a duty of the mailing list admins. ...

One day I asked a guy at Google why they don't just whitelist incoming mailing list mail, since they clearly have a good idea where the list hosts are. He said that legit lists send spam (actual ugly spam, not filter errors) all the time, either because a subscriber's account is compromised or the list itself is compromised. Accurate filtering is remarkably complicated.

Agreed that spam filtering today is a hard problem, and given Google's scale their problem with it is bigger than most others'. My assertion is that given how ubiquitous mailman's administrative messages are (as opposed to random list traffic), and given that those messages haven't changed in structure in aeons, it should be trivial for a company with Google's resources to not get false positives on those messages. Their heuristics and learning algorithms should be primed with a ton of samples of such messages to inform their decision making, if not to outright whitelist them.

On Wed, 4 Dec 2019 at 17:39, John R. Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:

Or maybe users are tired of the useless monthly messages and report them as spam.

Again, these are not a user messages or regular list traffic, they're admin/moderator messages addressed to an admin of a list. Your point about the possibility of spammers forging those is taken, but I don't see that as being anywhere remotely common enough to justify a 5xx error on attempted delivery of such a message.

On Wed, 4 Dec 2019 at 17:54, Constantine A. Murenin <mureninc@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Again, these are not a user messages or regular list traffic, they're admin/moderator messages addressed to an admin of a list.

So, to clarify the OP issues here — you're using Gmail on your domain (aka G Suite), and are also a Mailman administrator (on same or different domain?), and are unable to properly use Mailmain, because Gmail?

No. I'm a mailman administrator on some domain completely unrelated to google in any way, and google is rejecting admin email from said mailman instance to (so far) one list admin who has a gmail.com address.

I own domains backed by gsuite/postini and they are awesomely spam free, and good. What I say here shouldn't be taken as saying I don't want that goodness. I also work in domains which routinely get mis-tagged as spammy by google, and that can include replying to google staffers. This isn't good. Understandable, faking flows into your own mail must be a big problem for big mail hosters, mainly doing mail for other people. Oddly, no other enterprise I deal with does this: Only google tags google staffers as spam, when they interact in GMail and G/Suite. It would help enormously if google told us A/B Black/White techniques for our own mail investments in GSuite, which are functionally able to do things, not just community curated hints. But, the "things you can do" feels more like "things you can try" Part of this, is the freemium levels in Google don't go to people. You have to pay google money to get people to talk to. The second part is that we want to believe the awesome, but most people you can talk to in Google are robots with scripts. I have had the great pleasure of speaking at a meeting, with Google staff present, showing a thing which is in some sense "something is wrong" and having them get up to the microphone queue and say "I fixed that" -And it is awesome but its not repeatable, its not sold as a product to everyone, its rare, and it actually hurts more than it helps: Privilege outcomes is why people mail NANOG asking for help. Its not service level, it drives to tweet storms about problems to get fixed. For instance, it isn't clear to me how adding addresses to your own address book does materially interact with spam tagging. I added all the google staffers I deal with, they are still spam boxed. This is one of the recommendations from some years back. Did it ever work? Is it "official" or just an idea? How do you tell? I fully expect the usual ASCII list of "your idea won't work because" but the quality I am trying to get to here, is that mail un-spam and un-filter and un-protect is basically now not just a heuristic, but an undocumented heuristic: we don't know the interactions of the moving parts, and when we ask about the moving parts, the answers feel like smirks. Who you are alters what kind of reply you get back. -George (posting from a g/suite free edition hosted domain btw)

On Wednesday, 4 December, 2019 23:24, bzs@theworld.com wrote:

But that's ok, the new masters of this universe will just charge both ends for each and every email (perhaps a few included free with your Hulu or Netflix subscription) and old timers will talk about how great it was back in the old days when you could run lists like nanog for roughly nothing tho I don't know where they'll talk about that.

Somehow NetFlix has decided that my email address is "suddenly" invalid (the one that has been in continuous use since the mid-80's). Apparently the third-party that they use to send e-mail is a dirty spammer and thus has been blacklisted. I tried to tell then this, but no one at NetFlix seems to have a clue, and my clue-by-four has no one to hit over the head. I really do no care what the Masters of the Universe think. They can pry my mail server and domain from my cold dead fingers, and until then, they can shove themselves where the sun doesn't shine ... -- The fact that there's a Highway to Hell but only a Stairway to Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic volume.