New Obscure Infraction: Marking PAFOA email as spam

[mpan72]

I just read Dan's op again. It seems to me the only reason the infraction will be issued is to stop the whole marked as spam problem asap so no more emails are marked that way. With so many members it could probably put the site over the limit quickly. I understand his reasoning and have no problem with it.

I am not sure if I am correct as I really don't know crap about this kind of thing but that is what I took away from the op.

[FNG19]

That's MY opinion, yours will vary but I know what I want and I don't trust anyone else or their software to make that sort of decision for me.

My tools don't make that decision for me. They tell me what they think, then I have another tool I've instructed about how to make a decision based on that -- either good mail, gray area, or bad mail. Bad gets tossed (because that's what I've told it to do). Good gets kept and sorted (because that's what I've told it to do). Gray gets sequestered for review when I get around to it (because that's what I've told it to do). Thresholds are set where I want them set, and I can adjust those on a whim.

The software isn't making the decision for me. It's giving me the information I need to make the decision myself, which I then pass to another program to make the easy decisions with. The hard decisions I do myself. I set the thresholds where I'm comfortable, and I tightened the margins over time as I grew more comfortable with all the software involved. When a new version comes out, I widen the margins until I'm comfortable again.

My approach could work for you, with the margins widened considerably for your personal comfort level, and the post-processing adjusted to meet your personal needs. If you feel better hand-reviewing every single email you get, cool. If, OTOH, you implemented a tool that would just advise you what it thought and then you sorted those advisories into buckets, that would work, too.

It really doesn't have to be all or nothing. If that's what you want, cool. It's your time and effort. I have better things to do with my time. "Better living through technology" and all that.

[Nathan Hale]

Here's another thing...instead of the forum automatically "subscribing" me to every thread I comment on or view, why not only subscribe me only to ones that I click "subscribe" on? That way it will limit the amount of emails you receive for certain things.

stop talking. u are making too much sense.:-)

[whoshisface]

I believe Dan isn't actually banning anyone for this. It is nothing but an attempt to.stop sending you emails while you fix it on your end. Its not a punishment. If you're marking the email as spam then you don't want it in your inbox, if you dint want it in your inbox come here and set your settings ti reflect that. I don't think this is.punitive, its more encouragement for you to correct it the right way instead hoseing pafoa... nothing more. But Dan should probably confirm if I'm understanding it correctly.

[andrewjs18]

What is the current default setting for the email options when new users sign up? To the best of my recollection, they are all defaulted to on. If this is the case, has any consideration been given to setting those defaults to off, except for PMs and Admin emails?

http://forum.pafoa.org/2041029-post-19.html

Dan can run a query against the database to change those settings for every single current user and for potential users, if he so chooses to.

[danp]

I don't think automatic spam filters are the problem. I think the problem is when people manually notify their ISPs that email is spam. Doing so can land PAFOA on block lists and such.

This is true, the only concern is when someone clicks the "This is Spam" button with their ISP.

The problem is that as emails are marked as spam, it not only affects the deliverability of email to that recipient, but to all recipients at that ISP over time.

I believe Dan isn't actually banning anyone for this. It is nothing but an attempt to.stop sending you emails while you fix it on your end. Its not a punishment. If you're marking the email as spam then you don't want it in your inbox, if you dint want it in your inbox come here and set your settings ti reflect that. I don't think this is.punitive, its more encouragement for you to correct it the right way instead hoseing pafoa... nothing more. But Dan should probably confirm if I'm understanding it correctly.

This is correct, the purpose of this infraction is NOT to ban people. It's to disable the account until we can work with the user to figure out why they marked our email as spam and figure out what to do next. Without confirmation from the recipient that they didn't mean to mark our email as spam our third-party will never allow us to send email to them again and our sender reputation will drop.

http://forum.pafoa.org/2041029-post-19.html

Dan can run a query against the database to change those settings for every single current user and for potential users, if he so chooses to.

The horse is little out of the barn on that one, we can't assume everyone DOESN'T want to receive emails.

To put it in perspective, since we moved we've sent 25,000 emails and received 15 spam complaints, 12 of which were from a single person (what started this whole problem)

In that case we banned them, they emailed us, we confirmed they clicked it by mistake, we forwarded their correspondence to our third-party, their email/account was reactivated and everyone moved on with their lives, all within about an hour.

This is not a serious problem in terms of volume, just in effect.

[andrewjs18]

The horse is little out of the barn on that one, we can't assume everyone DOESN'T want to receive emails.

To put it in perspective, since we moved we've sent 25,000 emails and received 15 spam complaints, 12 of which were from a single person (what started this whole problem)

In that case we banned them, they emailed us, we confirmed they clicked it by mistake, we forwarded their correspondence to our third-party, their email/account was reactivated and everyone moved on with their lives, all within about an hour.

This is not a serious problem in terms of volume, just in effect.

I agree, but what I was trying to get to was rather than expecting people to not mark pafoa emails as spam, maybe setting everyone to not receive any emails whatsoever from pafoa until they manually change it might be best, so they're expecting the emails.

[normanvin]

I agree, but what I was trying to get to was rather than expecting people to not mark pafoa emails as spam, maybe setting everyone to not receive any emails whatsoever from pafoa until they manually change it might be best, so they're expecting the emails.

This sounds more then reasonable. And for that matter make the email part of the paid subscription.

[FNG19]

And for that matter make the email part of the paid subscription.

I disagree with this last bit, if only because there is a benefit to the forum of having people receive email notifications. There are also benefits to our fellow users. It's not a perk, per se.

[normanvin]

I disagree with this last bit, if only because there is a benefit to the forum of having people receive email notifications. There are also benefits to our fellow users. It's not a perk, per se.

Maybe. But it would also be a motivation to donate to the forum.