[Mailman-Users] mailing list filtered as spam

[Brad Knowles]

jeff zemla wrote:

> I have tried altering the content of the message, but nothing seems to work,
> which leads me to believe it is being flagged as spam based on where it
> originates from.  But seeing as the website has no content on it (just a
> line of text that says "Things will be here shortly") i dont know why gmail
> would have a preconceived notion that it's a spamming site.

This is one problem with reputation-based systems for detecting potential 
spam.  You may have a nearby network neighbor that is responsible for 
generating a lot of spam (which seems likely, seeing as you say you bought 
the domain from hostgator.com).

Or, the IP address you were assigned may have been used by spammers before 
it was re-assigned to you.

There are a whole host of other reputational issues that you may be dealing 
with, but this should give you some idea.


Fixing a tarnished reputation is hard.  Very hard.  Spammers don't care, 
since they just move on to somewhere else.  But for the rest of us, it's a 
real pain.

In the case of the first problem mentioned above (guilt by association), 
you're probably being caught by a blacklist that covers whole networks of 
machines, and there may not be any way for you to get off these blacklists. 
  If you're on an IP-address specific blacklist, you may be able to get your 
provider to issue you a new address that is not blacklisted, or you may be 
able to get those blacklist owners to update their list to remove your address.

Another option would be to move your domain and services to another 
provider, one that is much less friendly to spammers, and avoids both of the 
problems mentioned above.


You could potentially sign up for service with a company like Habeas (for 
their "Safe List" service) or Return Path (for their "Sender Score 
Certified" service).  If you're a small non-profit, they'll charge you a 
one-time fee, examine how your systems are set up and that you meet all 
appropriate "best practices" requirements, and then that will be that.

If you're not a small non-profit, they'll do the same thing for you, but 
they'll charge you an annual fee.

Habeas has the better reputation in the business, but is more expensive. 
Both are supported out-of-the-box with SpamAssassin, so they'll not only 
help you with all of the other customers with whom they have existing 
contracts and use the Habeas "Safe List" as a whitelist for incoming e-mail, 
but will also help you with anyone who runs a relatively generic install of 
SpamAssassin.

Again, Habeas helps with sites running SpamAssassin more than Return Path, 
by improving your score by a full 8.0 points instead of just 4.0 points, and 
many sites run with 10.0 points being a guaranteed non-spam message, and 5.0 
being a probable non-spam message.

> Any ideas?

And way you look at it, it sounds like you've got a lot of work ahead of you.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>