[Mailman-Users] Reducing false positives with spam markings with Gmail, etc.

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Cedric Knight writes:
 > Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote on Wed Nov 20 2013:

 > >  > Are most mailman hosts finding their mail in Gmail heading to the
 > >  > "Promotions" tab or "Forums" optional tab?
 > > 
 > > I don't receive any Mailman mail at my Gmail address, so I can't say.

Recently I do get some Mailman mail at my Gmail address, and I've
never seen it in the Promotions folder.  Nor have any of the xemacs
subscribers I've talked to.  But these are all programming-related
lists; it may be that Gmail's "AI" realizes that there's no way this
is a sales pitch.

It occurs to me now that if someone has a "Forums" tab, I would expect
Mailman mail to got there if and only if Mailman uses the RFC 2369
headers (possibly with the exception of List-Unsubscribe) and/or the
RFC 2919 List-Id header.  You can turn these off.

 > I've had complaints about this specifically with list *confirmation
 > emails* being being misclassified under "promotions", resulting in some
 > users assuming they are subscribed when they haven't actually confirmed.

That I can't help with.  As Mark suggests the "Precedence: bulk"
header may confuse some MUAs like Gmail.

 > Any more evidence?  Do any standards help decide if Gmail or Mailman is
 > wrong?

There are no standards for classifying mail, really.  I would say
Gmail is wrong, though, because confirmation emails are very easy to
recognize, and very urgent to most users (consider password reset).
Mailman might be able to help by trying to mimic the typical password
reset confirmation mail.

The problem may be that phishers often use mail that looks like a
confirmation mail, but then you should get a phishing warning.  Or
maybe the issue is that Mailman allows confirmation by email, where
most password confirmations require going to a specific web address.