Mandible Games

I'm not sure which mailing list package you're using, but it's been my experience that out of the free offerings, the two most commonly used ones (mailman and listserv) have by far the fewest spam filtering headaches. I think this is because it's a lot more trouble than it's worth for spammers to set up a listserv or mailman list, so they instead look for the (free) "easy to use" ones such as bMail or the like. Also, mailman and listserv both add lots of headers that are commonly in legitimate email and not in spam, which most packages don't.

Ah, found it. Apparently you're using poMMo, the successor to bMail. From the poMMo frontpage: "poMMo is versatile mass mailing software". Wanna hazard a guess at how many spammers ignore the license and use it anyway? And how that affects spam filters, especially bayes scanners that learn the headers?

Basically, if you pay for your mass mailing software, it's 99% likely not spam. If you use one that's hard to use, it's 99% likely not spam. Kinda sucks, but the spam filters use those heuristics in their metrics. This pretty much means you need to use non-free/difficult to use mailing list management software, or be filtered as spam.

-robin

Just took a look at the emails getting sent (to my gmail spambox), and I have some more useful information for you. Here are the headers your list software sent with its message, after stripping out all the ones added by the intervening servers:

From: Mandible Games
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Thunderbird/1.5.0.7 Mnenhy/0.7.4.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: (redacted)
Subject: Subscription request
Message-ID:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

You have an error in the "Content-Type:" header, which is an almost certain spamsign (the "Content-Transfer-Encoding:" header should be on its own line, and lines are separated by \r\n in SMTP). That's the first thing to fix. Also, the headers contain a User-Agent: header saying it was Thunderbird that sent it … but has different headers than if Thunderbird had *actually* sent it. You probably want to have your software not lie about what it is, because that's *also* almost certain spamsign. I'd also change the charset to "us-ascii" unless you plan on actually using the extended characters of UTF-8, and set the Content-Transfer-Encoding to "quoted-printable" (sans quotes), to match the vast majority of legitimate email.

Hope this is helpful.

Cheers!
-robin

I've used majordomo with good results in the past — I mean, it's a big pile of perl, so it's pretty easy to tweak the messages, and it integrates well with sendmail.

*shrug* I don't know how gmail's spam filters work. I know gmail's implemented domainkeys, though, so you might win some points if you add those headers and the appropriate DNS record.

Um, I appear to completely fail at logging in via openID. Which is a pity, because I like the idea a lot. Let's try that again?

I'd put more weight on the headers. I've had to administer a few spam filters, and one of the first things to set up is filtering on header mistakes, because legitimate mail so seldom has them.

I actually grabbed those headers from the message sent to my own mail server *and* after bouncing it to gmail. The Content Encoding header was borked on both. Gmail handles it just fine for display purposes, but that's because it just ignores it — the Content-Type and Content-Encoding headers are actually both optional headers, and it defaults to plain old text if they're not there.

I forgot to mention majordomo in my list above, but that's another one that has very few problems. One of my clients (the guy who runs http://www.zoji.com/, a facebook-like site) was having spambucket issues, and claims that installing DomainKeys solved most of his problems. He also verifies that it's a PITA to set up. I've never done it, myself.

why don't you just use yahoo mail, i've had it for 4 years already and never been disappointed with it. All the spam mail just goes to a spam mail folder and you never get those emails saying about getting a large sum of cash if you provide your bank info, cause they have a service that makes sure the email is coming from an actual address. But that's just my opinion, you do whatever you need to do.

Zorba — what's your way of dealing with spam comments, like Giodude's "I'm paid by Yahoo to post pro-Yahoo tripe on blog entries about email troubles" comment above?

Oh, heh.. I guess I wasn't reading it right, my mistake :P… anyways if I were being paid by yahoo, my comment would have been more like this, " yahoo's e-mail service is #1, it's totally awesome, it's like the best in the world and doesn't disappoint one bit." and it would have followed with tons of links to yahoo services. But I don't do crap like that. But I guess from reading it, it does sound like spam.

I tried it with my hotmail account it it gets flagged spam as well.

I know majordomo as a mailing list engine does not get relegated to spam to often but i do not know how user freindly they are currently ( they have been a rather big pain in the past, but there are some really nice config tools out to alter that)

Ironically, the spambots have found the email address I posted above, and I get lots of spam at that address as a result. Ah, the internets…

Thanks. I'm kind of embarrassed I didn't redact it myself.

I suspect this is because there is a kabal of e-mail servers, and if you're creating new competition, they'll work extra hard to make sure your address isn't recognized by the system. They're hoping that you'll eventually give up and use one of their servers, like Yahoo, Google, etc.
You could always e-mail hotmail and some of them and ask them for their cooperation, though.

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