Anyway

{ 5 } Comments

1. David Carlton | Sep 29, 2008 at 11:08 am | Permalink

   When this happened to me, the cause was inap­pro­pri­ate for­ward­ing rules on my mail server. I had a .proc­mailrc that was rout­ing the e-mail through gmail; proc­mail added head­ers in such a way that gmail was treat­ing my server as the source for all that e-mail, instead of ascrib­ing it to the ori­ginal sender. The res­ult was that gmail received lots of e-mail from my host, almost all of it spam (since almost all e-mail sent to me is spam), and decided after a few weeks that my host was a spam source. (It didn’t help that there were mul­tiple users of that mail server who were using gmail as a pass-through spam fil­ter via procmail.)

   I fixed the prob­lem by repla­cing my .proc­mailrc with a .for­ward file that had my MTA do the rout­ing itstelf; the MTA is smarter about this sort of thing than proc­mail is, and mod­i­fied the head­ers in a more appro­pri­ate way; once I did that, things got much much better.

   If this sounds like it might be a match for what you’re doing, feel free to con­tact me for more details.

2. Lauren Wood | Sep 29, 2008 at 11:52 am | Permalink

   Hi David, it sounds like most or all of the email you were for­ward­ing was marked as spam; this isn’t the case for me (I should have made that clearer). Most of the real email does get through (albeit after a cer­tain period of train­ing Gmail), and most of the spam doesn’t (ditto for the train­ing). So it doesn’t sound to me like I have the same prob­lem as you had. I would guess it’s Gmail rais­ing the bar in the end­less circle of spam-fighting, and rais­ing it a little too high.

3. David Carlton | Oct 01, 2008 at 9:47 pm | Permalink

   Yeah, I was for­ward­ing all of my e-mail, so of course 95% or 99% or whatever was cor­rectly marked as spam; if that’s not what you’re doing, then it does sound like a dif­fer­ent situation.

4. Lauren Wood | Oct 02, 2008 at 8:59 am | Permalink

   Yes, I’m for­ward­ing all of my email, and almost all the spam mail is cor­rectly marked as spam. Most of the non-spam is also cor­rectly marked as not spam; the num­ber of false pos­it­ives is just high enough to be annoy­ing. I believe my ISP (which has an option for for­ward­ing mail) is doing the right thing because lots of real mail does get through; I under­stood your first com­ment to mean none of your real mail got through as Gmail thought your ISP only sent spam.

   This is get­ting as com­plic­ated as fig­ur­ing out what’s spam and what isn’t; I think I need more caf­feine

5. David Carlton | Oct 02, 2008 at 10:41 pm | Permalink

   No, my real mail went through; it’s just that 5% or so of it got flagged as spam. I could be wrong, but I think that, when I was using the bad con­fig­ur­a­tion, the prob­lem was that the mailer doing the for­ward­ing inser­ted a Received: header con­tain­ing an envelope-from that men­tioned the e-mail address I was for­ward­ing from. Whereas, in the good situ­ation, the for­ward­ing MTA inserts a Received: header, but with no envelope-from. (It’s the Received: header right after the Authentication-Results: header that Gmail inserts.)

   I don’t know enough about mail head­ers to know what’s going on here; it is the case that some­body else using my mail server ran into the same prob­lem, talked to a coworker of his at Google (con­veni­ent, that!), and learned that Gmail was clas­si­fy­ing too much of the mail he was for­ward­ing as spam because of that, and that when we changed how we were for­ward­ing e-mail, the prob­lem went away for both of us.

   So I would look at your mail head­ers; if your address at your ISP is men­tioned in an envelope-from in that Received: header, it’s prob­ably the same thing, oth­er­wise not. Another way to tell is to look at the Authentication-Results: header (or the Received-SPF: header): — if the address men­tioned after the words “domain of” is your e-mail address that you’re for­ward­ing of, then that’s the prob­lem, if it’s the e-mail address of the ori­ginal sender, then some­thing else is the problem.

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