[Mailman-Users] Giving away the secrets of 99.3% email delivery

[Geoff Shang]

On Fri, 11 May 2012, Ralf Hildebrandt wrote:

> On the other hand we're getting spam reports for list mails (not
> spam!) our users sent to a list. But since it's not spam we cannot
> actually do anything about those mails while the LIST ADMIN could
> easily unsubscribe the people reporting the spam.

Except the list admin may not know about this.  Some people are just too 
lazy to unsubscribe from a list they double-opted into and report the mail 
as spam.

I had a situation where the organisation I was working for was having all 
mail sent from its server being completely blocked by a large American 
ISP, all on the back of one person's spam reports.  They wouldn't even 
tell us what the address was.  Fortunately I was able to figure out the 
address and the list from the headers of a message and remove the person 
in question.  I'm not sure that I'dve been able to do this with a Mailman 
message, they were using inferior (IMHO) list software then.

The only way we could avoid this happening again was to subscribe to their 
feedback loop.  Then we would receive the spam reports instead of them 
being immediately acted upon, under the understanding that we would act on 
them instead.

Of course, everyone has their own feedback loop, and if you care about 
getting mail through to big providers, you'll probably need to subscribe 
to all their feedback loops.

A good page with info on this and other issues is 
http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/section/ISP%20Spam%20Issues

HTH,
Geoff.