add "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" to generated EMails?

Jason Evans jsevans at mailfence.com
Sun Mar 12 16:05:34 UTC 2023


On 3/12/23 16:45, Russ Allbery wrote:
> It's not that it's not technically fine -- it certainly is -- but the main
> problem with moderation right now is that the email sent to the moderator
> gets rejected or discarded along the way by spam filters.  If we used
> encapsulation, this would have the advantage of no longer sending email
> apparently from an address that has no relation to the transmission path
> (probably good for not triggering spam filters) but the disadvantage of
> looking very weird and having nested encapsulation structure (very bad for
> spam filtering because spam filters usually treat all unusual messages as
> a sign of phishing).
>
> And if I were to pick one thing that threatens the moderation system the
> most, it would be messages going silently missing because the email server
> of the moderator decides that a lot of the moderation messages are spam
> and therefore all of them are spam and starts silently throwing them all
> away.

I think this is more of an education issue than a technical one. I think 
the best thing to do if someone is interested in moderating is to 
suggest that they proactively account for their mail services's spam 
filter even if that means white-listing all mail coming to the 
moderation account. Though this may not be possible when using services 
like gmail.

Speaking from experience, I'm a moderator on 3 different newsgroups and 
we really don't see that much spam coming through (not that much traffic 
either). If someone emailed us directly or posted on a non-moderated 
group like news.groups asking why their posts are not getting though, I 
would consider altering or removing our spam filter.

Jason



More information about the inn-workers mailing list