Email Abuse and Deliverability

We can access data about email complaints from several sources.

Note: if we are being blocked or deferred by a provider, reach this page and also read our mailq management page.

Our official abuse email address.

Our official email for receiving abuse complaints is abuse [@] m.o.

Almost all email sent to this address is in the abuse reporting format, which means it’s not useful to read email sent to this mailbox directly.

Instead, this email address is checked by mistert. This software parses all incoming email, inserts it into a sqlite database, and then sends a summary of abuse reports on a weekly basis to our support address.

You can check the data by logging into monitor002. See the Mister T README for more details.

In addition, if our Abuse Report Parser code detects a message that is not in the ARF format, it fowards the message to our info email account so a human can act on it.

Who sends to this address and why?

  • This address is configured with our upstream provider so when they get complaints about our IP ranges, those get forwarded to us.

  • In addition, the abuse email is assigned, via ARIN, as the official abuse email for our IP address range.

  • Yahoo (see below) is configured to send complaints about mayfirst.org, lists.mayfirst.org and lists.people-link.net to this address.

  • Microsoft is configured to send complaints linked to our IPs to this address.

  • The Validity service (see below) could be configured to send to this address for a fee.

The big email providers

Gmail

Google doesn’t send complaints via email - instead all complaints are aggregated and made available via their Postmaster tools. Our mayfirstpeoplelink Google account is configured with access to the postmaster tools available here.

We can only track complaints against email sent by domain, so we have mayfirst.org, lists.mayfirst.org and lists.people-link.net available. The dashboard provides mostly unhelpful graphs showing differences in complaints over time, but with little to no details.

Google also has a Feedback loop system. This system could allow us to insert an Email header in each outgoing email message that would allow us to track complaints in a more fine-grained manner, but it requires each sending domain to be added and verified to our Gmail Postmaster Tools account, which would require us to tediously register every domain used by every member.

Yahoo

Yahoo also has a feedback loop. Unlike Gmail, it does send complaints to our generic abuse email address (hooray!). But, like Gmail, it only works for domains that are verified. Using our May First Yahoo account, I have created an account for mayfirst.org, lists.mayfirst.org, and lists.people-link.net, which can be updated via this dashboard.

However:

  1. There is no data there! All data is sent to our abuse email address
  2. In only covers our three main domains

In addition, the Yahoo Sender FAQ has more details information, including a link to a sender support request form that can be used to ask questions about blocked email if we are that desperate.

Microsoft

Microsoft has both a Smart Network Data Services program and a Junk Email Reporting Program (see their page of services). We have a specific snds Outlook account that can be used to access the dashboard page.

This is the only major service that is IP based and is now configured with our /24.

If you login, you can see statistics on a per day basis of complaints, which makes it a potential canary for us.

Also, Microsoft sends complaints to our abuse email address.

And lastly, you can request support from their support form. The community wisdom suggests being very deferential and polite. If Microsoft says they don’t see anything unusual with your IP addresses, continue following up with more log samples until they finall mitigate it.

Validity

I discovered a service called Validity that has a Feedback Loop service that claims to send us ARF feedback messages from dozens of providers. I submitted our new /24 block and we may start being able to view summaries of our ARF messages, but to get them to send via email we have to pay a subscription.