companies with horrible bulk mail services

[Grogan]

I couldn't believe this, today I booked a vaccination appointment. There's a government portal that will lead you to locations, but the appointments are made with the pharmacies themselves. This wasn't some mom and pop pharmacy either, it was a chain.

It said "if you don't get a confirmation email, check your Spam or Junk folder". I thought nothing of that, because I use SpamAssassin which isn't as dumb as most mail services' filtering. Well, I didn't get the email. I don't quarantine in any way, because then that shit has to be cleaned out by each mail user. It's also quite rare for legitimate mail to run afoul of SpamAssassin even at my excited level of 3 (5 is the default).

So I went to the maillog on the server and found the transaction. Indeed, SpamAssassin deleted it because it got a Spam Score of 11. You'd have to be a complete doofus to get a score of 11, not even actual spammers get scores that high!

[Zema Bus]

I bet their emails end up in a lot of spam folders

I've never had so much stuff ending up in my spam folders, but then the anti-spam at my current mail host has become overzealous in the last several years, even after I logged in and dialled it down. So I have to keep tabs on what's in my spam folders, most of it I don't care about, but I still regularly find legitimate stuff in there, and often of two essentially identical emails one can get flagged as spam while the other does not. I've been planning to move to another mail host for a while now, probably Proton Mail. Another reason is that they go down periodically, several times a year, but they've been OK for a while so complacency settles in.

Did you get them to resend the confirmation email?

[Grogan]

No, I don't actually need the email, the appointment is made (I don't think I had to "confirm" my email), it will be an email with "instructions" on what to do for your appointment (for me that means push up my sleeve lol)

Email is such a pain in the ass nowadays. Spammers and scammers ruin everything.

[Grogan]

I did some troubleshooting and found that my bayesian probability data was part of the problem. It's been building for years. I started quarantining messages in users' SPAM/Junk folders (accessible only by webmail or Imap if you add the folder) so I could get a better idea of what's going on.

I couldn't tell at first, because the spamassassin data in the email headers was truncated since the last update. (Aren't updates grand?)

It was just inserting results like this:

Code: Select all

Content analysis details:   (0.8 points, 3.0 required)
  pts rule name              descripti
	=?ISO-8859-1?Q?on=0A_----_--
X-Spam-Flag: NO

It turned out to be encoding issues and I had to use sed on some Exim ACL files to fix it. Once I could see the full output again, I saw that even good mails were getting bayes scores of 30 to 40% probability of SPAM (which just gives it a small score) and junk mail (not quite spam) was getting 90 to 100% probability, bumping its spam score by 5 right off the bat.

That would have still rejected that pharmacy email with a score of 6, but I was also still getting a few notification emails from Linuxquestions from long running Slackware threads I posted to years ago (latest changelog, latest kernel) and they were getting rejected. My parents were getting junk (to me its junk, but its stuff they signed up for) rejected in their spam folders too, like notifications from services they've subscribed to and notifications of points card specials etc. because of the Bayes data. They probably will get through now.

After deleting the Bayes databases, now those Linuxquestions emails are getting through. They are unwanted, but were useful in troubleshooting.