Email addresses and spam filters

[Dave A]

For folks who are getting their email, and get the occasional newsletter from TFSA, reading on is optional. However, if you are having trouble logging in or you are not getting your emails, you might just want to read this.

Yesterday I popped out a newsletter for the first time in about 4 months. For those who have already taken the trouble to respond, my sincere thanks. It's encouraging to get that kind of positive feedback.

However, the run also highlighted the challenge of working through emails and spam filters. And that is what I need to focus on here for just a moment.

This site has a pretty useful email notification system. It is meant to be a tool for you to get the kind of updates that should be useful to you and exactly what notifications you get is almost entirely under your control. We also do not publish your email address on this site or share/sell your email address to "third parties." I'm pretty sensitive about the "privacy" of most of my own email addresses so I ensured your email information is protected too. Unfortunately the webmaster one here kinda goes with the territory and I have to live with the consequences of that
But moving on...

Basically, it is pretty important to provide an email address that actually works. First, you can't complete the registration process without a confirmation step (which isn't the cause of my concern here because we don't send mail to unconfirmed email addresses other than the confirmation mail) so using a dummy email address isn't going to get you too far anyway.

But more importantly, if I don't take steps to prevent the program from sending out emails to addresses that don't work, people who actually want their emails won't get them!

Incredibly, we did not trip mweb who is notoriously grumpy about bulk emailing. Gmail and Yahoo! seemed quite happy too, despite the rather large number of our members here who have registered with these popular free email account providers. We didn't even manage to upset Spam Assassin.

However, we did manage to wake up a few giants that seem to be popular with big corporates. This despite the fact that the email itself had a spam score of only 2.6. There were a few other funnies, but I'll get to that later.

The wonderful thing about these guardians of corporate email servers is that they can make a decision to stop emails on a global scale in milliseconds, and yet they take 24 - 48 hours to clear a false alarm. Both Barracuda and Frontbridge have cleared the blocks they had erected so hastily, but the effects will only filter through within a day or two.

The cause in this case seems to be dead email accounts. Too many emails to addresses that don't (or no longer) exist and obviously these programs shoot first and ask questions later.

The only solution I have is that if I see an email is bounced for a dead email account, and you aren't logging in so I know you might notice a PM on the subject, I have to suspend your member profile so that the program won't send out any more emails to you - about anything. It also means you won't be able to log on etc. So if you are having these sorts of problems, there is a 'contact us' link down below, drop me a line and we'll get you going again.

And now for the funnies:

Something called PROFANITY took offense at angloamerican.com. The feedback from PROFANITY was particularly useless in me understanding who or what might be the problem, but perhaps it was the word "Heck". Anyhow, if anyone can shed any light on PROFANITY who seems to be a gatekeeper at angloamerican, I'd be pleased to hear it.

For the guys and gals at Nedbank - please talk to your IT expert about NebankReactor. There are quite a few of you that have joined now and I really can't carry on manually jumping through the hoops that your gatekeeper throws up. We've got members from all the major banks in SA, and somehow all the others seem to survive without this dance.

And a last one for now...

If you are a fan of setting up email forwarding, try not to set up an email forward from mail address A to B if you've also got forwarding from B back to A. The marvel of this particular endless loop is that at some point one of the servers involved actually emailed to let me know about it