Last modified: 2014-05-06 23:46:25 UTC
Created attachment 13106 [details] spam notice on echo HTML email notification It just occurred to me that all HTML notifications I've received to date from no-reply-notifications@wikimedia.org (Echo) are in my Gmail spambox. Google displays a notice saying that "Many people marked similar messages as spam". If confirmed, this seriously affects our ability to reach notification recipients. Possibly related to: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52556
Possibly this might have the same cause as the mailinglist messages that were ending up in the gmail spambox.
Created attachment 13107 [details] Mail notifications headers compared (In reply to comment #1) > Possibly this might have the same cause as the mailinglist messages that were > ending up in the gmail spambox. This is supposed not to be the case, because they have different sender addresses with different SPF records and they are sent by a different IP, precisely to avoid @wikimedia.org mail, ML and wiki/other mail to be collated as single spam agent (this was done a few years ago by Mark, IIRC). Note that Echo emails are different from standard enotif in almost every single header (subject, from, sender, reply-to, footer and of course body are all non-standard), see an example at https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Extension:GettingStarted/Welcome_enotif&oldid=686716 I have been told that the Echo team had discussed with ops the implications of having a different header. Indeed, I have tested it and despite the From: Wikipedia <no-reply-notifications@wikipedia.org> Reply-To: No Reply <no-reply-notifications@wikipedia.org> and the absence of a Sender, the presence of (envelope-from <wiki@wikimedia.org>) in the Received headers makes it pass the SPF check: Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of wiki@wikimedia.org designates 2620:0:860:2:219:b9ff:fedd:c027 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=wiki@wikimedia.org However, there is not much to do if the emails "look like spam" and users press the spam button, except – I think – making it clear that they are not spam. I don't know if this is the actual problem, it may be not. Most notifications (some 5k out of 16k daily) are talk pages notifications which already triggered enotiftalk before Echo. Only some 40 % of notifications goes to new users; experienced users probably already received most notifications and know how to deal with them. We don't have stats on pre-Echo enotiftalk nor on enotifwatchlist ( http://ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/dashboards/enwiki-features As it was noted on the wikitech-l thread about mailing list "spam", Gmail suggests you to unsubscribe from diligent email senders, rather than marking them spam, if they use the appropriate headers, in that case List-Unsubscribe and List-Subscribe. I don't know if we can use these headers to point to [[Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo]] or there are better headers; it could be a starting point though, as it has no cost.
Prioritization and scheduling of this bug is tracked on Mingle card https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/flow/cards/232
Hello Dario and Nemo, thank you both for reporting and investigating this issue! Dario, do we have any way to confirm how widespread this issue is, beyond your own experience? I have not heard any reports from other users about this problem as of this time and there are no posts about it on the talk page. For now, I have Cc:d a couple members of our Core Features team, so they can help assess the problem and recommend a possible solution. Terry Chay, would you like to provide an engineering perspective on this issue, so we get a sense of what's feasible on your end, if anything? Nemo suggested that we consider using List-Unsubscribe and List-Subscribe headers to point to [[Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo]], if we think this would help address the issue.
Another report, this time about Yahoo!: <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)&oldid=579262399#WMF_notification_email_marked_as_spam_by_Yahoo> The user doesn't say if it's HTML notification but from the subject it's Echo.
So, it wasn't HTML but plain-text email: the situation with Yahoo! seems rather bad as of now, I don't know if it happened after Echo (more emails? more people clicking "spam" buttons?) or before. I filed a few bugs and more will be needed: bug 56315, bug 56413, bug 56414.
Silly question time. If the sender is no-reply-notifications@wikipedia.org and an affected user sets up a Gmail filter (which explicitly allows him/her to specify such emails are never spam), wouldn't such an operation solve the issue?
(In reply to comment #7) > Silly question time. > If the sender is no-reply-notifications@wikipedia.org and an affected user > sets > up a Gmail filter (which explicitly allows him/her to specify such emails are > never spam), wouldn't such an operation solve the issue? Yes, for that user. :) Just adding that address (or even wiki@wikimedia.org) to contacts should also work in Gmail (and perhaps Yahoo), which is why I opened bug 56416.
Ok, thanks, this is good to know. Workarounds are usually better than nothing, IMHO.
