[ih] The Declining Reliability of Internet Mail

[Jack Haverty]

On 1/10/24 10:33, Karl Auerbach wrote:
> (This is a repost, the original seems to have vanished, silently, into 
> the luminiferous ether.)

FYI, below is a note I sent to another mailing list, for my local 
neighborhood group, to explain what, I think, is happening to Internet 
mail.  One suggestion I received to get reliable email was to use a 
proprietary service such as Signal.  That makes me sad -- that the 
Internet email I've used for 50 years has decayed so much.   For 
History's sake -- how did that happen...?

Jack Haverty

---------------------------

Email has seemed to me to be getting less and less reliable lately, with 
lots of "I never got your email" experiences.  I've been doing email for 
a long time (I wrote one of the first email systems on the 'net - 50 
years ago!), so I just did a "deep dive" back into the technology jungle 
to figure out what's happening now.

I can go through the gory technical details, for anyone who cares about 
things like SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and other such techno-jargon. But the 
bottom line is:

Email through any kind of "forwarder" (such as this list) is now 
unreliable, and will get worse.

The reason for this is the ever increasing amount of "spam", "phishing", 
"identity theft", and other such cyber-crimes.   In response to that, 
email providers (gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc.) have been strengthening 
their anti-spam mechanisms, to keep such email out of their customers' 
(your) mailboxes.   Many have promised to continue to improve their 
filtering so you get even less spam in your mailbox.

Unfortunately, that also means you'll get less real email as well - 
essentially anything that travels through any kind of forwarding service 
may just disappear and never reach your mailbox.   That includes this 
message, and anything sent through any other similar "mailing list" 
address.  I received the following comment from MIT about their alumni 
mail forwarding service (which I've been using as a forwarder for 
decades with my jack.haverty at alum.mit.edu address).  It's not encouraging:

"/You should also note that new spam rules and policies make it very 
difficult to offer a reliable forwarding-only service at this point. We 
have found that email forwarding is becoming less reliable as spam 
filtering policies get more aggressive. In other words, forwarded mail 
looks suspicious and causes a red flag in spam filtering systems where 
mail is forwarded to. This results in the forwarded mail getting flagged 
as spam or silently dropped (the latter of which is becoming more 
common). ... Unfortunately email forwarding alone is no longer a viable 
option and you run the risk of losing/missing mail if you use it 
strictly as a forwarding address."

///Suggestions:

- assume that any email you send to this group (or others) did not get 
delivered to some of the group members.   If you want to send a reliable 
email, you should send it directly to the individual mailboxes, rather 
than through any mail forwarder.

- check your own email service (whoever you use to send and receive 
mail) to make sure it is up to date with all the technical details of 
spam filtering.   The site https://www.mail-tester.com/ is a way to test 
your own email to judge how likely mail you send will be treated as spam.

- if your own email doesn't get an "A" grade, move your email to a 
different email service.   I just did this with my jack at 3kitty.org 
address since my previous mail provider (of 20 years) was not up to date 
and didn't have a clue.
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