Mailing list emails winding up in greymail

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5 posts Page 1 of 1
by bobrk » Fri Jan 31, 2025 11:37 am
I noticed a bunch of my emails (mostly from Substack) have been winding up in greymail. How is the spam control managed? Seems to have coincided with the new government coming into power.
by joemuller » Fri Jan 31, 2025 5:13 pm
Hi Bob,

Every message that is automatically placed in Graymail should have a summary at the top which includes the total score (points) that the message received through the Sonic's Spamassassin system. There is also a list of individual rules which have been triggered - the ones starting with SONIC_ are a handful of internal rules we maintain, mostly to stop phishing emails which directly target our customers. If you see a particular non-Sonic rule that you'd like to adjust, you can make changes via our Member Tools under Email -> Spam Filtering -> Modify Scores.

If you have a particular message you'd like Support to look at, you can forward it to them (please make sure that the original headers are included or you use the 'Forward as Attachment' option in your email client. If necessary, our Operations team can dive into our email logs and see exactly when the message was received, how it was processed, and when it was delivered to your (Sonic) mailbox.

-- Joe M
I'm a proud employee of Sonic.net! :-)
by tikvah » Sat Feb 01, 2025 9:12 am
Either turn off graymail or keep on top of it. That's the only way. For years and years, Sonic has flagged pretty much every newsletter and customer emails and mailing list that I have signed up for. Things that have come through to my mailbox for years will suddenly end up in graymail. This includes mailing lists hosted at Sonic!

I have noticed no change in this over the last few weeks or months. I can't say there won't be changes in the future, but politics is not the issue right now.

Sometimes I'll go through a period where a lot of things get caught and I have to whitelist them. And sometimes everything will work well for a long time. More frequently though, things get caught but they aren't things I care about so it doesn't register in the same way as discovering I'm not getting stuff I expect to get and really want. You're noticing it now because it's something that's important to you, or it's the luck of the draw.
by bobrk » Sat Feb 01, 2025 9:31 am
Oh I'm on it, that's why I'm commenting. I've whitelisted over 2000 address, both wildcard and specific. I have my spam set a 3.0, and it's a pretty sweet spot. I check my greymail email everyday and make tweaks as necessary.

But when some of my from certain lists start getting blocked that's when I notice.

One of the emails got over 8 points for this:

8.0 SH_BODYURI_REVERSE_SBL The corresponding A record of an URI contained
in the body is listed in SBL
[URI: email.mg-d0.substack.com/34.102.239.211]

This is from a list that normally passes. The IP address just shows it's a site in google's cloud, not what specific website it's attached to.

It seems to me that someone else is bumping that score and I don't have control over it.

Is there a way of looking at the broken down scores for emails that pass? My other substack emails show me the total score but not what went into it. The headers for passed emails look like:

X-Spam-Status: No, score=-101.4 required=3.0 tests=DCC_CHECK,DKIM_SIGNED, DKIM_VALID,DKIM_VALID_EF,HTML_MESSAGE,MAILING_LIST_MULTI, RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE,RCVD_IN_MSPIKE_H3,RCVD_IN_MSPIKE_WL,SNF4SA, SONIC_BX_A2,SPF_HELO_NONE,T_KAM_HTML_FONT_INVALID,USER_IN_WELCOMELIST autolearn=disabled version=4.0.0
by seth.lohr » Tue Feb 04, 2025 6:51 am
bobrk wrote: Sat Feb 01, 2025 9:31 am Is there a way of looking at the broken down scores for emails that pass? My other substack emails show me the total score but not what went into it. The headers for passed emails look like:
If you look at https://members.sonic.net/email/spam/scores/index.php - there should be (in most cases I believe) a corresponding score and short description on what the rule is.
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