"blocklist" before "welcomelist"

[patty1]

Maybe everyone else already knows this, but I just discovered that I was having a very frustrating experience with a website I needed access to because my "welcomelist" listing was being overridden by a certain "blocklist" listing in Sonic's mail filtering settings.

I was sent an invitation from a grants management system (SmartSimple.com) to collaborate on writing a grant proposal. I got the invitation okay and accepted it, which meant I was in in SmartSimple's system. But when I tried to set a password by using the "Reset Password" link on SmartSimple, the reset messages were not getting to me. SmartSimple is used by a number of funders, and I verified with our desired funder that SmartSimple was sending reset messages to my main email address, which is in a domain hosted by Sonic.

Although the first message from SmartSimple (the invitation to collaborate on a proposal) came to me just fine, I added SmartSimple.com to my Sonic "welcome list" just to be safe. I also looked through my sender and subject blocklists to make sure that there were no entries that would accidentally trigger on "smart" or "simple." What I didn't realize until a tech help person at the funder mentioned in an email to me is that SmartSimple sometimes uses ".biz" instead of ".com". So I added "SmartSimple.biz" to my welcomelist. Still no reset messages.

So I went back and stared at my blocklists again. Because of a spate of spam a long time ago from ".biz" addresses, I had blocked that entire TLD. Yeah, I hear those of you who say that was stupid, but at the time, I was getting zero wanted email from that domain, only spam.

Anyway...apparently Sonic's spam filters act on "blocklist" entries before they act on "welcomelist" entries, because those messages from SmartSimple.biz got trashed by the ".biz" filter before they could be accepted for my inbox by my "SmartSimple.biz" entry. I hope that information helps someone else avoid my frustrating experience!

[kgc]

Patty, that's not quite correct. Would you mind sharing the X-Spam-Status header from the example message so I can take a look at it? This has a list of all of the rules that were matched on the message and should look something like this:

X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.1 required=5.0 tests=HTML_MESSAGE,MIME_HTML_ONLY,
SONIC_BX_A2,SPF_HELO_NONE autolearn=disabled version=4.0.0

[patty1]

Hi, Kelsey.

I can't provide headers from the messages that were filtered out by the ".biz" block because I never received them.

[kgc]

Patty, by default all messages marked as spam get routed to graymail. Do you have "Discard messages matching Blocklists" enabled? That does exactly what it says it does and discards messages that match a blocklist, but only if the messages are marked as spam which implies that in your case, the blocklist and welcomelists where not cancelling each other out. Perhaps because it was matching multiple blocklist rules?

[patty1]

Yes, I just checked, and I had blocklisted messages set for automatic deletion. I've changed that for now, but I remember that I had instituted it due to having too many unwanted emails in my graymail folder, so I may go back to it.

Perhaps I was wrong about the order that the filtering happens, but the bottom line is that the blocklist entry on .biz overrode the welcomelist entry for SmartSimple.biz.

[kgc]

Perhaps I was wrong about the order that the filtering happens, but the bottom line is that the blocklist entry on .biz overrode the welcomelist entry for SmartSimple.biz.

Provided it's only one of the welcome and block list rules in each case, they should actually negate each other. They are -100 and +100 scores respectively - so perhaps more than one blocklist rule was matching or the message would have been marked as spam anyway.