Re: [Nmh-workers] Emails being tagged as spam -- NMH solution???

[Bob Carragher]

[Note:  this email is being sent directly from the GMail web
 client, so its header should be correct and not "spammy."]

On Thu, 19 Feb 2015 15:58:21 -0500 Ken Hornstein <address@hidden> sez:

> >As you can probably see from this message's header, my nominal
> >email provider is Google (@gmail.com) but my ISP is Comcast.  In
> >particular, they are not the same domain.  Nor are my Google
> >account's username and my machine's login ID the same (for
> >historical reasons).  So, even though I set up as much of my
> >composed message's header to reflect the @gmail.com account, it's
> >pretty clear that it's coming from someone else.  Hence, the
> >tagging of them by aggressive filters as spam.
>
> So, it might be useful to figure out exactly what is causing
> the spam tagging, and work on that.  I know that this is
> sometimes hard to discover.
>
> I can only say that this email has one domain, but is being
> submitted to another domain and AFAIK, I get caught in zero
> spam filters ... at least, that's what I can tell.

Good question.  I'm assuming it's because of the different sender
domain versus From: domain because friends have warned me that
their mailer is popping up a "this email might not have been sent
by address@hidden" warnings.  I also see something similar
when GMail tags my own messages (that I've Cc-ed myself on).

> >Note:  since my machine login ID is a pretty common one, to avoid
> >my emails bounces going to someone else accidentally I set up
> >sendmail to specify my domain as @localhost.localdomain.  This no
> >doubt also contributes to the spam-tagging.
>
> Well, I guess I would wonder what the effects of that are.
> First off, I see your message-id has "@localhost.localdomain"
> in it; if I had to guess, I would think that would be one of
> the biggest things that spam filters are being triggered by in
> your case.  Also ... I don't understand why you would need to
> do this to stop email bounces.  Your bounces should be going to
> the envelope-from address, and that looks like it is set
> correctly.

Is there a better domain to use?

Comcast is my ISP, but I don't want sendmail thinking that
another Comcast user's email address (e.g. address@hidden)
is a local address, trying (and failing) to send email to a
non-existent user on my computer.  I also don't want the Sender:
address that would be generated (address@hidden) to be seen as a
possible address for mailers to send replies to (see below).

As for why I'm using @localhost.localdomain, that's for
historical reasons.  In the (dim-and-distant) past, a few friends
complained that replies to my emails would actually be set up to
be sent to the Sender: address, despite my From: and Reply-To:
fields being set to my public email address.  (Other than that
address, I haven't changed my $MH_DIR/components in probably 15
years.)  I used to use "mit.edu" as my computer's domain (because
I didn't know about @localhost.localdomain), and there really
is/was an active address@hidden email address who actually received
a few of those replies.

> >I'm guessing that one "simple" solution might be to purchase my
> >own domain, and then register it with GMail as an "equivalent
> >address" to "validate" my emails as non-spam.  I'd like to avoid
> >this if possible.
>
> So my configuration is that I do not use sendmail at all; I
> have nmh do authenticated SMTP directly to the mail server I
> send stuff through.  I think that if you did that you'd be in
> much better shape; for starters, your message-id would be a lot
> better.  You might have to do slight tweaking to get that to
> work right with gmail (like enabling your account for
> "insecure" applications), but I believe it should work fine
> with the stock nmh.
>
> We have contribued work from Eric Gillespie to support the
> XOAUTH protocol used by gmail; it's on my list of things to
> integrate, but it's kind of complicated and I haven't yet had
> the time to figure it out.

Not needing to use Sendmail would probably be a godsend for me,
as I obviously don't understand it or how to correctly set it up!
I can try this and see if I'm successful.

Could you point me to a man page, or maybe NMH archives that I
could read to experiment?

Thank you very much!!!

Bob