spam

[eirias]

I have a different "From:" and "Reply-To:" address set up for my email acct; this is because I want people to use my professional account in sending me email, but strongly dislike the interface provided by my university, so I have it all forwarded to a gmail account. I am wondering whether this is a common trigger for spam filters, because I have been having problems communicating with academic listservs I'm on -- both in sending mail to them, and in communicating with the administrators about them. How likely is it that my emails are simply not going through?

Comments

[supercarrot.livejournal.com]

do you have this set up? it's awesome. (although it might still give you the problems. dunno.)
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=%67mail&hl=en&answer=22370

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I don't, and I've been thinking about it. The difficulty is that it's also obvious, to mailservers I mean, that a From: address is essentially being forged, and I worry that it'd create the same problem, if that is indeed what is going on.

OTOH I did just do an experiment wherein I unforwarded my mail, changed my reply-to address to something else entirely, and tried to send gmail to my wisc account. And it worked -- so apparently, if it is common univ. policy to throw mismatches in the spam filter, it is not UW policy. This is inconclusive but it's suggestive that something else is going on, though what it is I can't imagine.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I did some more digging and tried that; as it turns out, it did the trick!

Rock. Thanks for the suggestion!

[drspiff.livejournal.com]

Your hunch is correct, if your email is coming from one source and the reply is sent back to another source, it will get caught in the less sophisticated spam filters. Changing the "From" address won't really help because the spam filter is often looking at the IP adress of the sending machine (which you can't mask as easilly).
Technically the spam filter rejects it not because it thinks it is spam, but because it flags it as potential phishing. Its like those scams to get you to hand over your SSN by sending you a faked email from a bank saying your financiall well being in peril and you need to log onto their site and give them all your personal information right away.
Is it possible that you could set your University email to all forward to your gmail account? That would produce the same effect of letting you read all your incoming mail at gmail.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I do forward everything to gmail already, actually. I forward it to gmail, and set wisc's address as the reply-to so it keeps my professional address involved. (It also adds another layer to my spam filter, which means almost none gets into my inbox; that's very nice.)

I don't know how they do it, but gmail's from-masking actually seems to work -- I think that all this majordomo software is checking is whether the From: is the same as the subscriber address. Mine wasn't, so changing it to make it match solved the problem.

[eldan.livejournal.com]

A lot of listservs (e.g. ReallyImWorking and a couple that I administer) automatically reject any mail from an address that is not a subscriber, as a crude first line of defence against spam - that may be what you were running up against. It's up to the list admin to decide whether the sender should be informed of this or the mail should just go into a black hole.