ET mailing list spam filter occasionally rejects some GMail emails as SPAM

[Roland Haas]

In one of the ET calls https://docs.einsteintoolkit.org/et-docs/Meeting_agenda#2019-12-05 it was reported that Email from (some) GMail servers rejected by mailing list a potential spam. This means that the spam filter rejects some gmail servers and affects colleagues whose institutions use gmail for university addresses.

To fix or at least ameliorate the issue

• possibly add info about this issue on contact website to contact us
• investigate setup of mailing list server

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[Roland Haas]

The attached tarball contains settings for postfix which may fix the spam issues at least for gmail servers.

Note that the fix sender_access which seems to be intended to exempt registered email addresses from spam checks seems out of data (from 2018) and I do not know how it was / is updated.

[Roland Haas]

@Steven R. Brandt since this requires root access to the VM at LSU, did you already have time to try out the fix I am providing?

[Roland Haas]

This might have happened again today for users at WVU, which also uses Google for its email servers.

[Gabriele Bozzola]

I believe that this happened to me with my gmail accounts (personal and institutional, University of Arizona), both not registered tot he mailing list. I am going to try to register to the mailing list and send the same email.

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[Steven R. Brandt]

I have applied the tarball above, and I have given Roland sudo access to the server.

[Steven R. Brandt]

I sent an email to the users list from my gmail and it showed up for processing. I’m hoping that means the issue is resolved.

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[Roland Haas]

Very nice. Thank you!

[Roland Haas]

Ok, turns out that apparently one had to use “google.com” and could not use “.google.com” to match all Google subdomains even though the man page on the server (and the web, https://linuxlasse.net/linux/howtos/Blacklist_and_Whitelist_with_Postfix) indicate that “.google.com” is the way to do and that “google.com” is a backwards compatible way that will go away eventually. So:

> cat /etc/postfix/google_access
google.com OK

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[Steven R. Brandt]

Server updated and tests. Everything seems okay now.