Harumph
So, I have just received word from a friend who subscribes to email alerts from Eclectablog that Comcast has been marking email notifications for new posts as “spam” and automatically filtering them so that users never see the alerts. Here’s what he found out when he contacted Comcast:
Comcast indicated that there was a spam marker (which was now taken off) put on your emails (I’m not sure what other Comcast users aren’t receiving emails but mine stopped arriving 8/20). A spam marker is placed on an email sender when Comcast gets a certain number of user spam reports! So not to get all paranoid, but it would seem a dedicated group could slow down/limit Eclectablog by a dedicated program of highlighting it as spam at various internet providers?Anyway, with the call back it was explained to me that on your end you might (maybe you do this) to audit your mailing list to make sure people get opted out when they want, make sure you aren’t getting a ‘hard bounce’ (not sure what that is), and try somehow to make sure ill willed renegades aren’t signing up. As obviously they would have to be receiving Eclectablog in their inbox/through a provider to be able to list it as spam.
Anyone who asks to be unsubscribed from our email notifications is unsubscribed almost immediately and definitely within 24 hours so I don’t think that is the issue. The idea that there are people who are signing up simply to sabotage us may seem outlandish but, sadly, it’s not. There are people who do this for fun and, more nefariously, there are people who are paid to do this type of thing by conservative groups trying to silence their opposition. They also do things like going on Reddit to downvote progressive articles and giving bad reviews to progressive books on Amazon.com. Why? Because, that’s just how they roll.
Anyway, if you signed up for email alerts and haven’t been receiving them, please let me know. There’s a contact button at the top left of every page on the site which sends an email directly to my inbox. I’m trying to determine how widespread a problem this really is.
Thanks.
– Chris
