How to Avoid Spam Filters Blog
Proper Email Delivery and a Good Email Reputation Mean Everything!

I was just in Gmail and went to click the delete button on one of my own emails that arrives there as a test.

Since the delete button is only a quarter inch from the spam button, I, in a hurry I clicked the wrong one. I had just marked my own message as spam.

I wonder how many times that happens by mistake to our emails. What do you think?

The court unanimously agreed with Jeremy Jaynes’ argument that the law violates free-speech and overturns spammer conviction, setting the stage for a Supreme Court spam laws showdown!

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The Virginia Supreme Court declared the state’s anti-spam law unconstitutional Friday and reversed the conviction of a man once considered one of the world’s most prolific spammers.

The court unanimously agreed with Jeremy Jaynes’ argument that the law violates the free-speech protections of the First Amendment because it does not just restrict commercial e-mails — it restricts other unsolicited messages as well. Most other states also have anti-spam laws, and there is a federal CAN-SPAM Act as well, but those laws apply only to commercial e-mail pitches.

The Virginia law ”is unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails, including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Justice G. Steven Agee wrote.

Agee wrote that ”were the Federalist Papers just being published today via e-mail, that transmission by Publius would violate the statute.” Publius was the pseudonym used by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay in essays urging ratification of the Constitution.

”In my view, the case was never about Jeremy Jaynes — it was about the First Amendment,” said Jaynes’ attorney, Thomas M. Wolf. ”The argument was never that there’s a constitutional right to send commercial spam. It was that the government cannot criminalize the sending of noncommercial e-mail for political and religious purposes, and that is what this statute did.”

Lawyers for the state had argued that the First Amendment doesn’t apply because the Virginia law bars trespassing on privately owned e-mail servers through phony e-mail routing and transmission information. The court rejected that characterization of the law.

Attorney General Bob McDonnell said he was ”deeply disappointed” and vowed to take the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court.

”Jeremy Jaynes used the private property of Internet service providers to defraud individuals worldwide,” McDonnell said. ”This was not a matter of free speech, it was fraud. Virginia acted appropriately to use this new law to put an end to this criminal behavior.”

John Levine, a board member of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail and one of the state’s expert witnesses in the Jaynes case, said he too was disappointed, but added that the ruling won’t have broad repercussions because Virginia is the only state that prohibits noncommercial spam.

”I don’t see it as a fatal setback for anti-spam law,” Levine said.

In 2004, Jaynes became the first person in the country to be convicted of a felony for sending unsolicited bulk e-mail. Authorities claimed Jaynes sent up to 10 million e-mails a day from his home in Raleigh, N.C. He was sentenced to nine years but is currently serving time in federal prison for an unrelated securities fraud conviction unrelated to the Virginia case, Wolf said.

Jaynes was charged in the spam case in Virginia because the e-mails went through an AOL server there.

The Virginia Supreme Court last February affirmed Jaynes’ conviction on several grounds but later agreed, without explanation, to reconsider the First Amendment issue. Jaynes was allowed to argue that the law unconstitutionally infringed on political and religious speech even though all his spam was commercial.

Wolf said sending commercial spam is still illegal in Virginia under the federal CAN-SPAM Act. However, he said the federal law does not apply to Jaynes because it was adopted after he sent the e-mails that were the basis for the state charges.

How could you possibly ruin your Email Delivery and mark your own email IP address as sending spam?

Yes you really can be clicking the “This is Spam” button on yourself. It happens quite easily and you may have already done this yourself.

The problem is that an automated spam filter is simply unable to determine what is spam and what is a forward. Here’s a break down of the problem using Comcast as an example.

You setup an auto forwarder from your domain to your Comcast email account. This also occurs often when you forward email from your work email account.

You are forwarding mail from you@yourdomain.com to you@Comcast.com.

When your customers send emails to you@yourdomain.com the email gets forwarded to you@Comcast.com

One day you receive some spam at you@yourdomain.com, which was auto forwarded directly from you@Comcast.com.

You open your you@Comcast.com mail box and see the spam, so you click to “Mark it as SPAM” and add it to your Comcast spam filter . You have just entered a spam complaint against your own email server! Comcast’s spam filter does not register the originator of the email as the spammer - instead, it registers the last place the email came from as the Spammer and in this case and the last place the email came from is your email server which is the outgoing email server for hosts you@yourdomain.com.

Comcast will then blacklist the entire mail server so that no one can send email to any Comcast email accounts.

They will then contact your host and ask that your domain be deleted.

Until then Comcast will block all email from the outgoing SMTP servers associated with your server (thru reverse DNS).

Solution

What do I need to do you ask?

You need to login to your email admin on your domain and go through your email accounts and take off any forwarding that forwards email to any account or any other ISP.

Also check to make sure your email Alias is not forwarding to any email account or any other ISP.

Although it might be an inconvenience to many, I think this decision is necessary to protect our mail servers from being blacklisted by ISPs in this way.

Verizon, Comcast or AOL certainly do nothing to investigate the source of the spam and would rather shut down a server than take a minute to check it out.

Please note, this does not mean you cannot send emails to Verizon, Comcast, AOL or other ISP based email accounts. This simply means you should not set your email account to auto forward emails. You will still be able to compose your own email to ISP users, and you will be able to forward an email to those users from your mailbox manually.