Another Dysfunction?

[ecosophia]

Over the last couple of weeks I've had the interesting experience of finding out that a lot of the emails I send are suddenly ending up in people's spam folders. That happened with one of my publishers -- he had to fish two manuscripts out of spam, and we'd been exchanging a great many emails up to that point with no difficulty at all. 

It interests me that this is happening now, when several other signs of systemic dysfunction seem to be cropping up, and when there also appears to be a renewed effort to deplatform people who don't toe the corporate media party line. (Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has been facing some hassles with the big corrupt internet conglomerates, for example.)  I find it hard to believe that a fringe thinker like me would come to the attention of anyone involved in the latter effort, but I suppose you never know.

I have workarounds in place, of course, but this has been a mild annoyance, so I figured that it was time to ask my remarkably well-informed commentariat. Is this something that's happening more generally, either to everyone, or to -- ahem -- specific categories of undesirables? 

(And if you're expecting an email from me -- or even if you're not -- you might want to check your spam folder...) 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, this has been going on for at least ten or twelve months on social media.

I have one facebook friend whom I'm friends with six times, because he's gotten hit with "you are banned for inapropriate content" so often and so long. They don't show the content, so you never know what you got banned for. Many others have two or three accounts. You can find excellent memes about facebook gulag.

Also, my political party got a 'soft ban' just a few weeks before the election, where suddenly the login no longer worked and facebook swore they couldn't fix it. (How hard is it to reset a password?)

My kids' dance emails and my church's emails have also landed in spam.

I think the most egregious was probably Twitter banning the president for a time.

Some businesses have been banned from processing credit and debit card transactions in a similar way, going back years. Gun stores have had a particular problem with that, but it's also been a problem for intellectual businesses that don't toe the line. Can't pay the podcaster by card if he's not saying the right things. The processing companies are the banners in this case, not the card companies. All very tidy and legal.

BoysMom

[(Anonymous)]

Two more points: the local library, which I'd previously whitelisted, recently got re-spammed.

And my husband's job, which includes sending people requested quotes by email, now routinely involves telling customers who are irked they didn't get their quote, to check their spam folder. This was not so last year.

BoysMom

[stcathalexandria]

Two weeks ago my gmail email address has been inundated by spam, 50 messages a day all for the same things. Previously it had been two per week. I've never understood why google can't block these things more effectively.

Also - back to your previous question on banks. I shop at Aldi for groceries and noticed this morning the sign they've had up for months now that they are limiting cash transactions and not doing cash back when using a debit card. I had forgotten about that sign. I'm in Pennsylvania. Wells Fargo also lowered the limit of how much cash can be withdrawn from an ATM machine per day per account. We got that notice over the summer sometime.

The only other systemic dysfunction is the IRS wouldn't allow us to e-file our taxes this year in April. So when they extended the deadline I tried again thinking maybe something was wonky on their end and got fixes. Still couldn't e-file at the end of July. Mailed it in and it has yet to be processed. We were expecting a small refund and I guess its coming in 2021 at this point.

[(Anonymous)]

Send me one & I’ll check both folders & let you know where it ends up.

I have the opposite problem—stuff that should go to Spam, like offers for pills to cure my erectile dysfunction—ends up in the regular box.

—Lady Cutekitten

[(Anonymous)]

I have the same problem, which started maybe a week or two ago. I have multiple email accounts, and two of them have started receiving 3-4 spam emails a day. Previously, spam filters would have caught those emails. One of the addresses is on my own domain which is hosted by Dreamhost (huge hosting company) and the other is Yahoo.

[grandswamperman]

My Dreamwidth and main Ecosophia blog emails are continuing to show up in the correct folder. I just double-checked and confirmed that no Order of Essenes correspondence has ended up in spam either. Looks like my spam folder is, fortunately, confined to actual spam at the moment.

Monkey-wrenching ourselves

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,

I work in tech in one of the big global companies. I have not seen anything structural around deplatforming, in fact the opposite - there is generally a lot of care taken to remain neutral politically. Where a position _is_ taken it tends to be driven by cultural righteousness along the lines of the left liberal values - mainly because the workforces in the valley and generally in these companies is not at all diverse along class lines, and assume these values to be universal.

Where I do think there may be challenges are around ever increasing compliance rules emerging (especially from Europe) about data privacy. This is arising from politicians globally who are trying to address the balance of power that has accrued to high-tech as a consequence of their advertising driven model. This funds the internet, no question,and it is a Faustian bargain.

Without the data-informed targeting used by the advertising industry on the internet there will be a reversion to indiscriminate advertising aka spam, or we will all need to start paying the real cost of the infrastructure, which is enormous.

New legislation is Byzantine, political and adding huge complexity whilst crapifying functionality for the user.

Along side this security has become a nation-state arms race. The sophistication is absolutely incredible (see recent attack on FireEye) and this has been another vector of rapidly increasing complexity.

In your case it may be that your email server is not adding the digital watermarks and so on to make sure your domain is recognised as high reputation.

Today, although most people don't see this because of the spam filters, more than 99% of email traffic is spam.

So you see how the system adapts and reputation signals become important, and systemically a value system is inadvertently implemented that excludes the fringes and independents.

CBM

Re: Monkey-wrenching ourselves

[(Anonymous)]

I work in tech as well, and I agree with this assessment, except in one point:

"Without the data-informed targeting used by the advertising industry on the internet there will be a reversion to indiscriminate advertising aka spam, or we will all need to start paying the real cost of the infrastructure, which is enormous."

Or (I'm going to get a little wild and crazy here :) ) we will stop using machinery to replace so much of our own psyches with shoddy intentionally-crippled prosthetic structures after which much of this overbuilt surveillance tech (aka the Internet) will rot and rust, after which much of the frothier and less sane discourse in our society will blow off.

I'm sorry if that sounds a bit snarky, but really, there are choices here beyond "stupid Internet" and "evil Internet". There's at least one more: "less Internet". And here's a really wonderful affirmation to that end which I got from the Internet (here, in fact!): "I lead an analog life." I've been using it a lot lately with good results.

thought policing

[(Anonymous)]

I don't have any specific information about emails I'm not getting, or emails I send not being received (a Catch-22 of sorts -- how does one know what's not happening? apart from scenarios like yours when the communications were flowing freely up until a specific point).

I do know that the censorship, deplatforming, and other thought policing happening to independent writers and thinkers whose work I respect and trust, and happening to me directly in my own small publishing and email discussion efforts, crossed a threshhold earlier this year that prompted me to decide to stifle myself rather than keep waiting for more hammers to fall on me for saying things that are unacceptable to the thought police.

And I know I'm not an isolated case. At least one poll showed 62% of Americans do not share their political views for fear of social (more brutal isolation amidst covid lockdown) and economic (i.e. job loss) backlash.

https://www.cato.org/publications/survey-reports/poll-62-americans-say-they-have-political-views-theyre-afraid-share

[booklover1973]

Spam seems to have become more sophisticated and the spam folder algorithms therefore more rigorous in marking emails as spam. It is probably one of the small signs of the decline of the internet.

[abrahamjpalma]

My messages to a work partner are also going to the spam folder, and we don't discuss anything political or suspect to banning, so I think you are right and this all relates to more strict spam policies on the algorithm filters.

I have been getting the expected notifications

[candace_k]

If it helps. I did receive a notification that you replied to the post I made here on dreamwidth to ecosophia. I also received a recent notification about the mundane astrology update from Subscribestar.

Re: I have been getting the expected notifications

[(Anonymous)]

I get those notifications too with no problem.

Lady Cutekitten of Lolcat

[(Anonymous)]

I have no idea if this is related but your story made me think of it.

The day after the election, Gmail asked if I wanted to categorize every email from Trump or Pence as spam. I said no, since despite them being VERY spammy, I have automated rules to sort and organize them out of my inbox, and it felt extremely weird that Gmail was asking me the day after the election.

Since then, Gmail has just automatically sent any GOP related mail to spam except for those I have specifically created a rule to keep out of spam.

On a side note, I still get all the spam from left leaning organizations that I haven't donated to for over 8 years.

[(Anonymous)]

Over the last couple weeks I've had to dig into my spam folder quite a bit as well. It's truly creepy, especially since replies to my emails from some people have started going there. At this point I think it's safe to say relying on the internet for communication is about to become a lot riskier: it looks like they major players are starting to clamp down hard.

[(Anonymous)]

One thing to keep in mind is that with the amount of data people have, it would be fairly easy to design an algorithm which would identify everyone who, let's say, publicly supports Trump (or at least doesn't hate on him enough), and start to harass them.....

[(Anonymous)]

There are a variety of ways emails wind up in spam folders:

https://sleeknote.com/blog/why-emails-go-to-spam

While it's possible subtle efforts to deplatform certain people may be going on, the fact is that emails, browsers etc are getting so insanely gnarly in their programming that it's getting more and more difficult to use them. I recently ran into the issue of trying to email one of my brothers where it would bounce back with an error message identifying the server handling the outgoing mail as a possible source of spam. Either that or the email would just vanish into thin air altogether, never getting delivered. I find it hard to believe I am persona non gratis to the PTB but anything's possible I suppose. I was told by my brother to contact my IP provider as a way to get the issue resolved but decided to just use a different email address when mailing him instead.

Given the constant "upgrades" (cough,cough) we are being subjected to, I suspect we will be seeing more of this in the future. It's not so much that sinister forces are trying to push certain people off the Internet (though I'm sure there are those), it's that the entire system is becoming so profoundly baroque that the issue of diminishing returns is really starting to bite now. It's possible the whole ridiculous mess will eventually grind to a useless halt.

My two cents worth...

Reddish Brown Drowsy Hazelnut/JLfromNH

That article is mainly for marking email....

[chaosadventurer]

though it might be more relevant if you were sending to lists of people.

So for the average person sending email

#4 on that list is the most likely content reason given the topics in question.

#6 is a concern, given that the manuscripts are likely Microsoft Word format or similar. Making sure such documents are stripped of any macros (good or bad, especially malware ones) goes a long way to getting them through.

I rather doubt #10 is an issue for the occasional typo I see in JMG's posts, though spell checking regularly might help some.

[missbreanna]

I know that Mailchimp, a popular email newsletter platform, recently made headlines with their new policies against hate speech. But what did not get as much attention was that they created a category of mailings that will receive extra scrutiny. It was a short bullet point list but one of the items was "daily astrology horoscopes." So there may be keyword filtering going on.

However, the algorithms that determine what goes into spam are notoriously fickle. It could be a normal fluctuation. If too many recipients mark something as spam, the machine learning will conclude that the source is spam. I just checked my own spam folder and most of it is marketing emails, but there's also a message from my electric company and the local public library in there.

-Breanna

[(Anonymous)]

It's also possible, and in fact I expect to see it at some point, that astrologers in general will start being removed from large parts of the internet. I give it five years at most.....

gremlins, definitely gremlins.

[hearthspirit]

Hmmm. I've noticed things that made my antennae quiver, but not sure it adds up to anything. Mostly because I doubt my own taste for schadenfreude: the idea of everyone smugly asserting that the entire world can be all! digital! all! the! time! and we don't even need cash anymore! and then having the whole thing crash would make me laugh in the darkest ways.

My Beaver Scouts emails seemed to all end up in peoples spam folders for a week, but that had happened last year too. The Canadian Scouts website has had terrible problems all 2020, though. Registrations snafued, everyone had to call in and get someone in headquarters to do it, all the reporting functions didn't work, the training modules weren't logging that people had done them, every upgrade they tried crashed the whole thing.

The businesses in my community have been having really slow internet issues, likely due to all the extra online ordering and working taking bandwidth. Enough to affect them being able to put through transactions, though. I've heard that in even more rural areas it's even worse, and some of the local governments were saying they'd ground to only a couple days a week of work because they couldn't zoom and couldn't meet in person.

Completely coincidentally , Elon Musk is here to save the day:

"Buying the dish and other gear needed for the Starlink service costs $649, plus tax. Rekounas said he paid $820 in total. Users are expected to install the kit themselves. Then, it's $129 per month for the service.

"I was floored," Waye said. "When you're doing beta testing, you would expect the company to at least provide you with the equipment. It just seems crazy.""

Re: gremlins, definitely gremlins.

[(Anonymous)]

You have to understand, Elon is using earthlings to fund the development of his Martian plantation. There is a clause in the Starlink contract specifically requiring the user to avow that if they are using the services on Mars that said service is not bound by the laws of Earth and that any laws developed by the Martian colonists/slavers apply.

-Architrains

email issues

[(Anonymous)]

I use protonmail now because yahoo decided that a lot of info about my email contacts was theirs to do with whatever they wished, I didn't agree, and there was no way to opt out without getting rid of my email. That was a couple of years back. A few months ago, an art site, deviantart, where I've been posting for years, doesn't like my protonmailemail address and won't let me use it. So I can't access my account or post my art. I've spoken to the people who troubleshoot problems, and they told me to go get a reputable email address. I gave up on the site and haven't posted anything there since.

[adwelly]

I’ve seen a few examples of mail misrouted to spam recently from my gmail account. Mostly notes of online purchases being dispatched or acknowledgements of orders, but there have been other things. It’s become frequent enough that I’m checking the folder once a week or do after years of ignoring it. Checked it just before this reply and spotted a note from someone who failed to join a school reunion zoom chat a few nights back.

I’d discount ‘political action’ as the cause and put it down to ‘trying a tweaked algorithm’. Obviously not a very effective one.

Andy

What's in my spam folder

[(Anonymous)]

I have been noticing for awhile now that what ends up in my inbox is a bunch of stuff that follows the mainstream media narrative, and what ends up in my spam is anything that goes against the narrative. It takes days of indicating it is not junk for those non-mainstream narrative items to go where I want them, and then within a few weeks, those things end up in my spam box again. Without a doubt, we are being censored.

Prizm

Re: What's in my spam folder

[chaosadventurer]

Not all spam filters are the same, and as such I've been shifting my personal email to systems without those mainstream media narrative filters. Makes me glad for my hosting choice for my business domains.

The 'free' email services aren't so free.

[ecosophian]

I tend to agree with booklover and JLfromNH,

spammers are getting more aggressive and sophisticated, so email algorithms have to become more strict. It is a sign of the decline of the internet. The same is true for telephone lines actually, 90% of calls I get is automatic ad calls and telemarketers. Another form of spam. Makes me wish I didn't have a phone sometimes.

So yes, your emails end up in spam folders because the civilization is ending. :-)

[weilong]

I used to host my own email server on an old computer in the closet, using a domain from one of the dynamic dns providers. It was a cheap solution that gave me complete control. But a lot of websites that require an email address wouldn't accept the domain, so I ended up having another email account hosted somewhere else and eventually just consolidated everything there.

Somewhere else is a small-time web hosting outfit in the country where I live. I've noticed that emails don't make it through to certain recipients sometimes. One of the major cell-phone companies (which provides email to its customers), for example, gray-lists my messages so I have to send them three or four times before they get through. Messages from my gmail address go through the first time.

I suspect there may be technical reasons for what you are seeing (rather than, or perhaps in addition to censorship), but the net result is to favor the big players and squeeze out smaller ones.

[(Anonymous)]

As someone who works in IT, I would invoke Hanlon's Razor extra hard for anything software related. In my years of experience, most teams struggle to build basic working software that doesn't have a tonne of bugs in it let alone a well functioning system with nefarious intent. This is one of the main reasons I don't fear The Great Reset. I'm extremely confident in our inability to build the software necessary for such grand plans.

Of course, there is also Grey's Law: any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Cheers,
Simon S

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, any system which gets rolled out will have a ton of bugs in it, which will limit the amount of damage which can be done, and means any major change will cause massive amounts of collateral damage. But there is such a thing as a poorly functioning system with nefarious intent!

where are you actually sending from?

[chaosadventurer]

Is the domain part of your email, something you have some control over (like I have for mine and for some of my clients') or is it a someone else's such as gmail.com or hotmail.com

The evolution of fighting spam has added additional checks along the way that a domain's definition can be missing. Stuff I've had to add to those domains I have influence over the year, things like SPF and DMARC records. So this is your own domain, I can certainly help you. Direct Message me your domain(s) (the part after the @) and I can give you some pointers.

Andy in Toronto
Adventuring in the Chaos that is life and IT

[(Anonymous)]

First the banks and then the spam, in short succession. Clearly you are sensing a disturbance in The Force or a vibration of The Wyrd. Is Sauron rising? A jackbooted Great Reset coming down the ‘pike? What gives?

[ecosophia]

That's what I'm trying to figure out.

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,

Regular reader of the main blog, relative newcomer to this one. Interesting you should ask: I started subscribing to Matt Taibbi's Substack platform a few months ago, and lately emails from it have been ending up in my account's spam folder (Gmail for the record). Not sure if it's part of a larger phenomenon, but Taibbi--to my mind the best journalist working these days--is definitely an independent observer.

Thanks and best,

James W

[(Anonymous)]

Another Matt Taibbi subscriber here. Have experienced no problems receiving his emails.

We quit Gmail several months ago and use Kolab instead. They are based in Switzerland and cost us about $11.50 per month.

OtterGirl

[brendhelm]

Not noticing this at all... whether something ends up in my spam or inbox folders seems largely unrelated to the content. (I've had messages from the same sender end up in both places on the same day, for instance.)

Daily horoscopes and such are still going to inbox. Subscribestar is still going to inbox. Almost everything in my spam folder actually is spam... only exception was an e-mail from a relative that happened to be sent from a work account.

[deborah_bender]

I've had the same AOL address since email was new and AOL charged by the byte. In recent years, I've had problems with blockage of outgoing and incoming mail passing through a legacy listserv (the organization in question couldn't fix it, so they switched to a forum system which nobody likes).

JMG's inquiry reminded me that I've been trying to form a habit of checking my spam folder once a week. There was only one message that didn't belong there; it was a mass mailed newsletter from one of my political representatives. No big deal; I don't live for the moment when that shows up. Nine-tenths of the incoming was spam and the rest was email that I had marked as spam because the senders were pestering me too often.

[(Anonymous)]

Hmmm...just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you😉! Is it all a part of the new regime of censorship which seems to be continually gathering steam? I follow Chris Martenson's work and several days ago he had his most recent Covid-related video pulled from YouTube -- it was about the efficacy of Invermectin. It seems the PTB are growing ever more sophistioated in their ability to marginalize/erase people and just generally frack with you in all kinds of ways. Or it could be the Russians!