These tips from SpamAssassin may be helpful: http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/AvoidingFpsForSenders

You are probably using a different address than the one that’s subscribed to the list — this tends to happen especially when forwarding mail from one address to another, or else when your email software is set up to check multiple accounts. To find your subscribed address, view the Full Headers (described below) of a message you’ve received from the list, and look for the one called Return-Path, usually among the first listed. It will look like this:

Return-Path: <groupname-owner+name=domain.org@groups.electricembers.net>

Groups encodes the subscriber’s address within the return address, beginning after the + sign and with the @ sign replaced by =. So in the above, +name=domain.org translates to name@domain.org, which is the actual subscribed address. It is from that address that any list subscription change requests must come, in order for Groups to know who you are.

Yes — see the Groups Users Guide

The most common reason is because you’re attempting to post from an address that is not a subscriber or owner/moderator of the list. If you are just a subscriber, not a list owner/moderator, and are being rejected as a non-subscriber, find your true subscribed address with the instructions above. If you’re an owner/moderator, login to the list’s admin page and check the list of owner/moderator addresses in the list’s General settings. If you are a list owner of a newsletter (to which unprivileged subscribers cannot post) and you’re getting a rejection message that says posting is not allowed, it may also be because you are listed only as an owner, not as a moderator. The two roles can be separate, and only moderators can post to restricted lists, so you’ll need to add yourself in the group’s Moderators section. See the privileges section of the Groups Administrator’s Guide for more details.

Message footers by default are added to all list messages on Groups, but there is a limitation in the software: for plaintext messages, it can append the footer to the end of the message, but for HTML formatted messages, it can only attach the footer as a separate file. This limitation is because of the inherent ambiguity in inserting new text into a document that already has HTML formatting with unknown layout and possibly unclosed formatting tags — the only safe way to add the footer to HTML is in an attachment. So, if you’re not seeing any message footer or if you’re seeing an attachment called “message-footer.txt” instead of having it appended to the message body, it’s because the messages posted to your list are in HTML format. If your group is a newsletter and only one or a few people can post to it, you could manually copy the default message footer’s information into every message before distribution in order to have it show up within the message body. If this is a discussion group, then the only way to make the footers show up in the message body is to get all subscribers to post in plaintext, no HTML formatting.

Subscribers appear in the Bouncing Subscribers table when a list message to them is rejected by their mail server. But the Bounce Score displayed in the table is not just the number of bounces; it’s calculated from a formula that depends on the number of bounces, the severity of the bounces, and the frequency of bounces compared to the frequency of traffic on the list. Also, bounces are purged from the system when they’re 30 days old, so that data is only accumulated over the last 30 days. If a subscriber has a temporary (low-severity) bounce once every month or two on a list that gets a lot of traffic, their bounce score may show up as zero. If the most recent bounce date shown for a subscriber in the table is older than the most recent traffic on the list, then it must have been a temporary bounce and they must have successfully received later messages. To see more detail of why someone bounced, click their address in the list and look at the Status line, which will say something like:

    Delivery not authorized, message refused (5.7.1)

This is the actual rejection message from their mail server, and it should give some idea (however cryptic) of why the message was bounced. To try to see more detail, you can click the View Last Bounce link below that line, which will show the rejected message in its entirety. Usually you can ignore the Bouncing Subscribers table, and people will either have their status reset after 30 days or be removed automatically from the list if their bounce scores climb high enough. If you see that there are a lot of temporary bouncers on there and you want to clear them out, you can select them all and hit the Reset Errors button to give them a clean slate. Or if they’ve been bouncing for a long time and their bounce scores are remaining low because of the type of bounces and the list’s traffic pattern, they’ll never reach the threshhold to be automatically unsubscribed, so you can select them all and hit the Delete Selected Email Addresses button to unsubscribe them from your list.

This is a feature of Gmail designed to reduce clutter in your inbox. The email you’ve sent to the group is not delivered to your inbox because a copy of the email already exists in your Sent Mail and All Mail labels/folders. For more information on this behavior, see this Google help page

We can’t control how much spam is sent to you, but we’re committed to helping block and filter as much of it as possible to make sure that very little actually reaches you. For every 1000 incoming spams, we estimate that 900 are blocked, 76 deleted, and 23 tagged, leaving 1 message which might end up in your inbox. When it starts to seem like your spam volume has gone up, there are several things we can do. In a particularly bad storm of spam, we may need to inspect specific messages or help block mail from specific email systems. But the best way to deal with a gradual increase is for you to help train Shield to recognize your spam. Please see the reporting answer below. If you have our Shield service and your own final destination mail server:

1. First, ensure that your mail server is locked down against receiving mail directly from any servers other than Shield, as spammers and viruses will manage to find that and send to you directly, circumventing the protective shield. Please see the relevant section of the Shield Admin Guide.
2. Next, if you’re seeing a lot of messages with the [SPAM] tag in your inbox, you simply need to set up automatic filters on the user side to dump these messages into a junk mailbox. See the filtering answer below. Or, if you decide that you would like us to change our handling of spam for your address or your whole domain so that we simply delete more of the spams instead of tagging and delivering them, please write to our help address.
3. If you’re seeing something on the order of 10-20 messages per day without any [SPAM] tag in a single person’s mailbox, that may just be a temporary wave of spammers being more successful than usual, which can last days or weeks. We are constantly training our systems on the new stuff and eventually our filters will catch up, but if you also want to help train the system with the spams you’re seeing, please see the reporting answer below.
4. If you’re seeing scores or hundreds of untagged spam messages per day to a single mailbox, there may be something seriously misconfigured, so please contact us and we will help you figure it out.

These are two different cases.

1. Missed (untagged) spam or virus Our filtering system is more accurate than most (eg. Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL), but it does occasionally make mistakes: around 1% of spam may slip through untagged. We accept this level of false negatives in order to avoid the risk of false positives. But if you receive something unwanted that wasn’t tagged, you can report it as spam, to make Shield work better for everyone. If you use Webmail you can simply click “Mark as Spam.” Otherwise forward it as an attachment to the following address:
   • Missed spam: Forward as attachment to: report-spam (at) electricembers (dot) net
   • Missed virus: Forward as attachment to: help (at) electricembers (dot) net
2. Legitimate mail wrongly tagged as spam or virus In the less common case of false positives, we always want to know about it so we can tune our filtering to eliminate these instances going forward; we aim to have ZEROlegitimate messages marked as spam or virus. If a message is tagged as a virus, it will have an Shield attachment that describes the reason and gives instructions for notifying us and retrieving the original message from quarantine. If a message is falsely tagged as spam: If you use our Webmail you can simply click “Mark as Not Spam.” Otherwise forward it as an attachment to: report-ham (at) electricembers (dot) net.

To forward as an attachment in most popular email clients, see these instructions. However, for MS Outlook, instead of their back-door technique we recommend this procedure:

Forward as an attachment in Outlook

1. Select Tools | Options… from the menu.
2. Under the Preferences tab, click E-mail Options….
3. Make sure “Attach original message” is selected under “When forwarding a message.”
4. Click OK, then OK again, and forward the message as usual.

Note: If you have Shield service and the problem is just that you’re seeing all the messages with [SPAM] and [VIRUS] tags in your Inbox, you simply need to set up automatic filtering.

If you’re using our Mail service, all tagged spam and cleaned virus messages are automatically filtered for you into a Spam or Virus folder on the server. You can view these folders by logging into Webmail, or using an IMAP mail client (but not POP). Messages in these folders, as in the Trash, are automatically purged when they are 14 days old.If you use Shield, you will need to set up filtering yourself, or have your email administrator manage it. Instructions are given here for a few common email programs:

Mac Mail:

Go to Preferences –> Rules, and add something like this:

Thunderbird:

Click Tools –> Message Filters, then click New… and create a rule that looks something like this:

MS Exchange:

Administrators of Exchange servers that use our Shield service can set up automatic filtering into per-user spam folders by installing the free plugin from Mailshell.

Outlook 2000 and similar:

1. Go to File –> New –> Folder, and create a new folder called “junk” or “spam”
2. Go to Tools –> Rules Wizard, and create a New rule
3. Choose “Check messages when they arrive”
4. Choose “with specific words in the subject” (click the check box, then in the lower window click the “specific words” link)
5. Enter “[SPAM]” (no quotes)
6. Choose “move it to the specified folder” (click the check box, then in the lower window click the “specified folder” link, and choose your spam folder)
7. Click Finish

If you’re using an email program not listed here or have other questions, contact us.

An interesting quirk of Internet email is that it’s possible to send a message “From:” any email address imaginable. When email was invented in the early 1980s, there were few concerns about the security and authenticity of email messages, and that legacy is with us to this day. Spammers often send their junk mail “From:” addresses in other people’s domains to confuse the recipients and hide their true source from anti-spam systems. And spammers have a habit of carelessly sending their junk messages to thousands of email addresses at a time, many of which may be old or otherwise invalid. Messages to these invalid addresses bounce back to the “sender”, which means if the spammer has chosen to send “From:” your address, they come to you. Because of how these messages arise, this type of junk mail is called “spam backscatter”.

So first off, don’t worry that your email account or domain name is compromised or stolen or hacked. Spammers can use your email address quite easily without hacking your account. Since spammers tend to rotate through many different From: domains, spam backscatter tends to explode one day and then disappear for months, so the worst is probably over. But it’s still irritating to receive all this junk.

You may wonder, “Can’t something be done about this?” In fact, something is being done: new enhancements to the Internet’s mail protocols (Sender Policy Framework, Sender ID and DKIM) are being finalized and adopted, and will begin to curtail the spoofing of “From:” addresses, which would take care of most of the problem. But it will be a while before wide adoption of the new standards takes place, and all we can do until then is wait.

The short version: The sender’s mail server is not behaving according to Internet standards, in particular the rule that says it should try again later if it receives a temporary deferral from our server. (Yes, there are more of these misconfigured servers than you would expect, even at big email providers who should know better.) The sender’s email provider should fix the problem, but we can also work around it by whitelisting if necessary.

The long version: Greylisting is our most effective anti-spam measure, and it works by giving a temporary failure (a 4.x response) the first time a sending server tries a message from a new sender to a new recipient. All legitimate mail servers should handle this temporary failure by deferring the message and trying again later, often within 5-30 minutes, at which point we accept the message and whitelist the triad of sending server, sender, and recipient, so mail will flow unimpeded on future attempts. (Mail servers are also fully whitelisted after a certain number of successful sends from any recipient to any sender on our end.) Spammers are blocked because their homebrewed spam-sending software mostly gives up after one attempt, for both technical and economic reasons, while legitimate mail gets through because the Internet standards (RFCs) require mail servers to handle these deferrals properly. This amazingly simple technique eliminates about 90% of spam at your doorstep, without even having to scan it for spam-like characteristics, while having very little effect on real mail. See greylisting.org for more detail.

However, even though the RFCs are the only reason the Internet works and we need to be able to rely on servers obeying them, occasionally we find that someone’s mail server does not comply with the standard. If that happens and you get a rejection message, you can let your sender know that they should contact their email service provider about their server’s non-compliance, but you can also let us know and we’ll investigate and take whatever action is necessary, including manual whitelisting, to allow their mail through.

This problem occurs when:

• You use Microsoft Outlook (or software based on it, like Entourage);
• you configure Outlook to connect to the server via POP; and
• you configure Outlook to leave copies of messages on the server.

The symptom of the problem is that everything works fine for days or months or years, and then one day Outlook starts downloading multiple copies of every message you receive, or it downloads copies of hundreds or thousands of old messages you already received in the past.

EE has been receiving reports about this problem consistently for years, always exclusively with Outlook and Outlook-based email programs, during which time we’ve used several different email server software platforms. As far as we can tell, the problem is caused by corruption in Outlook’s internal representation of the status of your account on the server.

To understand why this might happen, try to imagine what Outlook is doing every time it checks your mail. It connects to the server, looks over the long list of messages stored there, and tries to remember which it’s already downloaded (so it doesn’t download them again), which you’ve deleted in Outlook (so it can delete those on the server), and which have simply aged enough to be removed from the server (depending on the timeframe you’ve configured). Then it has to download any new messages you’ve received and add those to its internal database of messages to track in the future.

This work is all necessary because POP was designed as a simple way for an email program to fetch all mail from a server — the default behavior under POP is to download and delete all messages each time the program checks for mail, leaving your account on the server completely empty after each check. Keeping track of all those extra copies on the server is something Outlook has to do on its own, and this gets especially complicated when hundreds or thousands of messages accumulate on the server and messages are being added to and removed from Outlook’s database every few minutes. (True, computers are supposed to be good at this kind of accounting, but software isn’t perfect, and that seems to go double for Microsoft’s creations and triple for Outlook.)

The short-term fix: since you can’t fix Outlook, you have to reset its corrupt internal database by telling Outlook to stop keeping copies of messages on the server. There’s no better fix than starting over with a clean server Inbox and an empty internal database. Depending on how much mail you’ve been keeping on the server (7 days? 30 days? 90 days? all of it?) you might need to be careful with this change, to prevent triggering another download of all that mail. It might be best to reconfigure Outlook, quit it before the next Send/Receive, then log into Webmail and empty your Inbox on the server before starting Outlook again. (Having a local techie on hand can be very helpful with this process.) If you want to resume keeping messages on the server, you can then reconfigure Outlook accordingly, but why risk a repeat of this problem?

The long-term fix: if you’ve been relying on “keep messages on server” to roughly sync your server Inbox (seen via webmail) to your Outlook Inbox, you might want to investigate using IMAP instead of POP. This results in a system where you have one single view of your email folders and messages, no matter how or where you access them. Again, assistance from a local techie is essential in any substantial change to your email system.

It depends which password you need:

• Groups: On the Groups site, click Password Reset
• Mail users: Contact your organization’s email administrator
• Mail & Shield administrators: An authorized contact should email help@electricembers.coop
• Web Hosting/MailBox: An authorized contact should email help@electricembers.coop

For all services other than Groups, your current password cannot be retrieved; it will have to be reset to a new value.

No, sorry, we are not a domain registrar — you should register your domain first and then request hosting services from us. We highly recommend GKG as a registrar, as they are very reliable, inexpensive, and give great customer support. We do not recommend GoDaddy, for both technical and political reasons that we would be happy to explain if you want details, and we do not recommend Network Solutions for technical and pricing reasons.

No, sorry, we don’t currently have that sort of interface for DNS or Web hosting, although we do for the Mail, Groups, and Shield services, which are more configuration-intensive on the user end. For most purposes we believe you won’t feel the lack, as you can make any technical requests to us and have them fulfilled promptly and unfailingly, and with the benefit of our wide-ranging technical knowledge, which may save you from innocent mistakes. We do recognize that one-click installation of Web applications (CMSes, blogs, etc.) is a valuable service, but most of these applications have their own very easy command-line installers, and we will assist as much as we can if you run into difficulties.

To protect your data from catastrophic events, and to some extent from operator error, we back up all user data (files and databases) every night, except for obvious cache and backup files. The backups are stored both on a separate server in our main data center in San Francisco and on a remote server in Portland, OR. We can recover data from any of the following points in time:

• the last four nights
• one, two, three weeks ago
• one, two, three months ago

Please let us know immediately if you discover any need for restoring any of your data from our backups.

A wide variety of POP/IMAP email programs will work with our servers, but we recommend the free, open source, very polished and capable Thunderbird (from the makers of the Firefox Web browser), which works well for either POP or IMAP. Whatever software you use, you should ensure that it continues to be supported and updated to conform to evolving Internet standards and deal with new security threats. We do not recommend Eudora from Qualcomm, as it is both “quirky” and no longer supported by Qualcomm (migrated to an open source project, but that is still vaporware as of June 2011). We also do not recommend Microsoft’s Outlook Express, which has been officially replaced by first Windows Mail and then Windows Live Mail. Finally, we have found that users should expect to experience occasional data syncing problems when using Microsoft Outlook or Entourage with POP connections and “Keep copies of messages on the server” selected.

If you are unsure of how to get the Full Header information in your email messages, check the “Help” section of your email client. For your convenience, here are instructions for viewing the Full Header information of an email message in several of the most common email clients:Microsoft Outlook Express:

1. Open the unwanted message in your inbox.
2. Go to the “File” menu, then click on “Properties”.
3. Go to the “Details” tab. The header information will be in the “Details” window.

Microsoft Outlook:

1. Open the unwanted message in your inbox.
2. Click on “View”.
3. Go to “Options”. The header information will be in the “Internet Headers” window.

Gmail:

1. Click the unwanted message to view it.
2. Click on the down arrow at the upper right corner of the message (next to “Reply”).
3. Select “Show original”.

Thunderbird:

1. Open the unwanted message in your inbox.
2. Go to the “View” menu, click on “Headers”, and select the “All” option.

AOL:

1. Log into your AOL account.
2. Open the unwanted message in your inbox.
3. At the very end of the message, the full header information will be displayed below the line labeled “Headers”.

Eudora:

1. Open the unwanted message in your inbox.
2. Click the “Blah Blah Blah” button in the upper left-hand corner of the message window.

Hotmail:

1. Log into your Hotmail account.
2. Click on “Options” at top of screen.
3. Then click “Preferences (at far right, under “Additional Options”).
4. Go to “Message Headers” under “Other Hotmail Options”.
5. Click on the “Full” button, then scroll down and click “okay”. All messages will now display full header information directly below the “basic” header information (right below the date).

On the first of every month, your billing contact will receive an email invoice detailing your services and fees for the preceding month. All new services carry a setup fee of twice the basic monthly rate, which appears on the initial bill along with fees pro-rated from the signup date. You do not need to pay anything up front; simply wait for the invoice on the first of the month after you sign up.We bill by email only, no dead-tree mail, which makes it extra important that we have valid contact addresses for you, that our emails to you are not blocked or filtered, and that you keep us updated with any email address changes (see below).

We accept electronic payments from any credit/debit card for the current balance or for 6 or 12 months in advance, monthly autopay from any credit/debit card, or paper checks for the current balance or any advance payment amount. Details appear on your invoice.

We track an administrative and a billing contact for your account, and appreciate your help in keeping contact information up to date. Your contacts are listed in the monthly email that contains your invoice. To update or correct the information listed there, the current contact should email billing@electricembers.coop with a new name, email address, and phone number.

Each monthly billing email contains a link to that month’s invoice online, but other than that, there is currently no online billing system at EE for you to login to. If you lose the billing email with the invoice link and need to access it, we will be happy to re-send it to you. If you need to access your billing and payment history with EE, eg. for an audit, please let us know what range of months you need to access and we will send you a list of links to each month’s invoice.

Yes! Using the “Pay Now” button in your invoice, you can sign up for automatic monthly payments from a credit or debit card. The account you provide will be debited immediately to pay your current balance, and then automatically on the sixth of each month following until you request otherwise.

Your password is your responsibility, and you should always use something strong. A good way to make a strong password is to use a multi-word phrase. These passphrases can actually be much easier to remember and type, while simultaneously increasing entropy.

Your EE services are provided by peer-reviewed open source software and protected by cryptographically secure encryption technologies and tight security policies. However, all the careful programming, system administration, and advanced mathematics in the world are useless if you pick a weak password, or give it out to the wrong people! Maintaining a strong password is how you protect your data and prevent abuse of your account. Please do not use weak, easy to guess passwords like password, 1234, your username again, etc.

After you have shared a password with someone, or even after we send your initial passwords via email, it makes sense to reset your passwords to something only you know.

How to change your password for: Web accounts, Mail users or administrators, Shield administrators, Groups subscribers or administrators

We require the use of encrypted connections to our Mail service. This ensures that no one can eavesdrop on your private email traffic, including your password as it goes to the server, as well as your email messages as you receive and/or send them via the server. (Encryption is used in the same way to secure https:// Web sites where sensitive data like credit card details are going between you and a server.) Note that SSL/TLS encrypts the traffic between your email client and server, but this is not the same thing as sending encrypted email messages to your recipients, which would prevent anyone else accessing the delivered message from being able to read it. This practice is called Secure MIME or S/MIME, and it requires the use of message encryption/decryption software such as GPG with your email client (and your recipients.) Refer to your software’s documentation or the GPG docs for information on setting up encrypted email messages.

While email can be used to exchange files, it is in fact designed for relatively small messages, and larger ones can cause problems. Similarly, email can be used to communicate directly with large numbers of recipients (To:, Cc:, or Bcc:), but problems arise when a message has too many recipients. Here are some guidelines you’ll want to observe:

• Maximum message size: 15MB (good practice) 25MB (our upper limit)
• Maximum number of direct recipients: 25-100 (good practice) 250 (our upper limit)

If you’re beyond these limits, please use these alternatives:

• Sending to large numbers of recipients
• Sending large files

You can send to large numbers of recipients using your normal email program, but many email providers will tend to think that messages with more than 25 recipients are likely to be spam, meaning your message might not land in the recipient’ inbox, but in their junk folder! We encourage you to use our Groups service for sending to many recipients. Most importantly, it is designed to deliver to many hundreds or thousands of subscribers as efficiently and effectively as possible, because we take special care to preserve its good standing with other ISPs to which it makes deliveries. Another benefit is allowing people to subscribe and unsubscribe themselves using automated tools that don’t require your intervention.

Note that using a list server (like Groups) doesn’t eliminate the problems with sending large files, in fact it becomes even more inappropriate to send large attachments to a group. If you need to do that, see the recommendations below for uploading your file to the “shared documents” area of Groups, your website, or a file sharing service, and then simply emailing a link to that URL. This is a much more efficient way to distribute files to all your recipients.

Email was originally designed for exchanging tiny text-only messages. It’s since been extended to accomodate HTML formatted messages as well as attachments, but transmitting email involves sending each message through many servers, and encoding binary attachments as text, which increases their size. This makes email a very inefficient way to distribute larger files. While it may be okay to email a file to a single person who you know is interested in receiving it, it’s not really appropriate to attach a file larger than 10MB to an email message. When sending to a list, it is even more inappropriate to create very large messages. Even if you can get large attachments sent, your recipients may not be able to receive them.

Luckily there are many more efficient ways of sending large files. If you’re sending them within an office, you may be able to use local file sharing. If you’re sending them to someone out on the Internet, you can upload the file to your website, and send an email with just the URL, or you might choose a free service like SendSpace, YouSendIt or Dropbox. If you distribute many files to the same recipients over and over, you might all be able to use a peer-to-peer file sharing service like Pando. If you’re sending large files to a list hosted on our Groups service, you can use the “Shared documents” feature that comes with every group — just look for it in the group’s menu.

Discussion lists can make for wonderful community. But sometimes when they grow large enough, age long enough, or meet up with controversial issues, email discussion lists can get out of hand. What once was a natural extension of friendly or professional communication can surprisingly quickly become an uncomfortable place, marked by anger and disrespectful personal attacks. It is each list owner’s responsibility to manage their list on behalf of their organization or their community. To deal with difficult situations (and hopefully head them off in advance) in a fair and transparent manner, many list owners have found it helpful to create and enforce clear community guidelines.Terms of use are rules for participating in a discussion list (DON’Ts) and a clear explanation of what will happen if the rules are broken. List etiquette is a collection of suggested best practices (DOs) which can keep a mailing list useful and comfortable. We encourage each list owner to create and publish their own etiquette and terms of use, drawing on the many examples which quick web searches can uncover.