Network/Procedures/Maintain a listserv

This is more of an FYI than a howto or anything. Basically, it turns out that mail providers are becoming more and more paranoid as mail gets less and less usable due to spam. As a result, ML256 has had some trouble actually delivering mail to people who are members of its lists. I'll try to summarize possible problems and solutions here.

• We get onto spam blacklists.
  • For the shop, this can be checked here: http://bgp.he.net/ip/24.96.165.230#_rbl
  • This could happen for several reasons.
    • Mail spoofed as from the shop.
    • Someone's machine at the shop actually sends spam (because it has malware or some other reason).
    • Someone does something vaguely spammy and some service has an overly quick trigger finger.
  • Possible solutions:
    • Heavily restrict the machines that can send mail from the shop.
    • Make it so random shop Internet traffic leaves on a different Internet address.
    • SPF records. This is implemented by the shop right now.
    • DKIM. I believe this is finished implementation, but more testing is needed.
    • DMARC. We're not here yet.
• People click that we are spam and then their mail provider starts to believe it.
  • Possible solutions:
    • List-Unsubscribe header. This may actually redirect the "Report spam" button in Gmail to an automatic unsubscribe process! This would be ideal.
• Other resources.
  • How to not be sent to spam on gmail
  • Many links in this thread
  • This dnsbl is asinine but perhaps we should try not to be on it anyway.
  • A Survival Guide for the Small Mail Server