Members Removed for Marking Messages as spam

[work in progress]

It starts when a member receives a notice from Groups.io

From: groupname+owner@groups.io
Subject: You have been removed from ...

Draft Only

There is one particular circumstance in which members might find themselves automatically removed from the membership of a Group. This note has been compiled in the hope of providing some clarification because as things stand it can be hard for any individual to work out what has happened.

The problem that triggers the automatic deletion of a membership is a perfectly ordinary Group message being marked as “spam”; this can generate feedback from wherever that marking takes place to Groups.io, and in turn this automatically cancels the membership of the person concerned. The marking of an email as spam may be carried out by a user’s email service provider; it does not have to be done by the user themselves – indeed the user may have no idea that this has happened.

As things are at the time of writing (18^th March 2018) the resulting emails sent by Groups.io to (a) the member, and (b) the Group Owner & Moderators are not entirely clear about what has happened and why, mainly because it is not made clear that it can be the email service provider that has marked the email as spam. The ESP then feeds this back to Groups.io, and in turn Groups.io is more or less compelled to react to this by cancelling the individual’s membership of a Group. Not all ESPs send “marked as spam” information back to the message’s originator.

The member is confronted by an email that rather suggests that they are responsible for what has happened, and if they wish to restore their membership to click a link provided for the purpose, but given that the member has no knowledge of the message email that has been marked as spam and thus diverted to the ESP’s spam box some reluctance to use that link is understandable. Similarly the Group Owner / Moderators are simply informed that the member has marked the message as spam, and as a result can be equally bewildered about what has really happened.

A suggestion has been submitted via the beta Groups site to the effect that the wording of the emails sent to the individual member and the Group Owner / Moderators be changed to make what has taken place more easily understood.

Draft Version 1 18^th March 2018 / Chris Jones