Members Removed for Marking Messages as spam

[work in progress]

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.

Mechanism

Some Mailbox Providers (MPs), aka Email Services, will send a report back to the sending email service when a received message is determined to be “spam”. This is called a feedback loop (FBL) and is intended as an anti-spam mechanism[1]. Not all MPs implement this mechanism. Among those that do there are ambiguities as to how some of them make that determination, and what those MPs expect the sending service to do as a result of receiving such a report. These ambiguities have resulted in confusion and inconvenience for Groups.io members and group administrators (group moderators and owners).

In the expected case the determination originates with the MP's user (the group member, for our purposes), most likely by clicking a button to designate the message as "spam". MPs generally interpret that designation as an instruction not to deliver any more messages "like" that one to the user. MPs that implement a FBL then send an abuse report to Groups.io. In that case removing the member from the group is justified on the basis that the member no longer wishes to receive the group's content.

In the troublesome case the determination was made automatically by the MP's discriminator ("spam filter") and the message delivered to the member's "Spam" or "Junk" folder instead of to his/her Inbox. If the member does not discover the message there and designate it as "not spam" before the message is automatically purged from the Spam folder, then the MP may generate an abuse report just as if the member had specifically designated the message as Spam.

The difficulty for Groups.io is that it is not told by he MP whether the abuse report was generated for the troublesome reason rather than for the expected reason. The difficulty for the group member is that if his/her MP implements the troublesome case the mechanism can operate entirely without his/her knowledge, up until the point where the member is removed from the group.

in either case, Groups.io attempts to minimize the inconvenience to the group member by sending a notice to him/her. The notice contains a link to automatically restore the member's subscription to the group.

Notification

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.

Notice to member

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

 [message body]

Remediation

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.

Notes:

1. Wikipedia: Feedback loop (email)