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This is nothing to do with navigation, but is relevant to the Nav-L list.

There seems to be a problem of certain Nav-L messages not arriving at intended recipients, which is
getting worse. It is certainly affecting my input, and from what I hear is also affecting several
others. It may well be related to spam filtering.

Some years ago, getting overwhelmed by the rising tide of spam, I needed to do something about it. I
was aware that some kind organisation had taken to marking suspected spam with a warning in the
header of the message. After a long period of checking I felt safe in assuming that all the messages
so marked really were spam, and no genuine, wanted, messages were ever marked that way. So I set up
a filter, as my ISP allowed, to discard such messages before they were ever sent to my mailbox. A
few spam messages still got through, but most were removed, and that system seems to have worked
reasonably well for some years. I was unaware of any genuine messages being filtered out. Perhaps
many Nav-L subscribers do something similar.

Over the last few weeks, however, I have become aware of many Nav-L messages failing to arrive.
Another Nav-L member tells me that he has discovered certain Nav-L mailings had actually been marked
as suspected spam. Something appears to have changed for the worse. Either something has changed in
the messages or their headers as sent out from Nav-L, which causes some, but not all, to be marked
as spam. Or perhaps the anti-spam algorithm has changed in such a way that it's now marking genuine
messages as spam, where it shouldn't. Neither of these are under my control.

How can we deal with this? First, is it really a genuine problem, affecting many Nav-L members?

Second, am I right in diagnosing it as a spam-filter problem?

Second, can we at least be sure when we are missing messages? Would it be possible for Nav-L to
attach a serial number to each message, incrementing by 1? Could this be appended to the "subject"
line, perhaps? Or even automatically inserted as the first line in the text? Then, we could be quite
sure about what's being missed. I am no expert on such matters, so have no idea whether such a
suggestion would be impossible to implement, or trivially easy.

One approach may be for me to ignore Nav-L incoming emails altogether, and instead go to the website
archive. Would that fix the problem?

It seems that those damned spammers are destroying the usefulness of emails. Must they win?

George.

contact George Huxtable at george@huxtable.u-net.com
or at +44 1865 820222 (from UK, 01865 820222)
or at 1 Sandy Lane, Southmoor, Abingdon, Oxon OX13 5HX, UK.

   

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