On Thu, Dec 15, 2016 at 10:20 AM, Andy Smith <andy@bitfolk.com> wrote:

Unfortunately some customers are either not receiving these emails
or are happy to ignore them, for months at a time, basically until
we open a support ticket with them and ask why they aren't dealing
with it. This is taking up too much human time.

"We did not receive the email" is now no longer a valid excuse
because there is provision in our web panel for an
emergency/alternate contact:

https://panel.bitfolk.com/account/contacts/#toc-address-book

If we've been emailing a customer for weeks about this then we will
have also sent a copy to the emergency/alternate contact at some
point.

Well, now I have some first-hand experience with this. :(

On Fri Dec 16 Andy filed a RT ticket with me about spam being sent from my account. Unfortunately, he quoted the problematic spam in the RT ticket, which means that his email to me included the spam verbatim, which of course meant that it ended up in my spam folder as well and I never saw it.

On Sun Dec 18 (two days later) there was another report of spam, Andy notified me via RT that he was going to turn off networking. Of course RT included context, which included the entire problematic spam email again, so of course I didn't see it either.

He then turned off networking for my domain. Which certainly got my attention.

As it turns out, this was a simple misconfiguration on my part -- I had whitelisted relaying from a specific IP range back in 2011, but after the project ended I didn't maintain control of that IP block... and apparently it has since falled into the wrong hands. I could have fixed this quickly with prompt notice.

But that's neither here nor there. What my story seems (to me) to indicate is that "we did not receive the email" is in fact a valid excuse if the email in question quotes spam. I didn't have alternate contacts listed, but I could have listed a dozen and they would most likely all have classified Andy's email (10% "what is this" and 90% quoted spam) as spam.

I had followed this conversation on the users list, but assumed it would not be relevant to me, since I was receiving all of Andy's emails here on the list without problem. Content-specific filters make that a bad assumption.

I think there is need for a non-email backup. Sending an SMS would have been guaranteed to get through, I bet.

--scott