On Mar 19, 2018, at 11:56 PM, Dave Sergeant <dave@...> wrote:

I understand all this, but why do Yahoogroups, Google Groups and all my
other various email list providers continue to work well without having
this automatic unsubscribe? Why have groups.io to do it but everybody
else can seem to manage without having to do anything similar?

Dave

On 20 Mar 2018 at 5:28, toki wrote:

On 03/19/2018 11:12 PM, Barbara Byers wrote:

Is this a real negative or just speculation of what "might" happen?

It is a very real threat. Furthermore, it is something that can easily
escalate up to a plethora of email vendors, even if they don't implement
FBL.

Here is how it escalates.
AOL member sends the list mail to the spam bucket.  Member then deletes
the message. AOL sends FBL to Groups.IO. Mark ignores it. Member
receives a second message, which is tossed into the spam bucket, then
deleted. Cycle repeats itself ad infinitum.

At some point, AOL's anti-spam bots kick in, and blacklists Groups.IO as
a spammer.  A week or two passes, and the email from groups.io hasn't
decreased, so the AOL anti-spam bots escalate the listing up to one of
their upstream RBLs. The RBL adds it to their list, and wham. A small,
but significant number of ISPs start rejecting Groups.IO mail. And since
Groups.IO ignores the FBL, these ISPs escalate to their other RBLs.  And
six or so month later, Groups.IO is on everybody's RBL, with no way to
be delisted.

Caveat: I don't know if AOL is as diligent in stopping spammers now, as
it was in its heyday. (Now wondering if AfterBurner was at AOL, or
another site that was frequently considered to be a spam-haven.)

jonathon

http://davesergeant.com