Email blocking

7 Comments

A word of advice to writers who submit stories (to anyone) via email:

If your mail system or ISP blocks mail from people who aren't on your list of specified valid senders, you need to add the magazine editor's email address to your list before you submit the story.

If an editor sends you a rejection note and gets back a bounce message saying "I'm not accepting mail from people I don't know, so if you want this to get through to me, you'll have to visit this URL and submit a form saying who you are," chances are good that the editor will shrug and discard the bounce message, and you will never hear back about your story.

A few months later, you might send a query to ask what happened to your story. If the editor is particularly organized, they might remember what happened well enough to tell you in a response to your query—but then, if you still haven't put them on your accept list, they'll get the same bounce message they got before. You may never find out what the editor thought of your story, and you may waste months waiting for answers that will never come.

The latter half of the above scenario (author queries, response to query gets bounced) hasn't quite happened with us yet, but similar things have.

Really, this is just part of a more general point: if you're going to engage in business correspondence via email, and you have a filter on your incoming mail that blocks anyone who's not on your list, then it behooves you to put your business correspondents on that list before it becomes an issue. Especially if the correspondence in question is more important to you than it is to them.

That's one reason why I don't use such a filter. I get a lot of email from previously unknown-to-me senders, and some of it ends up being pretty important. At this point, though, I also have a fairly high tolerance for spam (which is good 'cause I get a lot of it), and I know not everyone does. So I can understand the impulse to use a known-senders-only policy. But be aware that if you make your correspondents jump through hoops to send you email, some percentage of them simply won't bother, especially if what they're sending is less important to them than it is to you.

7 Responses to “Email blocking”

  1. Tempest

    thank god you said this, because I wasn’t gonna. i was just going to let the three people who had one of those annoying blockers sit around for years and years wondering about their stories. I’m mean like that.

    Plus, when this happens, it’s usually when I’m in the middle of a lot of slushing. I’m already pissy anyway (because sometimes slushing does that to me) and then their little notification arrives in my inbox telling me that I need to take an extra step to tell them that their story has been rejected. In at least two of those cases the submitters had not bothered to follow our guidelines anyway, so i’m already mad about that. So I shake my fist at thir email address and move on.

    It’s hard being an angry black woman.

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  2. Allogenes

    Hmmm…two issues: do some ISPs/email services do some of this sort of blocking without the knowledge of the users? (I have had important mail get sent to Yahoo’s spam folder without any good reason.) And what if you don’t know in advance the address the reply will be coming from? Mail sent to “submissions@someplace.com” will rarely be replied-to from the same address.

    I have to agree with you–people looking for a response really need to make themselves open for the response!

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  3. irilyth

    ISPs are getting more annoying about this. I tried to send mail to a friend who was looking for a bigger hard drive for her Tivo, and AOL bounced my message because it has “a URL that many of our members have complained about” in it. Directron sends me e-mail because I bought stuff from them and signed up for their mail; I had never gotten spam from them before that, and I don’t thikn they’re spammers. But now I can’t recommend them to my friends who use AOL, without going through some kind of obfuscation to defeat AOL’s overly-aggressive spam blocker.

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  4. Jacob

    Allogenes —

    There are two kinds of blocking that can happen to you without you intending it.

    Some ISP’s use a “blacklist” of “known spammers” — such lists are maintained by companies/organizations like SpamCop.net. The problem, as Irilyth describes, is that mailers can get on these lists because somebody got mad at them, even if _you_ might not think they are spammers. Also, sometimes an entire domain will get blacklisted because of one bad user.

    The other kind is what you experienced with Yahoo — they’re using a bayesian filter that “learns” which emails are spam. When they start out, such filters are pretty bad, but if you identify enough good and bad emails, they get very good. But they have to be trained for each individual — if _I_ get an email that contains the word “mortgage” or the word “Rolex” it’s almost certainly spam. A realtor or a jeweler might need different rules. I can’t imagine how the editors of erotica magazines filter their email at all. 🙂

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  5. Jed

    Allogenes: very good point about not necessarily knowing what the responding email address will be. That’s another good reason to not use this kind of filter in the first place, imo. But if you’ve got the filter, then I think it behooves you (generic you, not you in particular) to go to extra trouble to find out what the responding address will be in advance. If you write to a business correspondent and explain the situation and ask them nicely to help you out by letting you know what address to unblock, they’ll probably be a lot more responsive than if you just assume they’ll jump through a hoop for you.

    All: Yeah, ISPs are getting more and more aggressive about this stuff. In fact, what prompted my posting yesterday was learning that Pair is implementing greylisting by default for all users; greylisting isn’t quite the same as what I described, but it’s similar, and similarly a nuisance for the correspondent. So I’m gonna have to go in and turn it off for myself and the SH accounts. But at least Pair gives us the option of turning it off.

    Blacklisting really sucks. On at least two or three occasions, someone who misunderstood how spam worked has blacklisted my server at Pair, leading to mail from me getting thrown away. It generally takes a day or two to get the blacklisting removed. Completely ridiculous.

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  6. Margaret Fisk

    Odd that you should mention this because within the past 3 days I dealt with the situation on both sides of the equation.

    a) Had a irritated author use me as a backdoor conduit when it turned out the problem was their ISP blocking the contract email!

    b) Found out that even though my ISP spam folder was always empty, it didn’t mean the filter was off. It is on by default and if you want to see what it deletes FOR you, you have to make a change. Had this ISP for 7 years. I wonder what has been deleted in that time. Luckily, I don’t think any editor or agent notes have gone astray, but they could have.

    So yes, please, everyone check their settings. Don’t assume anything because in the battle against spam, we ARE cutting off the nose to spite our faces and sometimes we don’t even have control over it.

    Thanks for bringing this up, Jed.

    Cheers,
    Margaret

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  7. Michael

    Thanks for the Pair info!

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