For more than thirty years I have sponsored The Listservs. Each listserv is an email discussion group. I have sponsored listservs for patent practitioners, for trademark practitioners, and for industrial design protection practitioners. I have sponsored listservs for users of the Patent Cooperation Treaty and for users of Patent Center. And today, Google cut off 48 members of the e-Trademarks listserv.
What is Google doing wrong and what can be done about it?
The listserv software that I use is designed with several features ensuring that it could not possibly ever be a source of spam.
As a first feature, nobody can join a listserv except with a two-step process. The person tries to join, and the system then sends a confirmation code to the person. Only if they click on the confirmation code will the system actually admit the person as a new member to the listserv.
As a second feature, the system carefully tracks absolutely every outbound email message. (This is several thousand email messages per day, across our dozen or so listservs.) The listserv member who is receiving a particular listserv posting will, most often, receive the posting, and when this happens, our server notes with great satisfaction that the listserv member did receive the posting.
But suppose the listserv member marks the posting as “spam”. Depending on the way their ESP (email service provider) handles things, the ESP may then report back to our server that the message was considered to be “spam”. Our server then logs this “bounce” event.
Our server checks the bounce log every day and carefully notes how many bounces have happened for any particular listserv member. If a large number of bounces accumulates for a particular listserv member, then our server takes this very seriously. Perhaps the email address has been shut down. Or perhaps the person who once had wanted to be a member of the listserv has changed his or her mind about it and now no longer wants to be a member of the listserv. When this happens, what does our server do? It sends a series of three direct emails to the person. The email asks, in effect, “is it really true that you no longer wish to be a member of the listserv?”
With any of the three emails, the member could click to say “I still wish to be a member of the listserv”. But if the member fails to click, eventually our server will conclude that it must be the member really does wish to become a non-member. And our server will mark the database with a “B” in a particular field (which means “bouncing”) and will no longer send listserv postings to that person.
Today, 48 members of the e-trademarks listserv received the “B”. They have been cut off from the listserv.
What do these 48 people have in common? I researched it, and what they have in common is that they all selected Google (gmail) as their ESP. And Google bounced dozens or hundreds of the listserv postings for those 48 people. So our server sent each of those 48 people the three emails inviting them to say they still want to be members. I’d guess that Google also bounced all of those 144 emails, or silently discarded them.
What I wish is that those 48 people would each get on the phone with Google and tell Google to stop misbehaving in this way.
I am rather reluctantly feeling that I may need to migrate all of the listservs over to a “forum” setting. No transition is easy and a transition to a forum would be annoying for everyone involved. But maybe after a successful migration, we would perceive some benefit. It would become easier to search for past discussions, for example. And it would probably do a better job of protecting the email addresses of members from being collected by spammers.
Do you have a reaction to all of this? Please post a comment below.
I’ve received several of the emails prompting to click “I still wish to be a member of the listserv,” which I do. This is even after I’ve called my ESP (not Google) to ask them to stop blocking these emails and to whitelist everything relating to these groups. The strange thing is that I seem to be receiving the “excessive bounces” emails only for the Trademarks group and not for the others – however, I don’t recall receiving any emails from the Design or Copyright listservs lately, so perhaps I’ve already been bounced and even the confirmatory emails aren’t coming through. Very frustrating. You’re already doing so much to prevent this from happening, and tech groups like Google are still finding ways to circumvent your efforts. I think a forum is an excellent idea, but I appreciate it would be a lot of work, at least initially. I’m sure there are many people across all of your listservs who would be happy to help.
I don’t know how pervasive it is, but I’ll add that Office 365 seems to behave the same way you describe Google as behaving: I have seen a few, but certainly not three email notices to attempt to verify that I’m still interested in receiving emails and then just notice that I’ve stopped receiving them. Similar to Katherine’s comment, this is only with respect to the Trademarks group.
On the topic of transitioning, I’m sure it is frustrating to know the small inconvenience that his happening to your members, but in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t that hard for us to deal with it.
I hope you might reconsider the transition from mailing lists to a forum platform.
Despite the problems with particular e-mail service providers, interacting via e-mail has some significant advantages over any forum platform. There is a large variety of e-mail client programs and web interfaces. Users may choose an e-mail client or web interface with which they are familiar or which enables them to handle mailing list mail very efficiently. E-mail systems have filter capabilities that can select or deselect content, or organize the content in accord with user preferences. Users who choose to keep their mailing list mail can search old messages using their e-mail client’s tools or other search tools. Likewise, there are alternative e-mail providers available for users whose existing e-mail providers are hostile to mailing list mail.
Forums, on the other hand, are like getting a new root canal every day. With forums, everyone is stuck using the same interface, and that interface may not be efficient for all users, or any of them. Forums may nominally provide search facilities, but in my experience, they are not as good as those available for e-mail; even if a more advanced search is available, there will be a learning curve for users who already know how to use the search in their e-mail. Posting usually requires the user to be logged in–some forums require the user to be logged in even for reading–so there’s yet another account and password to manage. And some newer forum software is very picky about the user’s web browser and will deny service to users who don’t measure up.
I guess if you were in my shoes, you would get to see what I see. Today I lost 48 members of the e-trademarks listserv. Last week I lost 30 members. Two weeks ago I lost 130 members.
I appreciate your suggestion that a user who got kicked off can sign up for a new email address from some other ESP. But right now, the e-trademarks list is down from 1100 active members to around 700.
I do not lack empathy for your plight. And I’m not saying “Let them eat cake!” I am just advocating for a weighing of the pros and cons that aligns with my perception of them. I see a lot of value to interacting with the lists via e-mail, and IMO the experience would be greatly diminished if the community moves to a forum. Mailman already provides a web archive for those who prefer reading a web site or cannot use e-mail. Switching to a forum burdens all users to accommodate those who use hostile e-mail providers but could resolve deliverability problems unique to their providers by opening a free e-mail account at another provider. And maybe the bounce problem could be mitigated by choosing Mailman settings that are much less sensitive to ephemeral delivery problems. Also, I recognize that every 6 minutes you spend on this administrative project comes at the expense of a tenth of an hour of billable work.
Carl,
The message is for your info in case it may be helpful.
Back in Dec. 2025 when the problem with Namecheap arose, I had been subscribed to four or five of your listservs (using the address bill@eshelman.biz) for many years. Using my main email service provider (bill@eshelman.biz address), I was never able to receive any more messages from your listservs. My ESP insisted that they do not use spam filters and could not help me.
So, I rejoined two listservs (patent practice and patent center) using a gmail address and it worked. I did not rejoin the trademarks listserv because I no longer do trademark work. The Patent Practice and Patent Center listservs, however, still work with my gmail address.
First, Carl, thank you again. Your listserves have been an ***invaluable*** resource for practitioners across IP fields both in the US and around the world. Second, everyone should appreciate that you have taken on a quite a burden. My only input is by comparison of your listserves and outreach, “to organizations” such as clubs and associations, that each use a mix of communication methods to provide no single point of failure. Some such organizations use Groups.io, Discord, Google Groups, direct emails, forums, and also listserves to maintain continuity.