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.