Warning about the SOTT newsletter on my email

[Ant22]

I just checked my SOTT newsletter and when I opened the email I saw a warning about the website being unsafe. Please see the screenshot below.

I receive plenty of newsletters that I do check. They're mostly related to my profession so it's nothing that could be labelled as controversial. No other newsletter has had this warning message.

I thought I'd report this in case it's useful or worth noting.

 

[Bobo08]

Are you using Google as your email provider? They have automatic spam/phishing filters. If many people mark a domain as spam/phishing, they will automatically mark emails from that domain as spam/phishing and display such warning for everyone.

That's the plausible explanation. There is also the conspiracy theory explanation that it is one more method they use to suppress SOTT, which might be closer to the truth.

Normally, the webmaster of the affected domain (@Scottie) can work with the email provider to whitelist their domain. I don't know how feasible it is in this case.

 

[Scottie]

Usually, those warnings come up because there is some hyperlink in the included article content that goes to a site that is "dangerous".

On top of that, certain words and phrases will get mail marked as "dangerous" (which these days can be anything at all).

There really isn't much to be done about it at this point. We even use SendGrid to send out out mails for us - supposedly to increase deliverability. No matter which provider we choose, Hotmail, Outlook, and various other sites ALWAYS temporarily reject our mail.

I've been fighting the E-mail Battle for over 10 years now, and it's only getting worse. There is simply too much spam and too much hysterical safety and/or censorship stuff in place to get e-mail delivered 100% of the time these days - unless you're Amazon.

As for Gmail itself, consider yourself "lucky": Google LOVES to read all your mails and extract data from connections between you and others, so they almost never reject our e-mail. They just put that big banner at the top of the message.