Menoloopal; Head Knots

Last week, Tigger's Mum, F, sent me a screenshot from her inbox spam folder. Apparently, there was a considerable number of such messages...

The devil's in the small print below the warning box.

Before I get into that, let me say that the timing of the message had me chasing a small ghost as I had just shortly before been doing my daily run of checking the comments folders on the Blogger dashboard. I had not seen any comment from F on the blog for the Monday post to which this particular message referred. So initially, I thought this was about F's comment being rejected entirely. The illusion was compounded when, after I had deleted the notification for myself, that comment and another appeared on the dashboard/blog. I reset the notification, and F's next comment still got posted, so it had only been a matter of our crossing each other in timing (and slightly tardy work by the intermutts). Anyway, this message was purely about the blog's notification by email aspect.

What's this gobbledegook? Let me start from the beginning. We've been here before, but as we know, Google is always tweaking things, so there is no harm in covering this again. Here is a screenshot from my original post at the end of April about the change to email notification (and for those who are wondering what that is even about - this is the choice you make to have any comments made on your blog sent in email form to your inbox so that you don't always have to be going into your dashboard...)

Now here is a screenshot as of today, three months later. The difference is that the first one arose in 'pending' because that was Blogger's way of alerting us to the change and forcing us to confirm, but the action to get notifications is as stated in that post (and scrawled with a finger on this);

This, you may recall, replaced the very straightforward "get email notifications of comments" box... why keep it simple when you can bamboozle 'em, eh?

Most of us probably are working with Gmail addresses if we opt for the notifications. I have noticed - and some of you may have also - that a few of our commenters while appearing on the dashboard and blog, do not actually get forwarded to our inboxes. I have long pondered why this should be, and this message from F has clarified it. She is operating with a Yahoo email address. Now, a couple of other folks don't reach me via email, and I wonder if they have been getting mail daemon alerts like this but not twigged as to why?

What that small print revealed is that, in order to minimise spam and other nefarious activity, there are protocols in place that prevent the different platforms from 'handshaking'. Your email address must be authenticated with a Domain Key Identified Mail (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF). This coding is part of Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC). 

What has my head a bit in knots is that F sent me this alert via the very same email address from the other platform, and my Gmail inbox had no issue with it. This shows inconsistency of checking within Google's different parts - and as this DMARC was set up primarily for email messaging purposes, it confounds me. 

There are steps that can be taken to sort this out, but they are very much within the domain provider's IT admin purview rather than something the end user can fix themselves. (Read here to glimpse what I mean.)

So, for now, it is a case of those of you not using Gmail for posting comments on Blogger, to prevent getting mail daemon bounce back, you'll need to alert your email provider/domain holder of the issue and get them working on their DMARC compliance. If you don't know who that is, it is status quo, and you'll just have to deal with these alerts. 

Of course, most of us using Gmail and the notification by email option could cancel the notification request so that the handful of people using other email platforms don't hit this issue... I have been pondering this recently because, as mentioned at the top of this post, I check comments on the dashboard daily anyway due to the nonsense spamming of comments that Blogger continues to perform - so notification is a double dip. Though, as almost all my email is blog comments, it would mean a very empty box to face each morning!

WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW IS IF THE ONE OR TWO OTHER COMMENTERS HERE WHO ARE USING 'NOT' GMAIL WHETHER THEY HAVE HAD SIMILAR ALERTS TO THE ONE UP TOP? If the common denominator in such cases is Yahoo... well... (if you are not already aware, despite its 'best' efforts to be otherwise, it is the source of a great deal of the unauthorised activity DMARC has been set up to prevent). Consider changing platforms - and if you object to Gmail for any reason, then perhaps Outlook would be the alternative for you. The security standard there is about equal to Google.

While my daily visit to the dashboard comments page reveals the comments I have not been notified of, it is not about that so much as it is to continue checking for the comments shoved into the spam folder. Blogger continues to do this, frustratingly. It also remains very erratic as to when and who. Occasionally, a comment from almost the beginning of time gets spammed. More commonly, it is comments made within the previous week. I also note that, while there are others, the most regularly spammed comments are those from my Canadian readers! The Blogger Forum is surprisingly lacking in posts about this issue - though last year there was a rash of threads about it - so I think this is a situation that Blogger can't sort out itself, and deleted all the complaints and left only one single thread - in which the solution given is the one we all ended up doing anyway, which is to go and mark them as 'not spam' and publish them again. Sigh...