Adding to the list of complaints about Gmail, it seems that emails coming from Yahoo’s Group community is marked by Gmail as spam. This time, however, users aren’t complaining, but rather, agreeing.
The reason Yahoo Group email is being labeled as spam is that the emails people are receiving contain a 1×1 pixel tracking image within the content. The main culprit is Yahoo’s verification email that is sent when group members update their personal email.
When this occurs, Yahoo sends a verification to the new email address. Because Yahoo’s emails contain the tracking gif, it gets treated as spam by Gmail’s filters.
According to SearchEngineJournal.com, this only occurs when you change an existing address. If you subscribe to a Yahoo Group with a Gmail address as your primary email address, this spam issue should not occur.
As mentioned before, Gmail users are not to upset about this “bug”. A response from a Gmail message board quoted by SEJ seems to capture the reaction of Gmail users:
“I just sent another Yahoo Groups verification email to myself, and it went straight to the spam folder.
However, looking at it I’m a bit inclined to agree with Gmail: they would need to special-case Yahoo, which then leaves them open to people faking being Yahoo to get past the spam filter.
You see, the first line of the text/html part is
[img alt= width=1 height=1src=”http://adserver.yahoo.com/l?S=150000719/rand=1943542533″]
and on the whole, I’d like to have my email server think that anything which puts a 1×1 image from a URI with ad’ in it before even the opening html tag is spam. That’s evil, nasty, deceptive, and looks
like the behavior of the most cretinous (sic) sellers of sugar pills.”
Another quote 2nds this feeling:
“Similar to Phil, I would want any email with a 1×1 pixel image to be considered spam by my spam filter since this is something a lot of spam does.”
Thanks to SearchEngineJournal for the heads up.
Murdok | Breaking eBusiness News
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