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Tell HN: Legitimate voting email from city clerk marked as spam

by Jupe on 6/10/24, 2:21 AM with 5 comments

Today I was browsing my spam folder and there I found an email from our local Deputy City Clerk. The topic of the mail was how to go about voting by mail. (I promise this is not a political post). I unflagged the "spam" status, perused the email... everything was legitimate. Emails, phone numbers, attachments (yes, I did check in VM), etc.

So, it has just occurred to me (I'm a little slow sometimes, getting old) that the sensitivity to one or a handful of "negative" reviews or judgements is enough to flag something potentially important as "spam". It only takes a few (how many, I don't know) "reports" for our automated systems to consider something it is not. (In fact, apparently, a single, probably false, comment suggesting improper jury sequestering could be enough to declare a mis-trial in a recent, high-visibility court case here in the US.)

I'm waiting on results of an important medical test. That's what first drove me to the spam folder in the first place (maybe somehow it was considered spam?).

So, this "hole" in authenticating messages may apply to much more than just vote-related emails. Be careful, and don't assume anything!

  • by solardev on 6/10/24, 1:25 PM

    Email deliverability in general is difficult, and many governments, especially small local ones, struggle with IT. You can check the email headers to see if DMARC, SPF, DKIM are configured correctly and how your email server is evaluating it.

    It's also possible their constituents don't really want their emails. For every important voting reminder, the same system probably also sends out boring old reminders of the latest council meetings and whatnot.

  • by RollAHardSix on 6/10/24, 4:10 AM

    Did you check SPF, DKIM, DMARC?

    I worked for a strategic marketing consultancy & I couldn't tell you the number of times I saw the above properly misconfigured for clients or government tourism entities. Like 90‰ of what I ran into.. luckily for them configuring SPF, DKIM, & DMARC is like the one thing I'm actually good at in this computer career thing

  • by AnimalMuppet on 6/10/24, 12:26 PM

    My personal email wound up in some peoples' spam folders for a while, because some, um, "enterprising business people" forged the return address for their spam.

    So it could be that, depending on who does your spam filtering and how they do it.

  • by cpach on 6/10/24, 10:55 AM

    Interesting. In my locale, all info about voting is sent via snail mail, never e-mail.