How does <email>@cpan.org work?
In the recent year I notice more and more instances that mail to ribasushi@cpan.org is silently swallowed. I know this because I communicate with the senders through other channels, and I've even received forwards of copies of emails which as far as the sender is concerned are delivered. I am also increasingly hearing the same story from my PAUSE-peers. Bottom line: it seems that the SMTPD cpan.mx.develooper.com is configured to do rather aggressive *silent* spam filtering.
I am writing this for 2 reasons:
- I want to gauge whether the problem is indeed pervasive, or it is just bad luck on my part.
- I want to solicit opinions on how to properly fix this if it is indeed a large-scale problem.
I personally would prefer to get all my mail forwarded my way directly, unfiltered and I would deal with it however I deem appropriate. Of course there are bound to be differing opinions on this.
Anyhow - please share your experience, both positive and negative!
Cheers
Musing on the pitfalls of the Swiss Army Chainsaw
The potential problem with them forwarding all mail unflitered to your primary e-mail address so that you can filter it, is that if you're filtering it yourself, you've lost out on one of the best ways to filter spam: originating IP address.
As far as your mail server is concerned, all your mail will be originating from cpan.mx.develooper.com which won't be on any of the spam block lists. The real IP address the mail arrived from (which might be a zombie PC in a far away land) might be on a block list, but your mail server won't notice that unless it's fastidious and scans "Received" headers in the message itself.
Being a new PAUSE user I wanted to set my Gravatar. I set up the forwarding and checked that it worked by sending myself some mail. I got that part covered. The mail did indeed get forwarded from develooper.com
I then went on to set up a new Gravatar for my cpan.org address. So far I failed to do so even after several tries with not a single contact from develooper.com (or from anywhere else).
Of course, I could chicken out and just use my regular mail address. I have to deal with spam filtering anyway so that is not the problem (spam is, but not the filtering that I am doing anyway). However, I like the idea of keeping the identity on cpan.org separate, if only for Gravatar and the likes.
My guess is that claiming a cpan.org address on Gravatar or recovering a forgotten password is currently impossible. Can others confirm or deny that?
As far as the better quality of spam filtering on cpan.org directly is concerned, it could either be a configurable option to unconditionally have all mail forwarded or that the result of the spam filter would be indicated in a mail header (or both).
I don't know of any mail that I'm not getting, but maybe I don't know because I'm not getting it.
I tried to connect metacpan with my CPAN account but I never got the confirmation e-mail from metacpan. Maybe the SPAM filter is the cause, here, too.
Other mails work, like notifications on module update.
I believe I get exactly the msgs I expect.
maybe I am too late here but here is my negative experience with cpan.org's spam filter: https://blogs.perl.org/users/kmx/2014/10/strawberry-perl-52011-invalid-msi-signatures.html
More and more frequently I don't receive expected mail to my cpan.org email address. In fact, the only reason it took me so long to respond is because I forgot my new blogs.perl.org password and the cpan.org spam filter was blocking the blogs.perl.org password reset email up until my most recent attempt!