Do you have an email account with Spark (xtra.co.nz)?
If so, email sent from DDAI mailing lists won’t reach you. This includes our general announcement list (facnews) and email discussion lists like “fac”.
The problem is simple: our mailing list address is “ddaimail.org“. Spark uses a content filter to scan incoming email, and they have decided that “ddaimail.org” is associated with spam — so they simply reject all email that has that string of text anywhere in the email.
It doesn’t matter whether or not the email is actually from ddaimail.org — because this is a content filter it will reject any email that has ddaimail.org written anywhere in the email, whether it is in the hidden header fields or the body of the text. If we try to send mail from another account to an @xtra.co.nz account but mention that domain – it bounces. Even email sent to their postmaster@ or abuse@ emails will bounce, if it mentions that domain.
Whitelisting our domain name in your email account is a good idea, but it won’t work to fix the problem, because it isn’t blocking email based on the sender (“from”) address or IP — it is a system-wide block based on scanning the actual words printed in the email. (And yes, if they are blocking email that mentions our URL, they are probably also blocking all sorts of other email from other senders.).
We do not know why they have decided that we are spam. We have always had strict no-spamming policies and the ddaimail.org mailing lists are all private, for facilitators only. Plus these are low volume lists — even on a busy day, it’s unlikely that you would receive more than a handful of emails from the list.
We are not listed on any spam blacklists – we’ve checked them all! We’re clean.
This problem has been going on for several months (at least since April 2017) and we have tried without success to work with Spark to resolve the problem.
What Can You do?
If you want to get mail from any DDAI mailing list, you will need to set up another email address, with another provider, and use that for your subscriptions.
We recommend gmail simply because it is the one system that has always worked to receive our emails, and usually seems smart enough to figure out that our mailing list is not spam. And of course it is free.
But you can try any other system. Just not Spark (xtra.co.nz)
Once you do that you should re-subscribe yourself to all email lists that you want to join. You can find the information you need to sign up here:
Another thing you can do is to register a complaint with Spark –but you probably need to contact them by phone or using online chat. As noted above, when we have sent email to them explaining the problem it has bounced, because if we type the domain name in the body of the email, it triggers their spam-blocking filter, every time.