Email from Yahoo group marked as spam

[alehman]

I need to temporarily forward email from existing Yahoo! group to my Discourse forum.

I set up a dedicated user on Yahoo! which fowards posts to a particular Discourse category. I successfully subscribed the user on Discourse. Emails from the Yahoo! group are arriving but are rejected as junk by Discourse.

Email::Receiver::AutoGeneratedEmailError
Happens when the ‘precedence’ header is set to: list, junk, bulk or auto_reply, or when any other header contains: auto-submitted, auto-replied or auto-generated.

I don’t see any way to configure Yahoo! to change the email headers it sends.

I’ve tried whitelisting domains yahoo.com, yahoogroups.com, but Discourse seems to insist on rejecting the email from my group regardless.

Any ideas would be most appreciated.

[mpalmer]

You can’t forward e-mail from a mailing list into Discourse. The potential for mail loops and other forms of rampant insanity is just too high, and the legitimate use cases are too few to justify playing whack-a-mole with the stupendous number of corner cases that need to be handled.

The only idea that comes to mind would be to get Yahoo to forward the e-mails to some sort of intermediate that would strip out the problematic headers before sending them on to Discourse, but… eeeeew. I’d recommend rethinking the plan that has you forwarding the e-mails from Yahoo to Discourse in the first place.

[alehman]

OK. Well that deep-6’s my big transition plan. Yahoo! uses Precedence: bulk. We have a club with a lot of VERY-long time Yahoo! users and I’m trying to ween them to something better. I thought temporarily forwarding the Yahoo! traffic into a category they could view on Discourse would make it more palatable for them (I selected Discourse primarily for it’s combined email/web functionality).
Thanks.

[pfaffman]

A quick look makes it look like there’s no easy way to get data from Yahoo! Groups. (There used to be a way, but it broke in 2013.)

If you’ve got an MBOX file with the archive, one could use the mbox import script. If you don’t, you could start building one now and do the import after a month or so.

Your next best bet might be to post to the group and ask for a set of early adopters and get them on board with the new site, then do a bulk invite.

[tobiaseigen]

If it’s not too much volume, you can always copy paste, then change author. This is something I do regularly in a community that is still part google groups and part discourse. I actually made the group moderated and create each post that shows up in my queue in discourse.

[mpalmer]

We’ve seen a lot of migrations over the years, and one of the patterns that has emerged for successful migrations is that it should be done as a clean break. Gradual weaning doesn’t work nearly as well; it tends to bifurcate the community.

[elijah]

You can’t forward e-mail from a mailing list into Discourse. The potential for mail loops and other forms of rampant insanity is just too high, and the legitimate use cases are too few to justify playing whack-a-mole with the stupendous number of corner cases that need to be handled.

But if you can control the mailloop issue, this looks pertinent:

White-listing for incoming group email - "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated"

I’m toying with the idea of managing PayPal / Shop orders to come though to a “group inbox” so several users could manage incoming orders. Currently this is not possible because of the recent positive additions for the detection of emails not sent my humans (with email headers like Auto-Submitted: auto-generated). Perhaps there would be a case for white-listing domains and specific email addresses that would be allowed to by-pass these recent detections? Doesn’t anybody else see a use-case fo…

[alehman]

I understand the comment about clean breaks, but I think this also is highly dependent on the character of the group of humans involved. It seems like there would be a use case for this and other applications to bypass the non-human detectors. Just a thought. Thanks for the thoughtful replies.