I was hoping you were wrong @Thanatermesis. You weren't.
Now the server of Elive is sending emails from the forum server (smtp remotely) instead of the elivecd.org server, this could avoid possible hacking (in case it was! which we don't know really)
Next will be to announce a release these days, specially to betatest the email (slowly) sending, but I think I must remove around a 20% of the actual subscribers in the newsletter to cleanup it a bit (never did that before, the idea is to remove the less-interested people based in a ranking level, which is based on how many "opens" and clicks received for example). If somebody knows a bit about how to proceed with the cleaning it will be helpful 
Did you write to the blacklist holders meanwhile
- to remove our server from their listings ?!??
.
Of course
At first you have to make sure that our server is not spamming anymore, check open ports and so on -
be aware that this will be the first thing that the black-listers check immediately.
!
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I'll take this very easy. Although never any responsible person does it the way I suggest. There are different types of people, from the perspective of a project (product, service, ...)
- Lead - Individuals, who an be contacted bit have no clue about the provided entity (just clicked Elive at distrowatch)
- Interest - Somebody who takes any action, regarding the entity (ordered Newsletter, ask a Question in the Forum)
- 'Customer' - Not the best description here, but someone who donated or installed Elive already
- Fan - Somebody who used Elive a longer time (maybe 2 or 3 releases)
- Resident - Someone, who seems to have no better to do as reading/answering the forum and idle at the IRC and so on ...
- Developer - It speaks for itself ...
I think nobody has a recipe, to get a person to 4 to 6. But the first steps are the interesting.
If there is a Lead (he/she heard of Elive and is interested in a easy distribution with eyecandy interface at lowend or older hardware), I need to do everything to get him/her to get the newsletter.
Here I follow the 'one of 4'. As the Lead is interested, I need to get more attraction. Since here are no recources to keep track of 'what is the point of interest', I need to show the core values (described before) again and again.
A lead, who ordered the Newsletter, is a interest. Here I have the opputunity to create further actions. Without getting the interest to make a donation in the first place, I want to know what is the desire. Regarding on the setup of the newsletter, I can write a teaser with 'read more' at any topic ... (even if I hate this kind of newsletter myself, it is a way to keep track).
Depending on the system, I am able to set up a 'one of four' rule. If a interest should make a move, but instead just eating bandwidth, I can set up counter.
First Newsletter: 100% - No action, get down to 75%
Second Newsletter: 75% - No action get down to 50%
Third Newsletter: 50% - No action get down to 25%
Fourth Newsletter: 25% - No action get down to 0% -> Potential kick out
Because I'd think there are not much readers, the four steps could be 'releases' as well. Between one Release a real interest should at least click one topic ...
One I've worked in a very successful marketing department (up to 7% Conversion rate) of a medium size company based in Hamburg. I've leaned the difference between my view/opinion and success in online marketing.
This is only the overview. If interest exists, I can go much deeper onto this topic.
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not yet, but I'm more in like waiting to see how the new "spam rankings" are marked with the next newsletter now
do you think I should say "your email has been removed from our newsletter" (maybe with some candies to offer) or just remove it?
Well, the rating is set automatically by the newsletter plugin (based on opens, clicks, etc), but I'm looking that it doesn't looks to be very reliable, hum! so I'm trying to write a small code to make it smarter
I like the simplest option "if no newsletter has been opened at all in at least X sendings, kick out from the database"
= 
Methinks that have no clue about how long it takes to get removed from a blacklist.
You (we?) should start with this asap -
= you are not serious, aren't you
Send me a pm with the mailserver data (name, ext ip, hoster, domain ect.) and, if available, a block protocol - for that I can start to whitelist the server then.
Next step should be - harden the mailserver;
prolly @yoda can be helpful with this.
Sincerly......
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Hey don't panic guys ..... it's not that bad IMO.
Frankly, I'm not too worried as to me it would all boil down to hotmail c.s that's causing mayhem.
I can't see any blocklists other than theirs.
So just script a block to stop sending to those adresses.
OTOH, I have to admit that I personally never read the newsletters ..... most times it's not news to me anyway but they shouldn't bounce. 
I give it a thought ... The question is what is better. More recipients (and the possibillity to get mentioned as Spam) or quality contacts. Maybe someone who subscribed 2 years ago for the newsletter don't remember and is marking the Elive Newsletter as spam, rather than unsubscribe?
Maybe a way between is to ask 'You don't reacted on any newsletter since [n] releases. Do you want to receive further Emails/Notifications/Interesting facts' about Elive?' -> No response, delete contact.
But don't to it regularly. If someone confirmed once, the contact should be considered as interested.
Edit: Is here a whiteboard App? It is getting much complicated, I need to draw the logic ... 
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Yes Im, I have just unsubscribed a bunch of 300 emails that didn't had much interaction (from 30k, so is not really much) in order to improve the spam
another thing is that the emails are going to be sent from a different server now, thats why I want to see how it looks like now
thanks! this is very helpful, we have sent before everything from elivecd.org and now is going to be sent from elivelinux.org (or more exactly forum.elivelinux.org), yes, we don't use any external email service but the own server for send emails (they are too much expensive for the amount of emails)
that's what I tried to do these days improved a few things around, but for sure is probably not perfect
well it was in the last 2 newsletters, when I have seen after the 20% of emails sent that a big amount of them are marked as "hardbounced" (undelivered) because of the spaming filters, this is very bad not only because these emails are not sent to the users but because these subscribers are marked as "errors" in the database (this means, we could not send again emails to them), and the next will be to write a tool to try to see if they works again or not (probably re-subscribing them and testing a new email sending, but this is bad for the spam rank if they are really undeliverable) - In other words: its bad because we lose subscribers statuses in the database and ALSO because the newsletters anouncement needs to be stoped 
my unsubscribing filter that I applied (as previously said) was based on:
- 10 newsletters sent to them without having opened any of them
- same, but with 5 only, for all those Microsoft email addresses
if you have suggestions to add more people automatically unsubscribed tell me, but I'm worried about the people that really don't want to be unsubscribed from the list (like, they just see an email about elive and instead to open it, they google for having news)
In any case, maybe I should send in the future an email to ALL those automatically unsubscribed ones saying "goodbye, we deleted your email because of the lack of interest (interactivity with email), if you want to have news about elive, subscribe again and open more our emails! dammit!" lol - Note: this is a bit bad because then I'm sending -again- a newsletter to those more probably to cause problems, or mark the emails as spam, etc...
THAT is an example of a subscribed user that doesn't wants to be unsubscribed but accidentally (because never opened any of these emails), was removed from the database...
So basically there's 30k subscribed to the beta releases, I unsubscribed 300 of them... is good to cleanup the mailing list to keep only the most interested ones, but every person is a different person and I don't want to unsubscribe any of them that really want to be updated in some way 
(in fact, the original idea was to remove the ones that had less activity, like only opened 2 emails from 15 sent or something similar like never clicked on any link, in order to have only the most interested ones (or lets say the ones that do an -action- based on them), but that would have been probably too much)
note that they started to bounce just because -some- users started to mark them as spam, and then the email services (gmail, outlook, etc...) started to filter them as forbidden to deliver.. then the elive server started receiving their replies as sending-errors (and so, marked as hardbounced)
yeah sounds good, and yes! I will try to remember the "remember the option" (like adding them in a special list or similar)
probably mindomo
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This is both a good and terrible idea IMO.
If the forum gets blocked due to spam ... then that's bad because people can't get email messages from the forum.
I don't use the feature but im sure many people do.
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One Way, not mentioned here is: Let it be done by others ...
I do think the main issue here is the pricing. But There are some free services, that are specialized to handle newsletter, do avoid getting recognized as spam.
For example: https://omnisend.grsm.io/ti-free-email
I never used free services before, every provider I worked with is for 100000 subscribers and more.
But may we should take a look at the few free alternatives with a subscriber amount 3000+?
I never seen any option, if there was not "too much expensive", then it was a no-no because X reason, so the only solution is to send from own servers
In your suggested case, I the free option is limited to 15k emails per month (we have 30k for a single newsletter, and a total of 60k subscribers in the database)
By other side I think a massive cleanup would be the best way to improve it (removing everybody that never opened a newsletter, but telling them about this step in order to make sure they want to be kept updated or not)
I totally agree ...... Just clean up the mess in the first place and with a bit off luck things will go better.
If it doesn't we'll think again as to what to do.
Release announced, BTW:
I have added an "unsub" header, in order to make easier the non-interested users to unsubscribe if they don't want to receive more emails (instead of searching into the footer) - result? well, after 400 emails sent, 20% of the people that opened the email was for unsubscribe 
so this header is a good or bad thing? so we can have much more people to unsubscribe but also less people marking it as spam ? hum.... question is remove it or leave it included?
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Clearly leave it ... I unsubscribed four newsletter this week, because of this topic here.
I can only speak for myself. A long time I have had no good internet connection and I'm one of the last people who ordered a mobile dataplan, Even If I love to be connected, I don't wanted to support the capitalism behind a service that should be freely available ... but that is another story.
So I subscribed a lot of newsletter, to get them at home and read them in train/subway/metro/... A long time it worked well, I moved interesting topics to a 'interesting'-email folder on my phone. Nokia 9100, HTC Orion II, ... (yeah, smartphone without always on is possible!)
But nowadays, I'm married, have a kid and a time consuming dayjob. So I can't read all the interesting topics anymore. Unfortunately the Newsletter are automatic processed and goes to a own folder, I rarely take a look at ... Today I've got a 50/50MBit fiber line at home and G4 LTE everywhere with a 128GB SD Card in my phone. No worries about time and space anymore, I forgot all the newsletters, I've active used in another time.
So I make place in my Inbox and save bandwidth of the provider of the newsletter. And I unsubscribe on purpose. Let others, younger, enthusiastic go on my path instead.
I do think it is good, that 400 people say 'I'm no longer interested'. In one case yesterday the unsubscribe lead to a 'oh, why do you want to leave?' landing page, with 4 options and a 'others freeform' ... I've also take the time to describe exact this reason (with a fewer words).
See: https://prismsound.us5.list-manage.com/unsubscribe/post
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Thanatermesis believes that the problems are finished.
UPDATES:
- The last release announcement was finished to be sent (it was sending very slowly to avoid spam rankings, which apparently helps a lot)
- Now the IP of the forum is blacklisted in csi.cloudmark.com which seems like to be used for some email clients like libero.it (which means, entirely unable to deliver emails to them, like elive downloads, etc)
- I switched back to the IP of elivecd.org for sending emails, which solves the previous problem
- Both elivecd.org and forum ips are blacklisted for any Microsoft emails since 2-3 months, they don't looks like to remove them
Next:
- I assume I should simply delete the "less active subscribers" from the list
- sending an email to them saying that or just delete them in order to avoid more spam ranking?
- I should change the subscribers message to something like only confirm your email subscription if you really are interested to receive our news and not click to spam when you receive them (maybe doing some signature with blood oath or similar)
- Maybe switch to give direct downloads from the page instead of using the delayed downloads system (which improves donations and collecting of emails)
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I spoke too soon.
From the site dashboard
- There are 4 email jobs that failed. Check your app.yml and ensure that the mail server settings are correct.
DKIM signing solves a lot of these problems. Are you using SPF, DKIM & DMARC DNS records?
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