Tor Mailing List Emails Sent to Spam Folder on ProtonMail

General Discussion
1

I recently subscribed to several Tor mailing lists. The emails for every single subscription went straight to the spam folder on ProtonMail.

I’m not sure if this is known or not, but I figured I’d mention it. For me, I feel like it’s extremely rare for subscriptions to mailing lists or registration emails to go straight into the spam folder, even though I know a lot of services will tell you that if you didn’t get the email, check your spam folder.

Maybe it’s something specific with ProtonMail that can be looked into or maybe it’s not worth it, but just figured I’d mention it.

Thanks.

1 Like
2

The quick fix is to go into PM settings>filters and allow. Not sure how PM identifies an address as spam but it’s worth looking into.

3

Sorry, that was horrifyingly obvious of me. You’re a PM user so you’d know that. I wonder if there’s a way to find out Proton’s criteria for marking spam and whether there’s a way to work around it?

4

I think there were two different methods that I used for marking the emails as not spam that were very similar. This is from memory, but should be close.

  1. Go into the Spam folder, click on the message, select ‘Mark as Legitimate’
  2. Go into the Spam folder, right click the message, select ‘Not Spam’

After doing this, I can see that the ‘From’ address from each email was added into the Spam and Block List to be explicitly allowed.

  1. Select the settings icon in the top right hand corner
  2. Select ‘Go to settings’
  3. Look for ‘Filters’ on the left hand side
  4. Scroll down to the ‘Spam and Block List’ section
  5. View all email addresses that were explicitly allowed as ‘not spam’

After doing the above, I haven’t had any issues with emails going into the Spam folder. However, I’ve noticed that sometimes the ‘From’ address is not one of the addresses listed on Tor’s mailing list, but it’s still coming from torproject[.]org, just not lists.torproject.org. A better solution is probably to explicitly allow the domain ‘torproject.org’ in the Spam and Block List. However, I hadn’t noticed until composing this message that some of the emails weren’t from the original Tor mailing list email addresses. I had just been periodically monitoring my Spam folder to see if any emails were going there.

I also thought it was worth looking into. However, I don’t have much knowledge in this area. I don’t know what Proton’s criteria is for marking spam. I guess I could reach out to Proton to see if I can get any information from them. Apart from that, I’m not sure what else I can do. I can certainly do some testing if some changes are made in the future. Any other thoughts, let me know. Thanks.

5

That should do the trick. I suppose there might be a slightly different domain for some lists but you can just add whichever relevant ones you can find in your mailboxes. I doubt if there’s much Proton can do to help beyond the filtering capabilities.

Best of luck!