Topic: Bouncing Email
What is bouncing? (aka Help! A list member stopped receiving list mail!)
Q. What the heck is bouncing?
A. It's the email equivalent of a telephone busy signal (soft bounce) or a "this number has been disconnected" message (hard bounce) for a telephone number.
Soft bounces (busy signal) happen when the recipient's email box fills up and new mail gets returned with a "mailbox full" message.
Hard bounces (number disconnected) happen when someone cancels their email address or changes ISPs. Messages to the old email address will get returned with a "user unknown" type of message. Also, some free email services like Yahoo and Hotmail will deactivate an email address if the user doesn't log in to their service within some time period and then you'll see "account deactivated" type of messages, these are also hard bounces.
At Yahoogroups, you can check a list member's bounce history by finding their email address on your member list or on your bouncing member list (link to that at the top of the member list), click on Edit and then click on Bounce History. Scroll down the page to see info on the bounces Yahoogroups has received and at the bottom, you'll find the last bounce message. If they're on your bouncing members list, you can send them a reactivation request to help them get restored to normal status and start receiving groups mail again.
List members can check their own bounce history by going to their MyGroups page and clicking on Email Preferences, then clicking on Bounce History for their email address. If they've gone into bouncing status, they can also send themselves a Reactivation Request from that page to get restored to normal status again.
Last updated on March 27, 2004 12:17 PM