Topic: Moderating Posts
I didn't approve that message, how did it get approved?
Q. A pending message got approved but I (and any other list owners or moderators) didn't approve it. It shows in the message headers and in the management logs that I did but I swear I didn't! How did this happen?
A. There's several ways that a pending message can get approved automatically:
1. If you've got an auto-responder on your email address, like an Out-Of-Office or Vacation automated reply, that autoresponder will reply to the Yahoogroups pending message notice and since the default Reply-to address on the notice is the approval confirmation address, the message gets approved automatically.
2. Are you using a challenge/response spam stopper like SpamArrest or Earthlink's spam filtering? The spam filter will automatically reply to the Yahoogroups pending message notice, using the Reply-To address which is the approval confirmation address, thus approving the message automatically. Because Yahoogroups doesn't reply to the spam filter challenge, you never get the pending message notice but each pending message gets automatically approved. (Yet another reason that those challenge/response things are worse than spam!)
3. If the pending message has a virus in it or is spam, your ISP may have deleted or quarantined the pending message notice while sending back a mailer-daemon bounce notice to the Reply-To address, which is the approval confirmation address, voila again, the message gets automatically approved.
So there's a starting place to help you figure out what's happening, in the first two items, you can disable the autoresponder or whitelist Yahoogroups.com so that the spam filter doesn't challenge those messages. The third item shouldn't occur too often, but if it does, you could turn off pending messages notifications or change your listowner address to something that doesn't do virus or spam filtering, use another mail provider, etc.
(Thanks to Bill Holmes for the info in #2 and #3!)
Last updated on March 27, 2004 01:48 PM