-- texas critter
]]>From Yahoo! Help - Groups Members - Removal of bouncing email addresses:
Yahoo! Groups will periodically remove email addresses which have been bouncing for long periods of time. If Yahoo! Groups determines that an email address has been bouncing for more than 6 months, we may remove it from our system. An email address is said to be bouncing when it consistently returns messages as undeliverable and is therefore determined to be inactive.
There's a "more information" link there which leads to Yahoo! Help - Groups Members - What are "bouncing" members? which explains what bouncing members are and about the "test messages" aka automated reactivation requests that Yahoo will send periodically.
]]>What's prompted my urge to everyone to switch is the latest and most dangerous exploit - read this article at CNet.
Any site hosted on a server using Windows (2000, 2003, NT, etc.) can get infected. Sites hosted on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and other types of server O/S can't get infected.
There are a good chunk of large and reputable sites running on Windows servers. As the CNet articles notes, even bank sites are getting infected and then the site can infect their customers - even going to an https url is not safe, the virus can infect the user from a secure https url.
The big lesson here for users is: Don't use IE - except for going to the Windows Update website (and if you're on Windows XP, you don't even have to do that, the XP update feature will do it automatically and without going thru IE). For all browsing, other than the Windows Update site, here's safe alternatives that cannot be infected by this virus or other malicious adware, spyware or any other nasties that automatically install thru IE.
Links open in new windows - all of these browsers are free of charge and advertising except for Opera.
(While Mac users aren't affected by this virus, the IE version for Mac is not a great browser, imho, so I'm including alternatives for Mac users as well.)
And this one is good too, Mailing and Posting Etiquette, it's shorter but it covers the important points. There's no copyright info here so it would be better to only quote excerpts and give a link back to the site for the full document. Or take the ideas presented and rephrase them in your own words. There's also some links at the end to other sites.
]]>You create a new address that forwards to your real address and you can set a limit on the number of emails that can be sent to that SpamGourmet address, say two or three or five, and then after that SpamGourmet automatically bounces anything, including all spam. The person you're emailing never sees your real email address, just the SpamGourmet address.
You can easily create a new SpamGourmet address each time you need to email a pending member and then just forget about it after that. And the best part is that it's totally free! And while the site has some advertising on it, it's Google Ads, not the really annoying kinds of ads.
]]>MSN Groups now offer email delivery, but YGs owners will find it far less flexible as a list server. A large pool of potential members, maybe 1/4 the size of YGs. You need a MSN or Hotmail address to join, but you can change that after you subscribe.
Topica is a basic email list server, no web space, cookie cutter home pages (these could use some design work), max email size 100k. Good customer service. The visible part of Topica seems to be a little smaller than Smartgroups. There are problems with ISPs blocking for spam.
Domeus, intermittently intermittent. I have two lists here but they seem so far away. Talkin Mit der Gruppen Meister: staff @ domeus.com
VPMail, basic list server based in Australia. Pretty good reliability as a list server. Email moderation. All my archives are named "Server Error."
Coollist, basic list server located in Singapore. Good reliability. "Archives unavailable." Everything management is done at the website here, except you can post by email. No email moderation.
Freelists is good, reliable and fast. Technical lists are favored. Each new list is vetted by a human being. Good support. Runs Ecartis (Lyris) software, which has lots of features but is not quite as easy as firing up a YG. Archives and custom home page space.
(Comparison done by Bill Holmes, December 2002)
If you've gotten spam sent to your group, be sure to view the source and copy all of it, then go to the abuse reporting form on the Yahoogroups website and paste it into the Feedback box, you could also add a brief note at the top as well.
While it may take Yahoogroups a couple weeks, I have generally gotten action on spammers by reporting them thru that form.
Note: Do NOT post spam or abusive emails HERE! This website is run by a volunteer who does NOT work for Yahoogroups and can't do a thing about spam or abuse at Yahoogroups. Any such postings will be deleted and the authors banned from posting here. You must go to the Yahoogroups website thru the "report" link above to report spam or abuse to Yahoogroups.
]]>[ Change to Moderator ] - Moderators can change delivery and posting settings for individual members. Additional privileges can be granted as well if needed.
[ Change to Owner ] - Owners have complete control over all features and settings of the group and can delete the group.
(If the list member doesn't have a Yahoo ID linked to their list membership, you won't see the "Change to Owner" option, instead you'll see a note that they must have a Yahoo ID in order to be an owner.)
It's now possible to have real co-owners, so if one owner drops off the face of the earth, the group isn't left to rot (assuming of course that the original owner did appoint a co-owner). Co-owners automatically have all the moderator privileges, it's all little green circles, instead of check boxes.
This can be a great thing to help prevent losing control of your groups. All listowners should create a separate Yahoo ID and email address, subscribe it to your group (set it to NoMail) and make it an Owner. Then if ever you lose access to your primary Yahoo ID or primary email address, you'll have that backup Yahoo ID to get back in control of your group.
If you make someone a co-owner, then when you go to their member detail page, those two options above change to this:
[ Change to Member ] - Members are basic participants in the group. They can post and receive messages and access web features made available to them.
[ Change to Moderator ] - Moderators can change delivery and posting settings for individual members. Additional privileges can be granted as well if needed.
So one owner can change another owner back to just a moderator or just a member. If you click on "change to moderator", then on the next page, all the moderator privileges checkboxes are checked, so you'd need to uncheck any that you didn't want them to have and click Save Changes.
The one hazard is that ANY co-owner can make any other co-owner just a moderator or just a member again. So if you make someone a co-owner and then have a falling out, they can remove you as owner, as moderator and as a member of the group and then ban you. So as with creating moderators, caution should be exercised.
Yahoo will also send out a notice to the list member when you promote them to co-owner or moderator or demote them to moderator or member.
]]>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!)
]]>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.
]]>Go to the home page of each Yahoogroup you own.
Click the "Management" link (in the left-side navigation hyperlinks).
Under "Group Settings", click on "Messages".
In the "Posting and Archives" section, click the "Edit" link.
On the far right, under "SpamGuard", click the "Off" radio button.
Click the "Save Changes" button.
]]>PG Offline is designed more specifically for Yahoogroups, it's $15.00 shareware also with a 30 day trial. One listowner posted this on EL-M:
I believe you can control it but it will try to get each message from the beginning to the last, by default. Then, later, you can just retrieve "new" messages.
I discovered that it stores the full newslist as an access data base -- and you can export to that. Probably the biggest drawback so far that I've seen is that it just copies what was in the message -- including all the html. It would be nice if one could strip that out (optionally).
It has some statistics built and and was pretty fast for my 2,000 or so messages in one group. Shows how many times a particular user has sent a message.
So far, I'm reasonably pleased with it for an archive of messages (before Yahoo removes them.....)
Thanks to Linda Lawrie for that review.
]]>A list member talked about bad service from a company (relevant to the list's topic), when word got back to the company in question, rather than trying to correct the bad service, they sued the list member, the listowner and anyone who tried to help them pay their legal fees. In the end, the people who got sued had to settle simply because they couldn't afford the legal fees to continue to fight the suit. So the company won because they had deeper pockets, not because they were right.
In the USA, the First Amendment right to free speech only protects US citizens from the US Government trying to squelch our speech, it has no jurisidiction over businesses or other private individuals. Other countries have differing laws and protection (or lack of) for free speech. As listowners, we should try to be aware of our responsibilities and liabilities.
]]>You'll need to be familiar with scripts and/or Perl to get it working. For lists with archives set to members only, you will need to edit the scripts and enter your username and password and you should probably have some familiarity with working with scripts in general.
And if you're transferring a list from Yahoogroups to Smartgroups, here's a possibly helpful list at Smartgroups:
Be sure to read the Readme file, the group doesn't look to have been too active in 2003 (two messages) so I'm not sure if there's any help or support for this program.
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