Yahoo policies and Corgi-L unsubs

If you’ve been pointed at this post after being unsubscribed from Corgi-L:

  1. It wasn’t your fault.
  2. We believe we know why it happened, but it appears to be out of our hands.
  3. You can re-subscribe, HOWEVER I strongly suggest you switch to getting Corgi-L in DIGEST form.
  4. It wasn’t your fault. 🙂
  5. We’re investigating what can be done about it.

What follows is my attempt at a simple explanation for what turns out to be a complex problem. Not necessary to read or understand unless you just want a peek into how things work.

The initial problem is Yahoo.

It appears that Yahoo’s mail servers are telling the world:

If mail comes from a Yahoo email address, and if it’s NOT sent by a Yahoo mail server, then it’s probably spam

When mail is sent to a mailing list like Corgi-L it’s sent to all the list members by the Corgi-L server (TAMU, actually). So if someone using Yahoo sends a message to the list it’s FROM a yahoo address but it’s sent by TAMU.

So, mail servers have been instructed to consider that spam, whether or not it is.

This is causing grief all over the world of mailing lists. It’s completely out of our control, but we hope it’ll get addressed somehow, soon.

What’s not a problem: your mail service.

Your mail service – whatever it is – did the right thing. It paid attention to what Yahoo said.

Your mail service said “Hey, the sender is Yahoo, but the mail server its coming from is TAMU. Yahoo tells me I should treat that as spam, so …. BOUNCE, for policy reasons” (i.e. Yahoo’s stated policy on how to handle this).

Problem two: ListServ

When ListServ (the software we use to manage the mailing list) gets a bounce like that for a “policy reason” it apparently decides that it’s SO BAD it needs to unsubscribe you.

That’s just wrong. In my opinion, anyway.

As a result, you got unsubscribed.

A possible work-around

UNlike getting Corgi-L as individual emails, digests come “from” TAMU and shouldn’t be impacted by any of this.

So switching to digest might be a way to avoid this mess while we get things worked out.

We’re trying to stay on top of this, and appreciate your patience and understanding.