I believe there are many reasons for bounces. Generally the bounce messages
gives a clue. Sometimes it says that the mailbox is full. Sometimes the
message says there is no such person (perhaps that person has changed
emails and not changed the list subscription). Sometimes there is a
message indicating the message may have triggered a spam service to block
the sender. Sometimes there is a message indicating the content of the
message was not acceptable. Sometimes there is a message that something
isn't working temporarily and the message is delayed and may be delivered
later.
PBS list administrators don't get these bounce messages until at least five
messages have bounced and then the mailman program that is used for our
list disables that subscriber so that messages do not continue to bounce.
We get the disabling bounce message only. Afterwards periodically a message
goes out to the person who is now set not to get any pbs mail telling them
to reenable their pbs list account. If a certain number of those messages
bounce, the person is unsubscribed from the list. Tsuh Yang included the
message that gets sent out. When some of the Yahoo subscribers were
disabled the first time, some people reenabled their subscriptions right
away. Others didn't so eventually I reenabled the rest of them, but if this
is a continuing problem with Yahoo another solution needs to be found. This
was more of a problem for people getting individual messages than for
digest subscribers so perhaps changing to digest would work.
If you are going to be away and have one of those limited storage email
systems that Ken was talking about (not everyone has a limit) it is a good
idea to set yourself to nomail before you leave and just check the archives
when you get back to see if you missed anything. In this case I believe the
problem is Yahoo, not the individuals not clearing their accounts. And I'm
not convinced it has anything to do with the content of the messages.
The Yahoo messages that have been bouncing have this message:
delivery temporarily suspended: host
f.mx.mail.yahoo.com[68.142.202.247] refused to talk to me: 421 4.7.0
[TS01]
Messages from 152.46.7.112 temporarily deferred due to user complaints -
4.16.55.1; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts01.html
This indicates to me that yahoo is targeting either our list or perhaps
ibiblio for some undisclosed complaint. If anyone in our group knows how to
sort it out please speak up. I've asked the Yahoo users to check with Yahoo
or to get a gmail.com alternate email to use for the list.
Diane Whitehead, another list administrator, who also is a list
administrator for the Medit-List, says they are getting bounces from Yahoo
on that list too with the same message.
Mary Sue