bounces/disabled accounts

I will suggest here that, for anybody who carries a free mail account
like Yahoo or Hotmail, most if not all accounts like this only provide a
certain (small) amount of their own disk space for you to keep your
e-mails stored. If people are viewing their e-mail through their
browser, they need to routinely go through their accounts and actually
delete files or download them to their computer then delete them at the
account location.

Some of the free accounts may not let you download your e-mail, but,
otherwise, if you can get a program like Thunderbird or Eudora and set
it up to download your incoming e-mails from the free service, there
will be an option in Thunderbird or Eudora (Macs have built in software
with a very original name, Mail) to also leave the e-mail on the server
or delete it automatically once downloaded. Select the option to delete
it on the server automatically once downloaded to your computer. This
will keep your Yahoo or similar account from bloating with e-mails
you've already read and maybe forgotten about. I get bounces back,
especially from customer accounts who use Yahoo, with a message letting
me know their mailbox is full and they will not receive the message.

Mr. Kelly M. Irvin
10850 Hodge Ln
Gravette, AR 72736
USA
479-787-9958
USDA Cold Hardiness Zone 6a/b

mailto:kelly@irvincentral.com
http://www.irvincentral.com/

Mary Sue Ittner wrote:

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

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