[Coral-List] yahoo/hotmail subscribers auto-disabled again

[Mike Jankulak]

It's been brought to our attention that a large number of our yahoo and
hotmail subscribers have had their subscriptions automatically disabled
again. I think this is the third such event since yahoo adopted its
community-unfriendly (opinions in this message are strictly mine and do
not reflect any official view of my employers or the US government!)
policies last year.

Basically yahoo's policy is that if the From: line has a yahoo email
address but the message does not originate from a yahoo-controlled
server then it is fraud.  Coral-List messages retain the original
poster's From: line but come from our mailserver which leads yahoo to
bounces messages back to us if the poster has a yahoo address.
Furthermore, some other big email providers (like hotmail.com, live.com,
msn.com, outlook.com, and a few others) have choosen to honor yahoo's
policies so they too will bounce yahoo postings back to us.

Bounces are automatically processed by our mailing list software. If it
gets ten bounces, your subscription is auto-disabled and you get
something like five warning emails to that effect over the subsequent
weeks. If your email stops bouncing for long enough before you reach the
magic count of 10 then your bounce count resets to 0 again.

So it comes down to a question of timing: whenever we get a flurry of
yahoo-originating posts there is a danger that several hundred
coral-list subscribers could be auto-disabled. In the April 18th event
this affected 673 of our subscribers.  I have now manually re-enabled
those subscriptions.

It's also worth mentioning that if you post from a yahoo address, your
post will not reach hundreds of our subscribers, regardless of whether
the specific timing leads to a mass-disabling. Your yahoo-originating
post will NEVER reach a large proportion of coral-listers.

What should you do about this?

Maybe nothing. For now we can manage this problem manually, and our
online archives are not affected, so even if people miss part of a
discussion they can always catch up via our web site:

http://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/pipermail/coral-list/

Or if you want to improve your coral-list reception and reach all of our
subscribers with your posts, consider switching to a free email provider
that does not honor yahoo's fraud policies. As of this writing gmail
(google mail) is known to be free of these problems.

For your reference my previous messages on this subject can be found in
our archives here:

http://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/pipermail/coral-list/2014-October/014707.html
http://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/pipermail/coral-list/2014-June/014337.html
http://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/pipermail/coral-list/2014-June/014330.html

Please contact us at <coral-list-owner at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> if you have
any questions about what I've said here or if you'd like to talk more
about moving your subscription to a different email address.

regards,
Mike J+, coral-list mod team