At 09:03 PM 12-08-02 +0000, you wrote:

>Dear Jason.
>
>Please if you could help. My messages just don't want to appear on
>the newsgroup.

Our Yahoo list is >>mirrored<< to the atkin news server. Every posting
goes to the Yahoo list before being copied to the NG. Thus, if you post a
message through the NG interface using an email address that is different
to the one you used when subscribing, Yahoo will bounce it back to the NG
server. NG servers usually have a "tolerance point" beyond which bouncing
email addresses will be added to a "block list".

Yahoo itself has a similar system that typically affects users who are
using free webmail or in-house mail gateways that impose quotas. If your
webmail server is set up to bounce your mail when your mailbox gets "full",
it will bounce all of your mail (i.e. including all messages broadcast from
the Yahoo list). After n bounces, it will put your Yahoo account on a
blacklist and refuse to either receive or send your messages. It won't be
reset until you go to your account (link from the list's main page on
Yahoo) and follow a procedure to do that yourself.

Most people who prefer to use the newsgroup interface set their Yahoo
account to "No email". This allows you to post messages but you won't
receive any in your mailbox.

Another dimension to your problem is that it appears the Atkin server was
down or misbehaving for a period over the weekend. It's an unattended
server providing a donated service to Firebird and IB users. It's possible
that Yahoo got too many soft bounces from the NG (which is just a
subscriber to the list) and imposed a soft blackout for a period. You get
hard bounces from full mailboxes, soft bounces when DNS succeeds but the
server isn't listening. In the case of soft bounces, the Yahoo robot will
retry 5 times in the succeeding 24 hours before giving up; and your
message will appear in the Yahoo list but will never reach the NG server.

As the moderator of this list (and a large number of others) I tend to get
pretty impatient with subscribers whose mail bounces frequently because
they neglected to empty their mailboxes. If I get complaint messages about
them from the bot, I unsubscribe them. Some lists won't even allow
freemail addresses to subscribe; but we have no control over this on the
Yahoo groups so people are expected to do the right thing. It's not like I
get >>paid<< to take care of this stuff...or even that I aspire to a career
in list moderating [grumble grumble]


regards,
Helen Borrie (TeamIBO Support)

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