[Mailman-Users] Mailman postings deferred by Yahoo

[Charles Marcus]

Stephen J. Turnbull, on 2/20/2008 7:32 PM, said the following:
> But the problem is that *Brian* (as an example) is an ISP whose
> reliability comes into question not because *his* customers use Yahoo,
> but because *his customers'* customers (subscribers, whatever) use
> Yahoo.  His customers are paying him money so that he takes care of
> the mail; they do not want to tell their customers to change their
> mail services.

I undertans, and believe me, I'm totally sympathetic... but I'm also
realistic.

There is nothing you can do to change Yahoos behavior, so my philosophy
is, just make my/your customers/clients aware of the problems when using
certain services/providers.

> Yahoo's customers are going to be disposed to believe that the
> problem is indeed elsewhere (the alternative is accepting their own
> responsibility for choosing a broken service, you see).

I do - but where I apparently differ with you is, I don't try to
encourage their illusions - in fact, I will do everything I can to
disabuse them of their illusions.

> So Brian (and other ISPs/hosting services like his) is caught in the
> middle.  He can't guarantee reliability because that depends on the
> customers' customer base, but reliability is what he takes pride in.

Again, I do understand the dilemma, I just choose not to make someone
else's problem my own.

Here is a canned email I send to our users once every few months:

Subject: Fyi: EMail is not always 100% reliable...

Hello,

Hopefully you already know this, but in case you didn't:

Hopefully you already know this, but in case you didn't:

There are any number of reasons that email can be delayed in transit. It
is even possible that a message will never arrive at its final
destination, and although under most circumstances you will get a bounce
notifying you of the problem, sometimes you will not. For this reason,
if you have some time-sensitive material or information that you are
sending to a client or vendor, send it to them, but FOLLOW-UP with a
phone call or something to make sure they got it.

In general, yes, if you send an email to someone, they will get it - but
it could be delayed in transit, it could get stopped by someone's
anti-spam or anti-virusm s/w (either running on their mail system's
server, or on their local machine), someone might accidentally delete
it without realizing it (it happens) - and it is even possible that a
mis-configured or otherwise malfunctioning server could lose your
message without generating a bounce.

So, if you are sending someone something that is time-sensitive and
money depends on it getting to its destination - FOLLOW-UP and make sure
it got there.

This is just common sense to me, but maybe you weren't aware that email
isn't always a 100% reliable communication medium.

-- 

Best regards,

Charles