Re: [Harp-L] I'm losing my Harp-L

[Doug Essinger-Hileman <greypilgrim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 6/20/2014 5:42 AM, slyou65@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

> According to the few messages I have received lately from Harp-L I am on their list to have my membership deleted due to excessive bounces. Heck, I don't even know what that means!  So if my posts quit showing up my real-life friends won't think I've departed. Hopefully. <br/>Your membership in the mailing list Harp-L has been disabled due to<br/>excessive bounces The last bounce received from you was dated<br/>19-Jun-2014.  You will not get any more messages from this list until<br/>you re-enable your membership.  You will receive 7 more reminders like<br/>this before your membership in the list is deleted.<br/><br/>To re-enable your membership, you can simply respond to this message<br/>(leaving the Subject: line intact), or visit the confirmation page at<br/><br/>    http://harp-l.org/mailman/confirm/harp-l/1d46d6b7d748096ba1b0a596d81badfaf2e4f6a9<br/><br/><br/>You can also visit your membership page at<br/><br/>
>   http://harp-l.org/mailman/options/harp-l/slyou65%40yahoo.com<br/><br/>On your membership page, you can change various delivery options such<br/>as your email address and whether you get digests or not.  As a<br/>reminder, your membership password is<br/><br/>    l<br/><br/>If you have any questions or problems, you can contact the list owner<br/>at<br/><br/>    harp-l-owner@xxxxxxxxxx<br/><br/>

I hope that the owner will permit me this "administrative" comment. I am 
not an owner or moderator on this list, but I co-own and co-manage 
another international mailing list, and have been struggling with this 
problem.

I suspect the problem, slyou65, is that you are posting from a yahoo.com 
address. This issue pertains email from a number of other domains, most 
notably aol.com.

Without getting into the technical difficulties, there is a system of 
authenticating the sender of an email called DMARC. Yahoo (and then AOL 
and several other ISPs) decided in early April to change their DMARC 
settings. (Here is a brief summary: 
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/04/09/2047205/yahoo-dmarc-implementation-breaks-most-mailing-lists.) 
The way most mailing lists work, these ISPs will now bounce back any 
mail sent to a list from someone using their email service. And many 
mailing lists -- it appears that harp-l is one of them -- have a setting 
enabled which automatically disables, or even removes, subscribers who 
are generating a lot of bounces.

[To those who are not familiar with the workings of mailing lists, this 
setting might seem draconian. But if a mailing list generates too many 
bounces, it will get blacklisted, and that endangers the existence of 
the list. The alternative is to manually monitor the bounces and then 
manually change settings and contact effected subscribers; that can be 
overwhelming for many list admins.]

To date, the only fixes are workarounds, and they are klunky at best, 
and downright awful at worst.

Thus, my counsel to anyone using an email address on the yahoo.com or 
aol.com services is to get a different email address to use with this 
mailing list. That will save your subscription from being disabled and 
will save the list admins a lot of headaches. Considering that there are 
free addresses available from Google (@gmail.com) and Microsoft 
(@outlook.com) that are not effected by this problem (and from any 
number of other services, but I cannot confirm that they will resolve 
this issue), it is a pretty simple step to take.

Doug