[email protected]

In a message dated 4/19/2003 5:42:56 AM Central Standard Time,
[email protected] writes:

> Sounds like an AOL problem.

Yes, I think you're right. Below is something someone posted to our local
list which addresses this issue. BTW, when I got up this morning and signed
on, I had Digest #3330 waiting for me, which means I missed 9 others!

Mary

* * *


Why does list mail come out of order or hours/days late or never appear at
all? Why do my AOL members not get all the list mail or digests? Why does it
take hours or days for list mail to get to my Hotmail or Yahoo email box
...?

Because AOL, MSN, Yahoo email, Hotmail, Earthlink, et al, are large email
providers. They get literally tons of email and they have to watch their
servers carefully because they can get overloaded. So they prioritize. They
give private email priority over group or list mail.


Yahoogroups is the largest email list provider (pay or free) and they send
out literally tons of mail. Large chunks of that mail go to the largest
email providers like AOL, MSN, Yahoo email, Hotmail, Earthlink, etc. Since
those large email providers give priority to private email, when their
servers are busy, they will refuse connections with Yahoogroups.


In other words, Yahoogroups tries to connect to them but their incoming mail
servers say no, try again later. So Yahoogroups holds the mail and waits,
tries again later until the email provider (AOL, MSN, Yahoo email, etc) will
accept the connection and receive the mail from Yahoogroups.


So that's why things come late and out of order. In addition, AOL has
admitted that they trash some email from Yahoogroups when their servers are
busy, so some Yahoogroups mail is lost and never delivered to AOL members.


This also applies to the confirmations sent by Yahoogroups to confirm your
email address or your subscription or unsubscription requests as well as
notices to listowners and moderators about pending posts or members.
Sometimes these confirmations and notifications take hours or days to get to
you or never show up at all.


If you really want to check things out, you can review the full headers of
delayed messages. The Received: lines at the top of the headers are the most
recent, the top one will be when your ISP or mail provider received it from
Yahoogroups. The Received: lines before that one are transfers between
internal Yahoogroups servers. So look at the time on the topmost Received
line and compare it to the time on the Received line just below that. Adjust
for time differences if necessary and if there's a big gap, it means
Yahoogroups was trying to contact your ISP or mail provider and couldn't get
thru, so they waited and tried again and again until they got thru.


In the case of AOL, it's also possible there's a delay after AOL received it
and before they delivered it to the AOLer's mail box as AOL has admitted
that they do sometimes accept mail from Yahoogroups and then hold it
somewhere in their system until their servers are not so busy and then
deliver it to the AOL member's mail box.


Sometimes an ISP or mail provider isn't reachable after hours or days or
trying to send mail and then Yahoogroups considers it a soft bounce. Some
Yahoogroups list owners that use Yahoo email have reported seeing a message
in their bounce history (go to My Preferences and click on Bounce History)
that says "Yahoo mail servers unreachable for too long". This means
Yahoogroups tried to send mail to them for a long period and finally gave
up. This may happen with any of the large ISPs or mail providers if they
experience temporary server problems and have to severely curtail their
incoming mail for a period of time until the servers are fixed and list mail
like Yahoogroups is always the first thing they restrict.




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