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Friday, July 4, 2014

 

Listserv changes due to ISP changes

In April major Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) Yahoo and AOL made changes in how they handle incoming mail. This change is totally outside of mail providers control.

In the past, it was okay to have your ‘from address’ (the member sending the message) be different than the sender server address (our listserve servers).  This is how our listserves were configured.  Under the new policies, these messages are now blocked by AOL and Yahoo.

The purpose of the change was to reduce the volume of a kind of spam called "spoofed mail".  Spoofed mail is email that has a "From" address that is not the same as the actual sender of the message.  Spoofed email is often (but not always) spam email.

AOL and Yahoo changed their systems to reject spoofed mail that claims to be from Yahoo or AOL but isn’t.  Other major mail services are following AOL and Yahoo's practice, include:

  • Google (Gmail and Google hosted domains)
  • Microsoft (Hotmail, Outlook, Live, and Microsoft hosted services)
  • Comcast

As you can see this effects the majority of us.

How to prevent a problem

Your listserv must be set up so the TO and FROM are the list address. Going forward, you will no longer see the sender’s email address, but will replace it with the listserve email address.  This allows both the ‘from address’ and the sending server address to be the same and will deliver messages from AOL and Yahoo accounts.

However, in the past if you click reply it would go to just the sender.  Now, since the sender email address has been replaced with the list email address, the message will be SENT TO THE ENTIRE LIST.  If you want to reply to just the sender, you should get their email address from their signature and FORWARD the message. For this reason, you should always include a signature in your messages to the list so people can respond directly to you.

The other option you have is to prevent subscribers/list members from *@yahoo.com or *@aol.com addresses from posting messages to your list.  They simply cannot participate in your list if they send from a *@yahoo.com or *@aol.com address.  They can receive and read messages from other subscribers/list members and they can send from another address, if they have one.

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Categories: Technology

Tags: Listserv Email