In February, there was some discussion on the Sightings list
about lost mail. The topic was
specifically about Yahoo routing list mail into a bulk mail folder, but the
problem is NOT only germane to Yahoo mail accounts.
All of the major ISPs are competing to have the best SPAM
filtering capabilities, that is, the service most able to get rid of annoying
SPAM. These SPAM filtering
capabilities are usually applauded by their customers, but they are causing all
sorts of problems for lists like this one.
We have had the most problems so far with AOL and
Yahoo. Both of these internet
providers depend on their customers collectively to define SPAM for them. What that means is that IF just 2
or 3 Yahoo customers mistakenly call our list messages SPAM, by simply clicking
the SPAM button, our list messages can become SPAM for every Yahoo subscriber.
And with 540 total Sightings subscribers, including 65 AOL,
40 Comcast, 48 Earthlink, and 50 Yahoo, you are going to be somewhat dependent
on others for the success of our list mail. With over 100 different Sightings posts each
month, the math is that over 5,000 separate Sightings messages get sent to
individual Yahoo subscribers by our list each month. A couple of errant clicks are easy to see with these
volumes.
Some of the internet providers recognize the problem, and
offer "white-lists" for good lists like Sightings, as opposed to the
bad lists that commercial Spammers use.
We have "white-list" status with both Yahoo and AOL, however
the experiences that other lists have with it are muddy.
Getting back to Yahoo specifically, these are the
recommended steps if you still see list mail appear in your bulk folder:
1) Enter the following email addresses as contacts in your
address book !!
sightings-admin@diabloaudubon.com
2) Specifically mark any messages in the bulk folder that
shouldn't be in the bulk folder as "Not Spam." The Yahoo helper people caution that
you may have to do this with several Sightings messages before your spam
filters will retrain themselves.
3) Consider resetting your personal SPAM filters as
explained here:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/plus/spamguardplus/spamguardplus-13.html
4) Lastly, you can filter list messages into a new folder by
following these instructions:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/mail/manage/manage-06.html
--Patrick King