Dear NabLers,

Those of you with Yahoo, AOL, AT&T, Hotmail, MSN, and related accounts may be wondering why you received a deletion notice from the UCSB Listserver.  I have reinstated all those who subscribed after 2006; unfortunately, my records do not go back farther than that. I tried not to reinstate anyone who had left the list deliberately. 

It's worth everyone's time to understand something of what was going wrong.  The problem turns out to have been caused  by a change in the way Yahoo and AOL treat their incoming emails, on April 24 of this year.  Basically, their spam filtering was tightened such that any "Yahoo.com" email that was received by any of the above-listed email clients, if it had been resent by a Listserver, was bounced back to the Listserver as if it was spam. This means that if you have one of these accounts, you are missing list postings from anyone with a Yahoo account, going back to April 24, because your email host is bouncing them.  The List was configured so that if a subscriber's email account bounced 200 messages to listserv@ucsb.edu, it would be deleted.  This seems to be what happened on July 10.

More technical details are pasted below.  There is a software patch for this problem, but as far as I know, UCSB IT folks have not applied it yet. I hope they will soon.  In the mean time, we will have to change the way we post messages from subscribers with Yahoo accounts (and possibly AOL & Hotmail), always forwarding them, rather than clicking their approval and preserving the poster's return address.  At times, these extra steps will slow down list functionality. 

If anyone who was removed is reading this in the archive, it is now safe to re-subscribe.  If I re-subscribed anyone who did not want a subscription, I apologize; please follow the "manage subscriptions" link, below, to re-unsubscribe.  I thank you for your patience.

I'm re-opening the forum for submissions now.

Best wishes,

Stephen Blackwell










Listserv Yahoo/AOL DMARC issue

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Problem:

On April 4th, 2014 Yahoo updated the DMARC  record with "p=reject" for the "yahoo.com" domain. This was done to proactively by Yahoo to protect their users from increasing email spam that uses Yahoo email addresses from other mail servers.  On April 22nd AOL similarly updated it's DMARC record with "p=reject" for the "aol.com"

All DMARC compliant mail receivers (including Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail) are now bouncing emails sent as "@yahoo.com"  and "@aol.com" addresses that aren't sent through Yahoo servers or AOL servers. Any messages without a proper Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) signature or Sender Policy Framework (SPF) alignment will be rejected.

How this impacts Listserv:

A subscriber/list member from *@yahoo.com or *@aol.com posts a message (or a replies to a message) to your list.  This will go to some subscribers, but will NOT go to subscribers/list members at yahoo.com.  Messages to this domain will not only not be delivered but will be bounced/refused as if the recipients at those domains do not exist.  Thus, after a few such messages, your subscribers/list members at all of those problematic domains are at risk to be auto-deleted from your list(s).

Resolution:

At this point there is no easy resolution to this issue.  L-Soft (the vendor that created Listserv) is working on a patch to correct the issue, but it won't be available soon, as it will be a server upgrade, so it has to be tested before it's released.

Immediate solutions:

For now, you must prevent subscribers/list members from *@yahoo.com or *@aol.com addresses from posting any 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.

The LISTSERV command is:   QUIET SET listname NOPOST FOR *@yahoo.com* or QUIET SET listname NOPOST FOR *@aol.com*

Send a message to your list explaining the issue and what action members from *@yahoo.com and *@aol.com addresses will need to take to continue to participate in the list. (Basically, get a new email address.)

ALTERNATIVE:  You can set all members from *@yahoo.com and *@aol.com addresses to REVIEW status.  This means their messages will come to a moderator/editor of your list.  The moderator/editor can then forward/repost the message so that it comes from their own address, not from the *@yahoo.com or *@aol.com address that originally posted the message.  If your list has no moderator/editor the list owner will receive the message.  This can be a lot of work and for some lists the traffic is simply too great for this to be a viable option.

The LISTSERV command is:    QUIET SET listname REVIEW FOR *@yahoo.com* or QUIET SET listname REVIEW FOR *@aol.com*


These commands can be issued from the Listserv web site by navigating to List Management > LISTSERV Command, type in the "Command:" field, then click the "Enter Command" button.

Other actions you can consider:

Create a filter for yahoo accounts, which prevent posted messages, and new subscribers from posting messages or joining your list.

List configuration setting:    Filter= also, *@yahoo.com* or Filter= also, *@aol.com*


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