Listowners-L Archives

Archiver > Listowners > 1998-12 > 0913297153


From: "Mike and Christi Brogan" <>
Subject: Word of warning for possible problems
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 07:39:13 -0600


Hi all,

Just wanted to share something that has occurred with one of my lists and
might help any of you who have the same problem. Due to the
sofisticatedness (is that a real word???) of todays email software, the
different spam filters some of us and our subscribers use, and the
combination of the two, this diagnosis has come in trial and error. Here's
the story:

I received an email from a list member of one of my mailing lists saying
that he couldn't figure out why:
1. I wouldn't respond to his emails
2. He wasn't receiving any mail from the list
3. HTML wasn't accepted on the lists

Now, 3. was easy to explain. But 1 and 2 were a different story. I showed
him as a subscriber to the digest version of the list, and knew that he
should have been receiving some mail, but I was more puzzled about 1. I am
not always prompt in my responses to other email, but my listowner email is
different. If I receive a message from a subscriber, I automatically handle
it immediately. So, I knew that either he was lying or I hadn't received
the message. I wrote to him and asked how many times he had tried to
contact me and he said three. Now that's just to many for my ISP to have
"mis-routed" so I asked him to resend one of his previous emails and that I
would try and figure out what was happening. He did and I waited and waited
but never received it (or so I thought) Then I remembered something that
had happened in the past with my email program. Now, keep in mind that I
use Outlook 98 and do have the spam filters and "Adult filters" enabled
which means I don't see most of the "stuff" that gets sent to me. It goes
straight into the deleted message file. So, I got to thinking that in the
past when I was retrieving something I accidently deleted from my mail from
the deleted mail folder I had noticied some of the mail that had not been
read was not "spam", so I thought I'd go and look. Now, I don't know what
is in his email that triggered the filter, but lo and behold, it was in the
trash file. So, noting that it had happened with his email to me, I asked
him to check his deleted mail folder and the same had occurred with him. He
was using Eudora, so it's not just an Outlook thing.

Moral of the story is: Always check through your deleted file before
purging... you never know what you're gonna find. And if you have a
subscriber who "isn't receiving mail" and is subscribed, this might be what
is happening to them!

Christi Brogan
San Antonio, TX
Rootsweb Listowner: Barton, Brogan, Burlingame, Calvert, Dunn, Perley,
Whitmer and Voss
http://www.txdirect.net/users/broga

This thread: