In recent days, our email server for our listservs may have removed your email address from membership in one or another of the listservs. Assuming that you did not want this, what should you do?
The background is that some weeks ago, the hosting company (Namecheap) that hosts our listservs made an ill-advised policy change that forced OPLF (Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC) to migrate the listservs from one hosting system to another. This changed the IP address of the server.
(The new hosting system costs more money than the previous hosting system. I have set up a page explaining how to donate to help cover this cost.)
In recent days, many members of our listservs have found themselves to have been unsubscribed from one or another of the listservs. This happens because our server is configured to respect the wishes of persons who do not wish to receive emails. This is, of course, exactly what an email server should do!
If you are reading this posting, perhaps it is because you are one of the persons who has found yourself to have been unsubscribed from one or another of the listservs. And maybe you do not want this. What should you do?
If you are in this situation, then the problem is that you selected an email service provider (ESP) that behaved badly. Your ESP wrongly assumed that all emails from the new IP address must be spam. This was not, of course, because any emails from the new IP address actually were spam. They were not. The emails were listserv postings, exactly like before. But what had changed was the IP address from which the emails were being sent.
The result was your ESP bouncing dozens or hundreds of the emails.
Our listserv hosting server then counted up the bounced emails, and figured that it must be that you don’t want to receive the emails. So our listserv hosting server then sent you three individual email messages, over a period of several days, asking you if it is really true that you don’t want to receive the emails. Each email contained a link that you could click on to say that you do want to continue to receive the emails.
And it looks like you did not click on that link in any of the three emails.
This might, of course, be because your ESP bounced those three emails, just as it previously bounced dozens or hundreds of the listserv postings. Maybe you never saw those three emails.
What should you do now?
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- First, if you have not already done so, subscribe to my blog. My blog is on a different IP address from the listserv server and so your ESP might not be wrongly bouncing emails from my blog. This would permit you to receive updates like this one.
- Second, get on the telephone with your email service provider and have a very frank conversation about what your ESP has been doing. Tell your ESP to stop bouncing emails from the new IP address 159.198.40.90.
- Third, go to https://oppedahl-lists.com/mailman/listinfo and subscribe all over again to the listservs to which you wish to belong.
The problem is that if you only do the third thing, and fail to do the second thing, then this will probably simply happen again.