(Updated November 25, 2023 to recognize that if your email service provider is bouncing the normal listserv postings, your email service provider may also have bounced the warning message that was sent to you about your email service provider bouncing the normal listserv postings.)
In recent days, dozens of members of our intellectual property listservs have received (or at least have been sent) email warnings that start like this:
Your membership in the mailing list <blah> has been disabled due to excessive bounces. The last bounce received from you was dated <recent date>. You will not get any more messages from this list until you re-enable your membership. You will receive 2 more reminders like this before your membership in the list is deleted.
If you received such an email warning, this is because (a) you belong to one or more of our listservs, and (b) you selected Microsoft (outlook) to be your email service provider. But of course another possibility is that you did not receive this warning email message, because your email service provider bounced the warning email message too. What should you do next?
The email warning invites you to “re-enable” your membership. But if you do that and nothing else, probably you will still end up with your membership getting “deleted”.
The problem is your email service provider, Microsoft. Microsoft is wrongly bouncing the listserv postings that you are supposed to receive. According to Microsoft’s own Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer, there is nothing wrong with the listserv postings that our server tries to send to you. But Microsoft is bouncing the listserv postings anyway.
And of course what may also be going on is that your email service provider, Microsoft, likewise bounced your warning messages about the excessive bounces.
What you need to do is:
-
- Complain directly to Microsoft about its behavior. Feel free to mention that our listserv postings have properly configured DKIM and SPF and PTR records.
- Whitelist our listserv domain (oppedahl-lists.com) in your email system.
- Whitelist our listserv IP address (66.29.132.148) in your email system.
- Whitelist our firm domain (oppedahl.com) in your email system.
- Whitelist our firm domain IP address (63.250.38.181) in your email system.
- Did I mention that you should complain directly to Microsoft about its behavior?
- After carrying out these things, do the “re-enable” task described in the email warning.
You can read more about this problem in Microsoft’s behavior, and more about how to do whitelisting, here.