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 reason why this happened is that our email server is configured to respect the wishes of persons who do not wish to receive our emails. This is, of course, exactly what an email server should do!
If you are in this situation, a first thing to realize is that this is not my fault. It is the fault of your email service provider (ESP). This is not a problem that I can fix. Only you can fix it.
What’s going on is that the ESP that you selected is wrongly bouncing our listserv postings as if they were spam (which of course they are not).
Our listserv hosting server then counts 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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- Step 1. 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.
- Step 2. 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 our IP address 159.198.40.90.
- Step 3. (Note that you should do step 3 only after you do step 2!) 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 Step 3, and fail to do Step 2, then this will probably simply happen again.
Your ESP might lie to you, trying to blame its bouncing behavior on something that it pretends is my fault. But I am doing everything right:
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- our listserv postings use a properly configured DKIM record;
- our listserv postings use a properly configured SPF record;
- our listserv postings use a properly configured DMARC record;
- our listserv postings use a properly configured PTR record;
- our server’s IP address is “clean”, meaning it is not on any “black hole lists”; and
- every one of our listserv postings has an “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the posting.