Our old mail server just died. We tried to get it fixed/restored. After some attempt at that we ended up moving to a new server and list server. We are using MailMan for our new list server. The SmarterMail server we were using for lists was about 4 years old. A lot has changed with mailing list servers during those years. We should have taken the time to update it sooner but we thought it was working just fine.
When the old mail server died it was without warning. We had to scramble to fix it and after failed attempts we started researching and setting up a new mailing list sever. There was no way to warn everyone that the list was going to be moved to a new sever. Here is a more technical explanation for those who care to know more details. =================================== Several mail providers have changed how they accept email. This caused a lot of problems a couple years ago especially for mailing list servers and the deliver-ability of email from a mailing list. We had no idea so many people who had subscribed were not getting any emails form the old server. We had some people complain the during last couple years and our support team has worked hard to help get the mail working but many people simply couldn't get email from our lists. We now believe that number is about 1/3 of all subscribers never saw any email even though they had subscribed to the this mailing list. We had no idea that many had problems. The new DMARC rules and the digital signature PKI encryption have pretty much broken all mail servers. Mail Servers change email messages by adding headers or maybe footers to a message. They may change the subject line to add something like [LegacyUG]. Also the headers in the message that contain the deliverable address gets modified by list servers. All of this fiddling with an email is similar to what s p a m m e r s use. So, about 30% of all email providers won't allow emails form mailing lists through. The newer version of MailMan software that we moved to works a lot better but isn't perfect. It handles things better by trying to figure out the rules an email provider requires and MailMan has options to help improve the deliver-ability by follow those rules. So, the problem isn't that we just took the liberty of adding a bunch of people to a mailing list but rather over the last 3 or so years people have subscribed and but never got a confirmation and never received any email from the list. The list still had them as subscribers. I had backups of all the lists that were only about 2 days before the server crashed. These exact lists were imported to the new mailing list sever. Oh, what a relief or so we thought. Then the problems started. We figure that about 1/3 of everyone we just put on the new sever started getting emails for the first time ever from the list. Whoa, what's all this email all of a sudden. Then, as all of you have experienced the last couple days the "panic/frustration" mail started. It was one of our users Wendy Howard who is a moderator for several mailing lists over at RootsWeb (they use the same MailMan software we do) sent me an email and after talking with her discovered that we can turn on Emergency Moderation for a while which we did yesterday. The Emergency Moderation will help so we can all get back to actual Legacy questions and help. All of the non-Legacy related emails can be worked on off-list by the moderators who can help people get unsubscribed. It will probably take a while for the thousands who are now getting any emails for the first time ever to be assisted in getting unsubscribed. It's too bad those people never got to experience what this list is really all about. Users Helping Users. All of you are Awesome and there are so many good people here who give of their time to help others. Thanks to all of you. We are working as hard as we can to keep everyone happy. Thank you for your understanding and we hope this never happens again. Thanks, Ken McGinnis http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com <http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/>
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