Why is my email bouncing?

Submitted by Sarah Gonzales on October 2, 2005 - 11:15am. ::

When you send email to any of our mailing lists, you may receive a message back indicating that your message did not post and "bounced". There are several reasons this could occur, however, the most common problems are mentioned below. Rest assured that the PAA list moderators will get in touch with you if there are problems and they will respond to these requests as quickly as possible.

Q1:
Your mailbox may be full and not accepting email. Particularly if you use AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail or any other free email service, keep in mind that you have a mailbox quota. Once your mailbox is full, email is no longer delivered to your address and a returned message gets sent back to our mailing list administrators. Mailman will keep trying for a period of time to send email, but if after 10 tries, it still fails, Mailman will automatically disable your account from reception of mail. This is the most common problem.

Solution: it's time to delete some mail or increase your disk space (quota).  

Q2:
What does it mean when I see the message that my post is held because "message has implicit destination". How do I avoid this?

Solution: The list address must be explicitly specified. Mailman lists can not be blind carbon copied (i.e. the list address can not be in the bcc: field). In order to avoid this message, you need to specify the list address in the to: or cc: fields.

Q3:
Do I have to subscribe to the mailing lists in order to send email to the lists?

Solution: Yes. We do this to eliminate spam as much as possible. If you wish to send email to a list, please subscribe to that list. You can subscribe to any of our mailing lists here.  

Q4:
My message was rejected and I received this message - Reason: Message body is too big: XXXXX bytes with a limit of 30 KB

Solution: Email is a wonderful thing allowing individuals to forward documents / images, etc... in the form of attachments. However, please consider that we may have several hundred people on a single mailing list. Forwarding documents that are large in size can flood our lists. Attachments are also the typical mechanism that spreads viruses from one computer to another. For that reason, the PAA web administrators have set the allowable attachment size to be very small. That doesn't mean that your message won't be approved, it simply means that messages with attachments over a certain size will be reviewed by the web admins prior to posting. If the attachment is indeed too large, your message will be rejected and a suitable note will be attached indicating why your posting was rejected.