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Moderated Korean Studies Internet Discussion List


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Technical Problems Checklist (KS List)



RECEIVING Problems:

Case #1: I no longer receive any postings from the KS List.

The most common causes are:

(a) You are subscribed with one email address but then forward messages from that address to one of the popular free email services, such as Hotmail and Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo!, or GMX. Many such services apply very tight filters or do not accept forwarded messages that come from mass mailings like the KS List. Note that such a non-acceptance at these email services may occur sporadically—so you may well have received messages there before, but if you receive three or four on the same day, it may stop working. Solution: Do not forward KS List messages.

(b) Your own university or institution has many mail filters in place that you are likely not even aware of, and these do not allow incoming mass mailings, even if they once did. Note that there are several hundred mail filters in place on both the sending and the receiving email server BEFORE and WHEN a message is sent.

(c) It’s possible that these emails are going into your SPAM folder. Check your own SPAM folder and the SPAM filters on your computer. There are many possible causes why messages may have been held back by filters you set up yourself. If you have an option to do so, white-list the email address “koreanstudies@koreanstudies.com”.

(d) Though rare, it’s possible that the IP used by the domain “koreanstudies.com” may have been blacklisted on one of over 300 anti-SPAM lists and thus your receiving server now rejects list messages. The domain does use a dedicated IP, so this should not be possible. It has, however, happened more than once in recent years because subscribers who changed their mind simply hit the “Report SPAM” button in their Yahoo or Hotmail account instead of unsubscribing. Others forwarded list messages from their institutional email account to Hotmail or Yahoo, who then “internally” declared them to be SPAM (even without complaints). Such blacklisting problems occur from time to time with major free email services like Gmail or Hotmail, but far less often with email accounts on university or private servers.

Case #2: I receive messages, but do not see my own messages posted.

If your message appears in the list ARCHIVES, then other subscribers received that message in email. You may not have received it because of a setting in your own email application (possibly in conjunction with a setting in the list’s options for your account) that instructs the server not to send double postings (as you already have a copy of your own mail saved in your email program that was archived when you sent it to the moderation queue). That is not how it is supposed to work, but this is a common cause for such disappearing messages, and like other issues, this may happen sporadically but not with every message you post.

Case #3: Sporadic delivery failures … I receive most but not all list messages.

This is most likely caused by various mail filters. Caused by technical countermeasures to the growing SPAM activities internationally, sending and receiving emails has developed into a highly complex technical task these days. Now we even see ourselves forced to enable OUTGOING filters, since many big email services such as Outlook have begun to reject incoming mails from servers that have no such filters enabled. The OUTGOING filter, which actually consists of over 100 separate filters, assigns an auto-calculated “outgoing spam score.” If you look at the extended email header of a received message from the KS List, this shows as “X-OutGoing-Spam-Status” score. If this is above zero, then some email services consider it SPAM. There are many reasons this score would be bad and considered SPAM even though it comes from an academic discussion list: capitalized words in the email subject line, certain terms (often used by spammers) in the message body text, or if the message includes a long tail of messages posted in that thread by other posters, and these messages may then include many links (“link spamming”). This last case, which is also a violation of our own list policies, is evaluated especially negatively if the listed URLs link to blacklisted websites, and many government and media sites are actually blacklisted. There are many other possible causes for such negative evaluation of messages. It is best to post your own message and do not include all the other earlier posted messages in your own posting.

 

SENDING Problems:

Case #4: I posted a message, but it was rejected within seconds.

You are either not subscribed or you subscribed with a different email address than the one you used to post the message that was auto-rejected. Solution: Send posting requests to the list’s moderation queue (koreanstudies@koreanstudies.com) from the same email address you are subscribed with.

 

ARCHIVE Problems:

Case #5: My own message to the KS List was posted and shows just fine in my email inbox, but my message text was cut in the ARCHIVES; the archived message is empty.

This means you have HTML enabled in your email application. HTML and PHP are the most common script languages for websites, but some email applications (often Webmail clients) allow you to enable HTML to format your text. That, however, constitutes a very big security risk, which is the reason so many WordPress and Joomla websites get hacked. You can hide functional code in HTML (in fact, most websites include functional code), and once that HTML encoded message is in the ARCHIVES, then it works just like a regular website. It is already on the server, and if it contains hidden malicious code, then it is pretty easy to hack the server from there. HTML-encoded messages are therefore cut. Solution: Do not encode your messages with HTML.

Case #6: My own message to the KS List was sent out by email but does not show in the KS List ARCHIVES.

We have received such complaints, but this cannot really be the case. If the message was sent out, then it will show in the ARCHIVES. Maybe your web browser has caching enabled. Solution: At the specific ARCHIVES page where your message should appear, press your browser’s RELOAD button once or twice.

 


The »Moderated Korean Studies Internet Discussion List« has now over 2,500 subscribers; we can no longer discuss and investigate every single “non-receipt” case. If you are experiencing technical problems receiving or sending messages, please take the time to read through the above checklist. The KS List is being solely operated by the list owners, moderators, and technical advisor without any institutional or private funding. Also note that the software used, Mailman, does not allow us to edit incoming messages for posting; messages are reviewed but not edited in any way. Thank you.




 

 

  Please direct any questions to the list owners Min Paek (Independent Scholar) and Werner Sasse (Hamburg University, Emeritus).