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.
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