We've had reports that some Yahoo! Groups members with Hotmail and MSN
mail accounts have been bouncing since approximately December 29,
2006. The error message many of you are reporting is "550 Command
rejected for policy reasons."

We are working with our contacts on the Hotmail team to understand why
this occurred and will let you know when the problem has been
resolved. We appreciate your patience and we apologize for the
inconvenience this has caused.

We also want to acknowledge an outage the U.S. and International
Groups sites experienced early today (Pacific time). Users who
attempted to access their groups on the Web experienced timeouts on
their browsers between the hours of 12:45 a.m. and 2:15 a.m. Pacific.
This issue has been resolved and we are investigating solutions to
prevent similar outages in the future.

— Carole McManus
Community Manager

Yahoo! Groups will undergo scheduled maintenance on Monday, January
15, 2007, at 9 p.m. (Pacific time).  We expect a brief service
interruption.

Some users may not be able to access http://groups.yahoo.com for a 20
to 30 minute period from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. (Pacific time). Any groups
messages sent at that time will be delivered after 11 p.m.

We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause you and your
members. Scheduled maintenance keeps our servers running smoothly so
your groups can run smoothly. We appreciate your patience during this
downtime.

— The Yahoo! Groups Team

This message has also been posted on the Yahoo! Groups Team blog
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team , your source for the latest
news and updates for Yahoo! Groups owners and moderators.

Due to a database-related issue earlier today, we are experiencing a
Groups email backlog. Delivery of messages posted between 7 a.m. and 4
p.m. (Pacific time) today, January 25, may be delayed several hours.

Messages posted now are being processed through our backup mail
servers, so they will be delivered immediately.  While our primary
servers catch up, Groups users may see messages that were posted
earlier today delivered out of order.

We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause you and your group
members.

The Yahoo! Groups Team

This message has also been posted on the Yahoo! Groups Team blog
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team , your source for the latest
news and updates for Yahoo! Groups owners and moderators.

Yahoo! Groups will undergo scheduled maintenance from about 10 p.m. to
4 a.m. (Pacific time) Thursday, February 15
(http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html ). Access to web
messages and email may be delayed during this time. Check the Yahoo!
Groups Team Blog for English-language updates:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team.

We appreciate your patience during this maintenance. Regular upkeep of
our servers keeps Yahoo! Groups running smoothly for us all.

— The Yahoo! Groups Team

We want to acknowledge the reports that not all groups are receiving
email. Some of these groups are seeing the posts on their group
archive on the Web, but not receiving them via email. This problem has
been difficult to diagnose, since it is affecting some groups but not
others.

Our engineers have been investigating the root cause since we became
aware of the problem last night. We will continue to work on this and
will keep you updated via the Groups Team Blog:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team .

In the meantime, we appreciate your patience and apologize for the
inconvenience.

The Yahoo! Groups Team

From February 28 about 2:30 p.m. (Pacific time) until March 1 about
11:15 a.m. (Pacific time) (http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/),
some members of some groups were not receiving email. Some members of
some of these groups were able to see the posts on their group archive
on the Web, but were not receiving them via email. Groups mail
delivery is back to normal as of about 11:15 a.m. (Pacific time). We
now have more information about what caused this.

While we were working on an improvement to our email delivery systems,
email delivery was inadvertently suspended for some members of some
groups. This problem did not affect all Groups users. Unfortunately,
while messages posted to affected groups during this time were saved
to group archives, the messages cannot now be delivered via email. If
your group's archives are open to your members (more
info about Archive settings:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/groups/messages/messages-16.html), your members
can access the undelivered messages via the Web. If your group's archives are
not open to your members, you may want to suggest that your members resend any
messages they had sent between yesterday afternoon and this morning, if they
want to ensure that all members of the group receive them.

Yesterday's work was part of our ongoing efforts to improve the
performance of Yahoo! Groups and was not supposed to involve any
downtime for users. The delivery glitch was the result of human error,
and because it only affected some members of some groups, it delayed
both our awareness of the problem and our efforts to resolve it. We
sincerely regret the inconvenience it may have caused.

The Yahoo! Groups Team

We've had reports that some users with Gmail accounts have not been
receiving Groups mail since approximately March 14, 2007.  This was a
difficult issue to diagnose, because we were able to replicate the
issue with some, but not all, of our test Gmail accounts. Some of us
were missing Groups messages in our Gmail accounts, some of us were
receiving them as usual. We appreciate those of you who wrote in
detail about the problems your members were having on the Groups
Technical Issues board and in email to Customer Care.  Having detailed
information helps us get to the bottom of issues faster.

The problem appears to be on Gmail's end. We have gotten in touch with
the Gmail team and are working to resolve this issue. We'll post an
update when this has been resolved.

We've posted further information about email delivery on the Yahoo!
Groups Team Blog: http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team?p=3094

Carole McManus
Community Manager

We sincerely apologize for the mail delivery bug that caused many
group members to receive multiple copies of group mail. This bug was
introduced when we were working to increase mail delivery speed (one
of our biggest user requests).

We pushed a fix at midnight March 29 (Pacific time), but unfortunately
at that point a backlog of mail was still being delivered. We're
confident that the bug is fixed on our end— however some ISPs may
still be delivering backlogged mail to some users.  We're monitoring
your comments and appreciate you letting us know your group's status
on the Groups Team Blog: http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team

The Groups product team has also posted a response to user feedback
regarding IFrames and group description in the latest blog entry.

We appreciate your patience and again we're very sorry for the
inconvenience.

-- The Yahoo! Groups Team

Yahoo!Groups is being affected by a network connectivity issue that is
affecting a number of Yahoo! properties. This issue is not specific to
Groups. We are working with the Yahoo! Network Operations team to
resolve the problem, which began Friday April 27, at approximately
8:00 a.m. Pacific (http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/).

We do not have an estimate of when this will be resolved. We will keep
you updated via the Groups team blog:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team

Yahoo! Groups will undergo scheduled maintenance from about 9 p.m. to
10 p.m. (Pacific time) Thursday, July 19
(http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html ). Access to web
messages and email may be delayed during this time.

We appreciate your patience during this maintenance. Regular upkeep of
our servers keeps Yahoo! Groups running smoothly for us all.

— The Yahoo! Groups Team

As of 8/21 5:30 pm PDT: The system failure that was causing message
delivery delays has been corrected. While our engineers have
identified and corrected the root cause of this issue on the Yahoo!
Groups side, you may still continue to receive messages from your ISP
over the next few days. We appreciate your patience as we worked
toward resolution and are sincerely sorry for any inconvenience this
has caused. We've taken measures to avoid a recurrence of this issue
in the future.

For more details on this issue, please visit the Groups team blog:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team

Thank you,
Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager

We're aware some groups are currently experiencing technical issues.
The engineering team has identfied the problem and we are currently in
recovery mode. Some groups may continue to experience message delays
or error messages over the next three hours. If it looks like this
issue will persist longer than that, we'll post an update to the
Groups Team blog: http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team

Thank you for your patience,
Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager

In the coming week we will be making some changes to yg-alerts. Not
only will you be able to get email notifications with useful Yahoo!
Groups information and news, but you'll also find valuable groups
resources.

We are planning to transform YG-Alerts into the *new and improved*
Moderator Central. What this means is that we are going to recreate
what you know as Moderator Central on the Groups platform. You will
find all the same resources currently found on Moderator Central
(http://moderators.groups.yahoo.com/)such as the message boards, the
new moderator tours, the Groups team blog, as well as all other
channels that currently exist to exchange ideas and help each other.

This change will make it easier for us to update and refresh content
on a regular basis in attempt to delivery more relevant information
to all of you. It will also provide us with a channel to communicate
directly with Groups Moderators through the email notifications sent
out from this group.

If you only want to receive alerts for issues affecting users and
site downtime you can edit your membership preferences to message
delivery of special notices only.

I'll send additional details out shortly.

Thanks!
Jami Heldt
Community Manager

The Yahoo! Groups Team is hosting our first-ever Groups Moderator Town Hall next
month. It's happening Tuesday, October 9th from 6–9 p.m. at the Yahoo! Campus
in Sunnyvale.

If you live in the Bay Area, and own or moderate an active group with at least
50 members and want to learn more, please visit the Groups team blog for more
details:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-nNIST_woRKGLBc4JxGgUEhtmZ_EL?p=6941

Thanks!
Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager

We're aware that some users in some groups are experiencing issues with delivery
of daily digests.  We are currently investigating the problem and hope to
resolve this issue as quickly as possible.


Thank you for your patience,
Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager

We believe that we have fixed the digest problem and that the groups that have
been affected (~20%) should begin to receive digest normally starting tomorrow.
But we will be monitoring over the weekend to be sure. Our apologies for the
inconvenience to digest users, and we thank you for your patience.

- Yahoo! Groups Team

--- Jami wrote:
>
> We're aware that some users in some groups are experiencing issues with
delivery of daily digests.  We are currently investigating the problem and hope
to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.
>
>
> Thank you for your patience,
> Jami Heldt
> Groups Community Manager
>

Email delivery times are a bit like the tires on your car. You usually only
think about them when something goes wrong.

I say this because I'm guessing most folks may not have noticed anything about a
change in the delivery speed of email sent through Yahoo! Groups. But thanks to
the hard work of the back-end engineers and the Operations team, there has
indeed been a change -- a positive one!

Read the full story on the Groups team blog:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-nNIST_woRKGLBc4JxGgUEhtmZ_EL?p=7315

- Yahoo! Groups Team

It’s my pleasure to re-introduce Moderator Central. This site was created for
new and experienced moderators to stay looped in on the latest and greatest
Yahoo! Groups news and provide a channel for moderators to connect with one
another to ask questions, share advice, collaborate, and find resources.

Some of the tools Moderator Central offers to help you share and collaborate
with other moderators include:

Message Boards the place for new moderators to ask for advice about setting up
their group, for more experienced moderators to discuss tips on member
recruitment and managing group dynamics, or to stay up to speed on technical
issues, common challenges, and workarounds. These public forums are in a
threaded message format, so they are easy to follow and search. You can even
subscribe to an RSS feed or Alert so you don't miss a thing.

Getting Started makes it easy to start your group off on the right foot. Take
our tours and learn more about creating your group and building your membership.

Yahoo! Groups Suggestion Board allows users to submit product suggestions to the
Yahoo! Groups team and vote and comment on the contributions they feel are most
valuable and relevant.

Yahoo! Answers about Yahoo! Groups are displayed on the Moderator Central home
page, making it easy to share your expertise and recognize the contributions of
others by voting and rating their contributions.

Some new things you’ll find on Moderator Central are the Best of Yahoo!
Groups, where we shine the spotlight on some of Yahoo! Group’s finest. You can
also find the Groups Podcast, where we’ll highlight a fun Groups related topic
to share with you on a monthly basis. In addition to these new features, we will
have the ability to refresh content regularly to make it more relevant & timely
for you.  So take some time to look around and let us know what you think and
let us know what you’d like to see by commenting on the Groups team blog:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-nNIST_woRKGLBc4JxGgUEhtmZ_EL?p=7362

Thanks!
Jami Heldt
Community Manager

On October 9th over 135 group moderators from the Bay Area joined the Yahoo!
Groups team for its first ever Groups Moderator Town Hall at the Yahoo! campus
in Sunnyvale. Our goal with this type of event is to provide moderators with an
opportunity to engage with the Yahoo! Groups team as well as one other.

To read more and to learn where our next Groups Moderator Town Hall will be,
please visit the Groups Team blog:

http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=51470/*http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-nNIST_woRKGLBc4\
JxGgUEhtmZ_EL?p=7386

Thanks!
Jami
Groups Community Manager

Apologies for not posting to the blog about this issue earlier, but we do want
to let folks know that we're aware of the problem with Yahoo! Mail mistakenly
diverting some messages from Yahoo! Groups to the Yahoo! Mail spam or bulk
folder.

The Mail team has just tonight pushed a fix to the problem, but they're not yet
sure if the fix will address the problem completely or only partially. So if
you're still finding messages from Groups sent Wednesday (10/24) or later being
wrongly diverted to your Spam or Bulk Mail folder, please let our Customer Care
team know:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/yahoogroups/general.html

It will help us solve the problem more quickly.

Thank you,

- Yahoo! Groups Team

The Yahoo! Groups Team is hosting a Groups Moderator Town Hall next Tuesday,
November 6th from 6–9 PM at the Westin Bonaventure in downtown Los Angeles.

If you live in the Los Angeles Area, and own or moderate an active group and
want to learn more, please send an email with a link to your group to:
communityevents@....

Thanks!
Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager

In reviewing suggestions on the Groups Suggestions Board this evening I read a
comment left by a long time moderator indicating that they weren’t certain how
to share their feedback with the Groups team.

Are you uncertain how and where you can share your suggestions with the Groups
team?
To learn more, visit the Groups Team Blog:
http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=51470/*http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-nNIST_woRKGLBc4\
JxGgUEhtmZ_EL?p=7806

Jami Heldt
Community Manager

Below are known issues that may be affecting some Groups users:

Hotmail Update: Good News & Bad News (current forecast: scattered showers)

The Good News

Hotmail used to reject some messages sent from Yahoo! Groups because they
exceeded 15 "hops" (the default limit set on Exchange Server to prevent mail
loops, which Hotmail refused to reset to a higher, more appropriate level:
http://kb.iu.edu/data/beha.html?osecat=email). This would happen most often in
groups that moderate messages, since the moderation process causes more hops
within our system.

But we've recently made changes to the way hops information is presented in
Yahoo! Groups headers, so that this 15 hops limit should no longer be an issue.
These changes should mean far fewer bounced messages to Hotmail members.

The Bad News:

In the last couple of weeks Hotmail has adjusted their filters in a way that is
pretty much blocking all "invitations" sent from Yahoo! Groups. And despite our
attempts to get them to stop this blocking, we’ve not yet seen them lift this
block:

So we have two recommendations:

1. If you’re sending invitations to Hotmail users through the Yahoo! Groups
system, consider also sending them a direct email (from your own email) either
pointing them to the group home page and directing them to click the “join”
button or point them directly to the join page:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NAME_OF_YOUR_GROUP/sjoin

2. Encourage your Hotmail users to complain to Hotmail about the problem.
Ultimately, they will only take action to fix the problem if enough Hotmail
users complain.

Calendar Reminders (current forecast: clear skies ahead)

We’ve recently seen a surge in reports of calendar reminder problems affecting
approximately 20% of our users. The Calendar team pushed a fix on Tuesday that
should have corrected this issue. Let us know if you are still experiencing this
issue by commenting below or submitting a report to Customer Care:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/forms_index.html

One thing to be aware of is that if someone posts an event to the calendar who
is on moderation status, a reminder won’t be sent.

Thank you,

Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager

In case you haven’t heard, the Groups team is currently testing new features
and enhancements to the Groups product based on feedback we’ve heard from many
of you.

We’ve asked moderators who are interested in testing the new functionality to
set up a beta test group and share their feedback with us as well as collaborate
on ideas and recommendations for improvements.

You can stay update to date on the latest beta news by checking the Groups Beta
Status module in the upper right hand corner of this group.

To read more or to learn how to set up your own beta test the group, please
visit the Groups Team Blog:

http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=51470/*http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-nNIST_woRKGLBc4\
JxGgUEhtmZ_EL?p=7851

Thanks!
Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager

Moderator Central is the place for new and experienced moderators to go to
connect with fellow moderators to ask questions, share advice, collaborate, and
find resources. Since membership to Moderator Central has grown by over 3,000
members in the last few weeks, I wanted to make sure that everyone is aware of
the wealth of information that can be found on the Message Boards.

The Moderator Message Boards
(http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/moderatorcentral/message_boards.html) are
the place for new moderators to ask for advice about setting up their group, for
more experienced moderators to discuss tips on member recruitment and managing
group dynamics, or to stay up to speed on technical issues, common challenges,
and workarounds. These public forums are in a threaded message format, so they
are easy to follow and search. You can even subscribe to an RSS feed or Alert so
you don't miss a thing.

Some basics for participating on these Message Boards include:

Search the existing topics on the message boards before posting a new topic to
see if your question has already been asked and answered. Just type your
keyword(s) in the search box at the top of the board and click the search button
to see what’s already been posted on the topic. The key is to be as specific
as possible so you can narrow the search results down as much as possible.

Post a new message: Go to the message list view, sign in to Yahoo! if necessary,
and, click "Post New Message." Select your public profile (which is how others
will recognize you), write both a message subject and message, and then click
"Post Message."

Create a new topic: Briefly summarize your question or subject in the “message
subject” line when you post a message.

Reply to a message: Click the "Reply" link at the bottom of any message, sign in
to Yahoo! if necessary, select your public profile (which is how others will
recognize you), write your comments, and click "Post Message." You can edit your
message as you write it but you cannot edit it after you preview or post it.

Thank you,
Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager

We are aware that the Yahoo! Groups site was intermittently unavailable for a
few hours on Saturday morning and again for approximately one hour this morning.
As a result of this downtime, some accounts have been temporarily disabled by
being put into auto-responder status. We are currently working on re-enabling
those accounts.

We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience. Our engineering
team is working to get this issue fully resolved as quickly as possible. We’ll
post updates as they are available. 

Regards,
Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager

Our engineers have identified the root cause for this issue, and we will be
conducting hardware maintenance from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM today, 12/3, to resolve
it. During this time, some groups will be unavailable for viewing, but no
messages will be lost and users will continue to be able to post via email.

It's my pleasure to introduce the all new Groups blog:
http://www.ygroupsblog.com/blog/

I encourage you to go check it out and let us know what you think by posting in
the comments section.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Best,
Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager

Below are known issues that may be affecting some Groups users:

Calendar Reminders (current forecast: scattered showers with clear skies in the
forecast)

We are aware that some groups are still experiencing issues with calendar
reminders not being sent. The Calendar Team now believes this issue is related
to Day Light Savings Time and is currently working to correct this within all
groups. I’ll post an update to confirm when this process is complete. In the
meantime, we appreciate your patience.

Again, one thing to be aware of is that if someone posts an event to the
calendar who is on moderation status, a reminder won’t be sent.

Delivery Issues with Centurytel.net Addresses (current forecast: stormy)
We’ve seen reports that Yahoo! Groups email sent by members with
Centurytel.net mail accounts is not being delivered. We have confirmed that
Centurytel.net is dropping, or failing to deliver Y! Groups email. We sincerely
apologize that you are experiencing this issue unfortunately it’s not
something we can control. This is not a Yahoo! issue but an issue with how
Centurytel.net is handling email from Yahoo! Groups.

We are currently trying to contact the administrators at CenturyTel to work to
correct this problem; however, they have not returned our calls or emails. If
you are a CenturyTel customer and are able to reach them, please ask their
administrators to contact our technical team by sending an email to:
ygmailadmin-owner@yahoogroups.com.

If you have any questions or concerns please let us know by contacting Customer
Care at:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/forms_index.html

We appreciate your patience and we apologize for the inconvenience this has
caused.

Please visit the Groups Blog to leave a comment for the Groups team on one of
these issues:
http://www.ygroupsblog.com/blog/2007/12/17/yahoo-groups-weather-report-12-17-07/

Thank you,
Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager

Below are known issues that may be affecting some Groups users:

Update: Delivery Issues with Centurytel.net Addresses
We’ve been in contact with the administrators at Centurytel.net and have taken
steps toward correcting the issue with Y! Groups email not being delivered.  If
you are a Centurytel.net mail user and you are still not receiving Y! Groups
email, please let us know by contacting Customer Care at:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/forms_index.html

Issue with Search within Groups
We are aware that some Groups users are experiencing issues when trying to
search for messages in their groups. We have identified the root cause of this
problem which is related to the indexing of messages. If you are currently
experiencing this issue please contact Customer Care and we’ll work to correct
this on a case by case basis. We hope to have this issues fully resolved for all
groups early in the New Year. We appreciate your patience and we apologize for
the inconvenience this has caused.

"SFReadDir()" Error
We know that some users have been affected by this error when attempting to
access their group's files. Customer Care has been responding to reports on a
case by case basis and we do believe this issue is resolved at this time. If you
continue to see this error, please let us know by contacting Customer Care at:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/forms_index.html

I encourage you to continue to contact Customer Care with questions and reports
of issues with your Groups to get the quickest response. To post comments on any
of these topics, please go to the Groups Blog: http://www.ygroupsblog.com/blog/

Happy Holidays from all of us on the Groups team!

Best Wishes,
Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager