[Idyllchat] More info for those who can't send to IdyllChat

[Julie Siebel]

Oooookay,

I've done a lot of research on this in the past few days, and here's what we know - I'm not sure what we can do about it. Sorry for the technobabble, but I wanted to be complete in my explanation.

All the people who've contacted me unable to post to IdyllChat have one thing in common: Yahoo. (The SBCGlobal users having the issue use a Yahoo Email portal.)

Here is what we *think* is going on. Yahoo uses a program on their email servers called QMail. QMail has a bug that causes an error of errors in certain situations, yielding the specific error message that these people are getting. There is, and has been, a patch for this problem, but Yahoo apparently has not applied it.

I just got off a very long phone call with SBCGlobal/Yahoo technical support and they were very unhelpful, unfortunately...they don't have any way for me to get to the people in charge of the servers that need to be patched. I haven't given up yet though :)

We think that the problem came about because the place where the IdyllChat list is hosted has *lots* of mail lists, and apparently passed the "threshold" in number of list addresses that triggers the QMail bug.

We're not 100% sure, but as the problem is only affecting Yahoo users on QMail servers, call me 99% sure.

I will continue to try to get ahold of Yahoo (and whomever else I can bug about this) to get them to fix it, if that's the issue, and I will try to figure out some way around the bug, but until one of these things happens, there's nothing I can do to help you send these emails. (I may sign up for IdyllChat with a Yahoo address, and see they stick me on a server with the error - perhaps I can get some help THAT way!)

The only temporary thing I can think of is that I can help you set up a gmail account for your IdyllChat stuff; if you're using Outlook Express, I can tell you how to set it up so it simply checks the Gmail account at the same time you're checking your regular email.

I'll let you know when I know something more.

Julie
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