Va-Birders,
You've heard me tell of the loss of great numbers of subscribers due to
Internet Service Providers mistakenly identifying Va-Bird as a spam sender. I
now have more insight into this issue and would like to explain.
Va-Bird has robust spam protection, but every once in a while a little bit of
junk sneaks through. When that happens, please just ignore it. Delete it.
Forget it ever happened. PLEASE DO NOT REPORT THE SENDER AS A SPAMMER TO YOUR
INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER. If you do, this is what will happen.
Your internet service provider will thank you for reporting the spam and then
they will identify the sender as a spammer and block that sender from ever
sending anything to you or any of their other customers ever again.
Unfortunately, if you forward the entire message to them, they will also
identify Va-Bird as a spammer and block all future Va-Bird messages to you and
all their other customers. This has actually happened with Verizon, Comcast,
AOL, and Apple (mac.com, me.com, and icloud.com).
Va-Bird will keep trying to send mail to you and all the others but your ISP
will bounce the messages back as undeliverable. After ten "fatal" bounces, you
are automatically unsubscribed from Va-Bird.
I can repair some of this damage. I can resubscribe you. I can work with your
ISP through certain channels to convince them that Va-Bird is legitimate and
not a spam sender. I can resubscribe the dozens of other Va-Birders who use
your ISP. I can do this, but I hope you recognize it is a real pain in the
neck.
There is one thing I cannot fix, however. When Listserve.com finds out that
you reported Va-Bird as a spam sender (and they WILL find out), you are gone
forever. They will permanently block you from subscribing with that email
address and I have no way to work around it. Your only recourse is to
subscribe with a different email address.
SO, please let us handle the spam issues on this end. I think we've got a
pretty good record of keeping Va-Bird clean. If you've got a problem, take it
up with me. Please DO NOT EVER report anything from this list as spam.
Thank you.
David Spears
Va-Bird List Administrator
