Yahoo! continue! to! astonish!

[lovingboth]

There's a Yahoo group I am a member of using a new Gmail account. It's a closed group, so it needs a mod to approve the membership. OK, no problem...

.. until you want to do something in relation to the settings. In this case, I want to set it so that the email account gets no email from the group (and, ideally, no email from Yahoo at all!) while remaining a member of it.

But you can't do that via sending an email, as you could with any decent mailing list. You have to do it via a Yahoo account.

OK, let's look at the welcome email: "Your email address has been added to the email list of a Yahoo! Group. To gain .. easier control of your message delivery options, we highly recommend that you complete your account by connecting your email address to Yahoo account (sic). It is easy and free. Please visit: (address)."

Oooh, perfect...

.. except that link 404s.

OK, let's create a pointless Yahoo account*. So I do that, and then set it up so that the Gmail address is verified as belonging to that account...

.. but Yahoo groups doesn't think that account is a member of it.

OK, let's create a second even more pointless account via logging in with the Google account that is a member of that group. That's done...

.. but Yahoo groups still doesn't think that account is a member of it.

I've emailed the "help", but what is the way to alter your own settings for a Yahoo group you're a member of via being joined other than via an existing Yahoo account?

* Yes, I know the word 'pointless' is redundant in this context.

Comments

[rhialto]

Oh, they have done more stupid things. They just recently (I presume) broke all mail forwarding and pretty much all mailing lists, with their hare-brained DMARC system.

They seem to want that the mail's From: header somehow corresponds to the sender's mail server... sigh.

So now a Dutch mailing list that I administer, and which has around 100 members, gave me 80 bounces because of a mail from a yahoo address which could not be sent to subscribers @yahoo.{com,co.uk}. And some other domains have joined in the madness too, including hotmail and xs4all.nl. I really would have expected better from the latter...


(Edit: Note that things like the envelope FROM already identify the list server just fine, and that changing a From: header counts as forgery as far as I'm concerned. And if you do indeed change the From: to the list address, you just lost the originator... Great)

(Edit 2: bounces refer to http://postmaster.yahoo.com/errors/postmaster-28.html which is no help at all)

[nitoda]

I suspect there isn't one. The group owner or moderators can change the email settings if you ask them to. You should be able to email [group]owner@yahoogroups etc to request help. I've recently had some people wanting to join Depend support groups without having a Yahoo account and I know they are making this harder all the time. Yahoo sucks but it does provide free infrastructure for support groups.

[kingginger.livejournal.com]

I really wish there was an alternative to Yahoo Groups...

They've messed with all the techie groups I am on recently where the "from" now says it's the group, not the person who posted the email.

Let alone the search function being broken for years...

But indeed, I still need to sign in with a Yahoo email address that I haven't used in a decade, but still needed for the groups.

Very annoying.

[lovingboth]

That's part of their 'let's have DMARC do p=reject' crap - they can't insist everyone emailing them has the 'from' validated and have their own system send out as anyone...