Gmail not echoing your own posts to Yahoogroups back to you. About 6 months a...

Julian Bond - 2012-10-16 11:11:48+0000 - Updated: 2012-10-16 11:11:48+0000

Gmail not echoing your own posts to Yahoogroups back to you. About 6 months ago or so I switched to using Gmail as my outgoing mail server as well as my incoming. I still use a local email reader. Now, I belong to and contribute to quite a large number of Yahoogroups some of which I run. It puzzled me that my own posts to those groups weren't coming back to me via the inbox. It finally got sufficiently annoying to research and at that point I discover that this is a known bug in Gmail and has been for getting on for 2 years. Your outgoing email is in the sent and all folders in Gmail. But when the email is echoed back to you by yahoogroups, gmail is not so helpfully just discarding it. Probably because it has the same email ID as one already in their database. This is just wrong, but clearly isn't going to get fixed. The work arounds are all abit messy because you have to use a different smtp send server to normal and/or a different send email address just for posting to yahoogroups.

What I haven't checked yet is whether the same behaviour happens in mailing lists hosted in googlegroups or mailman.

Peter Bowyer - 2012-10-16 11:19:35+0000

It's not a bug, it's a well-known feature. Doesn't matter what mailing list system you're interacting with. A sent message will only appear somewhere other than under 'Sent' when it forms part of a conversation (ie someone replies to it).

Julian Bond - 2012-10-16 11:30:52+0000

Your feature is my bug. As far as I'm concerned the message I send and stored in sent is not the same as the message back from the mailing list software. It's not a duplicate but actually a different message, or should be. What's annoying is that I believe GMail is receiving the returned message but discarding it. It should be my choice to discard it, not their's.

Peter Bowyer - 2012-10-16 11:32:45+0000

It's the same message if it has the same Message-ID. If the mailing list software applies a new Message-ID, then Gmail will treat the incoming message as new.

Julian Bond - 2012-10-16 11:34:40+0000

This is going to be somewhat challenging to prove!

Peter Bowyer - 2012-10-16 11:37:58+0000

It's a very well-known behaviour - try this Google search... http://peeebeee.com/SZ19AF

Julian Bond - 2012-10-16 11:49:55+0000

Yes, understand. That's a very similar search to the one I did and shows the same results. So yes, lots of other people have found the behaviour strange, asked the question and then been disappointed with the answer. Just because it's well known doesn't make it right, or intuitive!

I've found an old message sent via different smtp server. And I can confirm that Yahoogroups is not rewriting the Message-ID: header. So my local email reader is storing the sent message, sending it via a 3rd party SMTP server, it routes to yahoogroups, is exploded to the list, comes back via gmail and finally via POP3 back to my local email reader. Locally, I now have 2 copies but with the same message-ID. One in my sent folder and one in the mailing list folder. This is what I think should happen. Because my local email reader does this and isn't phased by it, it makes GMail look wrong.

As far as I can see if I want to go on routing my email via GMail's exceptional spam filtering, I have to either put up with this or use somebody else's SMTP server on the outgoing leg of the route.

Peter Bowyer - 2012-10-16 11:55:47+0000

Sure I understand it's confusing at times. As a long-time manager of mailing lists, I get used to coming out with the stock reply when someone asks 'why is your mailing list not sending out my messages?'.

I believe GMail relies heavily on the Message-ID and particularly on the uniqueness thereof - which it's entitled to under the RFCs. Having messages with the same Message-ID showing up in different places would break things for them. So changing this behaviour would be a very hard thing for them to do, and to be fair, there's a diminishing number of people who are affected by it.

Julian Bond - 2012-10-16 12:13:44+0000

Yup, sadly mailing lists seem to be fading away the same way usenet is largely fading away, at least as a discussion forum.

Julian Bond - 2012-10-17 11:27:29+0000

FWIW, I've switched to a different SMTP send server and as expected I'm now seeing my own posts to mailing lists returned to me. The only downsides I can see is its potentially less reliable than Gmail and I no longer have the record of the send in the Gmail send folder. Neither should be any big deal.

Peter Bowyer - 2012-10-17 11:29:02+0000

Glad you've found a solution.