My groups have found groups.io far superior to Y!Groups. My recommendation is to transfer as soon as you can. Y!Groups are literally falling apart from neglect. Groups.io is good and getting better.

The only complaint I have had from my users is groups.io is much more touchy about being called spam by users or email services. Groups.io immediately unsubscribes members when a groups.io email sent to them is designated spam for self-protection. This is not groups.io's fault and they are handling it as best they can. Spam is a persistent problem that the computing industry in general struggles with. Blame the criminals, not the victims.

I recently sent out a long email on the spam issue to one of the groups I help moderate. I am a software system architect. The message is too long and too technical for many people and I kind of regret sending it, but to compound my error, I'll paste it in below in case anyone here can use the contents.


Allow me to explain a few things about groups.io unsubscribing folks because emails have been marked as spam.

First, I will talk about what happens. There are four distinct entities involved:

• Groups.io . Groups.io is the service that distributes email to groups like like yours. Group members send email to Groups.io using an email address that indicates the group. For instance, for My Example Group, you use the address MyExampleGroupATgroups.io. (I've replace @ with AT to avoid unintentional mail to the address.) Groups.io receives the email and verifies that the sender is a member of the group, and then forwards the email to all the members of the group. Services like Groups.io face an enormous problem: they look like spammers. Spammers send out huge numbers of unsolicited emails selling knock-off pharmaceuticals and the like. Spamming is illegal in many countries and spammers try hard not to look like spam. One technique is to appear to be a legitimate service like Groups.io. Since groups.io sends out more email than they receive, it is relatively easy to imitate and the anti-spam forces may mistake groups.io for a spammer. Groups.io has to avoid that or serious trouble will ensue.
• Email services. These are services that distribute email. Examples are gmail from Google, hotmail (now outlook), AOL, and a host of other services. The email service is indicated by the stuff that follows the "@" sign. For instance, if your email address is exampleAToutlook.com, your email service is outlook.com. This can get confusing because there are many email services and they are often tied to business entities that provide other services. Comcast Corporation has an email service that they offer to folks who use their network access service (more on network access providers below), but you not obliged to use Comcast's email service if you they are your network provider any more than you are obliged to use Google's gmail if you use other Google services like their search service.
  
  Most email services are free, or at least you are not billed for them. When you send an email, it first goes to your email service. The email service forwards the email to the email service of the addressee, which then forwards the email to the addressee. When the addressee is a service like Groups.io, Groups.io then forwards the email to all the members of the group.
• Your Email Client. This is the screen on your computer where you receive and send email. It can be a locally installed application, like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird, or a web application like Gmail. Email clients are independent of email providers. You can use Microsoft Outlook with Comcast email service, or gmail service. I have several email providers and I send and receive all of them from the same client. My client used to be Outlook, but now it is Gmail. I switch around all the time because I like to be familiar with what others experience with their email clients.
• Your Network Provider. These are the folks that connect you to the Internet. They own or lease communications wires, satellite links, cell towers, optical cables, and the like. Your network provider could be your cell phone service like Sprint, a cable company like Comcast, or a traditional phone company. Whether you like it or not, your network provider has access to every bit that enters or leaves your computer from the Internet, including your email, no matter whose email service you use. So far, network providers have not fiddled much with the content they transmit. But they could. The laws are vague or non-existent and Terms of Service, which govern your relationship with your provider, are nearly impossible to decipher. Besides, they are all written by bean counters with the civic attitudes of back alley heroin dealers. It's unlikely you will ever negotiate an alternative.

These entities are pretty much mix and match. You may use two different network providers at the same time-- I use Comcast's cable network and T-Mobile's cell service for example. On my cell, when I am out and about, I receive email over T-Mobile's cellular network, but when I'm at home, I am connected through Comcast's cable.

When you are communicating with MyExampleGroup, all four of these entities are working together to make the connection between you and the group and each of them can play a role in marking an email as spam. That's why all of this gets so confusing.

Why does email get marked as spam? First, who wants to get spam anyway? No one that I know. And it gets worse every month. Sending unsolicited emails can get you in jail in a lot of places, so you certainly don't want to be accused of spamming. Spamming doesn't work very well: a spammer may send out a million spam emails and be happy with 5 replies. So spammers send out huge quantities of spam to get a few hits because it is cheap. Network providers hate spam because the spammers clog their networks with garbage. There are credible estimates that over 50% of all email on the Internet is spam. The fee you pay your network provider could be considerably less if there were no spam and other misuse of the Internet.

So we have lots of folks identifying and scrubbing out spam. Some network providers do it. Email services do it. Email clients do it. The FBI investigates spammers and sends them to jail. Interpol investigates. US state police investigate. Unfortunately, most spam comes from jurisdictions where it is legal. And spammers are very smart people who fight hard to keep their streams of spam going; as hard or harder than the anti-spam forces work to stop them.

Groups.io is caught in the middle of this. The laws regarding sending spam to someone who doesn't want it are hard to parse, but most forms of spam are illegal in most states and could send the operators of Groups.io to jail in some jurisdictions. One of the ways of stopping spam is black listing. If an email service (and groups.io acts as an email service like gmail or comcast, they just play a special role) is identified as a source of spam, other email services may put them on a black list and refuse to forward their emails. Groups.io is relatively small and they have to tow the line or they will be blacklisted. Therefore, the instant their email is rejected as spam, groups.io quits sending. That's when a subscriber gets dropped by groups.io for rejecting a groups.io email as spam. Groups.io has no choice. They face blacklisting or prosecution if they don't. The rejection could come from the user, the user's email client, email service, or network provider.

You may wonder why this didn't happen with Yahoo Groups. Two reasons: Yahoo is much bigger and well-known than groups.io and much less likely to be blacklisted. Second, I hate to say this, but Yahoo has become a bit sloppy and not as meticulous about following regulations as Groups.io. You may have noticed that Yahoo Groups became unreliable a few years ago. That's symptomatic. Also, spam has been getting worse and the good guys have been doing more to stop it, including being more aggressive about declaring email spam.

What to do when a member is unintentionally dropped? The only practical thing is for the member to resubscribe. Don't blame groups.io, your email client, your email service, or your network provider. You probably don't need to change any of them. Blame the spammers. They are criminals. They're like shoplifters, raising prices and forcing stores to be annoying. You don't have to change your provider except in extreme cases. Most providers are okay, some may be better than others, but it is hard to distinguish.

Two things you can do to make it less likely that groups.io email will be identified as spam: One. Go to your spam folder (junk or whatever it's called) in your email client and mark any groups.io mail that landed there as not spam. Second, if your email client supports it, put MyExampleGroupATgroups.io on your contact list. (Use your group name and the @ sign.) You may even be able to add groups.io as a trusted service so all your groups.io mail is trusted.

I apologize for this long screed, but I like groups.io a lot and hate to see black marks against it, but I hate spam also.
Best, Marv

John,

Can non-members (i.e. the public) access our home page?

Yes.

They see a slightly restricted version: the numbers in the Message History table are not links to the messages for that month. For logged in members they are.

They also see buttons to Join (or Apply for Membership, if your group has restricted membership) and to Log In (if they aren't).

In addition, the Visibility control in the Privacy section of the group's Settings page allows you to have the group listed Groups.io's directory of groups, or not. Visibility there may help people find your group's Home page.

Shal


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nobe,

I have noticed in some groups that members can send without their
emails showing and just use the io. email.

Moderators can use the group's +owner address, but members' email addresses will always be shown in the From field of messages they post (when received in another member's email inbox). On site the display name is used instead.

On the other hand, you may have noticed that some member's email address is shown as: Shal Farley via Groups.Io <shals2nd@...>
That is a work-around for "the DMARC problem":
/static/help#why-are-emails-from-some-people-changed-to-be-via-groups-io

If you think something else is going on please explain further, I'm unfamiliar with it.

Is there a owner setting somewhere to accomplish this?

You can go into a member's page in the group's Members list and add a Display Name for them, or edit what they have.

But there are no group settings to control how members' email addresses are handled in email.

Shal


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Thank goodness!

Can non-members (i.e. the public) access our home page? ?That would be desirable.

Thanks,

John Selby, Treasurer
South Sound Classical Choir

Jim,

Surely we would be able to opt out of "like" notifications?!!!

Yup.

I think the effort of devising a set of comprehensive, yet clear and easy to use, set of controls for what you want to be notified about, on web and by email, and how often (per event, daily summary) is one of the tasks that has kept the "notification overhaul" ever on the horizon, yet never quite here.

Shal


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On Sun, Jan 13, 2019 at 03:41 PM, nobe wrote:

I have noticed in some groups that members can send without their emails showing and just use the io. email.
Is there a owner setting somewhere to accomplish this?

To obfuscate email addresses in the message archive (i.e.: it hides the domain information), go to Admin>Settings>Privacy>Hide Email Addresses in Archives.?Note that this setting affects the online message archive only. Outgoing emails will still contain the sender's email address in the From field.

Regards,
Bruce
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On Sun, Jan 13, 2019 at 03:41 PM, nobe wrote:

My first question was setting up a database, which I think I did correctly, however, was unable to delete one started previously by a former member.

I want to offer my PSP members some assistance using various features by way of tutorials.

Once again, very poor instructions.

The GroupManagersForum wiki is a good resource for anything not covered in the system Help. It is accessible to everyone...you don't even need a groups.io account...so you can directly link to those pages if you want.

Here is the page on databases:? /g/GroupManagersForum/wiki/Databases. Many other topics are covered.

If you can't find something in the wiki, just ask. That's what this peer-to-peer group is for.
?
Regards,
Bruce
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I have noticed in some groups that members can send without their emails showing and just use the io. email.
Is there a owner setting somewhere to accomplish this?
Thank you.

Received from Bruce Bowman at 1/13/2019 04:03 PM UTC:

And it's my fervent hope that groups.io doesn't devolve into the kind of notifications-fest that Facebook has become.

Surely we would be able to opt out of "like" notifications?!!!

Jim H

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Thanks so much. It worked. That is okay, I never want the messages to be public. Ilene ? ? ? ? ?

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On Sun, Jan 13, 2019 at 01:35 PM, magicalkingdomgroups@... wrote:

I have done this before 6 times before?but right now I am trying to set up a new group and I cannot for the life of me find where to make the Archives (Messages) only available to Subscribers.

It's in Admin>Settings>Privacy>Visibility...

...and here's a reminder that once you select one of the "private messages" options there is no way to make them public again.

Regards,
Bruce?
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I have done this before 6 times before?but right now I am trying to set up a new group and I cannot for the life of me find where to make the Archives (Messages) only available to Subscribers. Please Help Me. Ilene

On Sun, Jan 13, 2019 at 10:41 AM, Al Ludwick / NN4ZZ wrote:

If someone "likes" a message is the person who wrote the message
notified? Or would they only know by going to the message online and
checking there?

Groups.io currently provides neither a personal inbox nor any real notification system, so the only way that would be possible is via email. At this time one has to view the message archive online to check for "likes."

With respect to your second question, I've heard much conjecture regarding the "notifications overhaul." It's brought up in many contexts, including missing entries in the activity log, missing notifications to Moderators/Owners, and various notifications to subscribers of related activities (such as "liking" their posts). Although lumped under one topic, these are very different functions, and unlikely to be implemented all at once. The actual scope and timeline is known only to Mark.

My own speculation is that such things will have to wait until the groups.io app is done, so as to provide a consistent user interface. And it's my fervent hope that groups.io doesn't devolve into the kind of notifications-fest that Facebook has become.?

Hope this helps,
Bruce
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______________________________________
? Ian Gillis C Eng MIET

Yvonne,

I wrote:

Except for the attachments, the Yahoo Group Transfer function at
Groups.io would have been your perfect answer. Alas, Yahoo / Verizon
made some change a few weeks ago that broke it.

In case you hadn't heard, it is back on again:


Shal


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