The Greg Brown Discussion Group

An Internet "discussion group" (sometimes called a "mailing list") allows people to share information with others who have a common interest. The GBrown-L group is handled by Yahoo Groups. Messages sent to the group are automatically sent to all subscribers who request e-mail distribution. It is also possible to read the messages via Yahoo Group's web interface. There is no cost to subscribe.

 

Home GBrown-L Page at Yahoo Groups

The home page for the GBrown-L group at Yahoo Groups is:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GBrown-L.
This is a good page to bookmark!

Since the GBrown-L group is "public," anyone may read the messages without registering or subscribing to the group.

 

Subscribing to the GBrown-L Group

To receive the group messages via e-mail or to utilize Yahoo Group's extra features on the web site, you need to subscribe. You may do this in one of two ways:

If you subscribe by e-mail, you will receive a message back asking you to confirm your request. All you have to do is "reply" and "send" using your mail program.

You will need to register with Yahoo at the web site if you want to post from the web interface or use the extra features of Yahoo Groups.

 

Message Delivery Options

AFTER subscribing you may change your message delivery option EITHER by using the "Edit My Groups" link on the My Groups page OR by e-mail. Using e-mail, the following three options are available:

 

Unsubscribing

To unsubscribe from GBrown-L, either click the "Leave Group" button on your GBrown-L membership page or send a BLANK e-mail message to:
GBrown-L-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

 

Message Topics

The group is for discussions related to Greg Brown and his artistic endeavors. It's fine to post messages on Greg's efforts for charitable causes (such as In Harmony). Occasional messages about his close associates (such as Bo Ramsey, Dave Moore, Nina Gerber, etc.) are OK.

It is fine to write to the group to let people know about the availability of commercial products related to Greg (CDs, T-shirts, etc.).

Please do not write or forward to the group any petitions, virus or other warnings, political statements, charitable requests, etc. Do not send "test messages" to the group.

Considerate debate and critical analysis are OK; name-calling or otherwise attacking other group members is not.

Please send messages in plain, simple text. Do not send binary attachments, nor messages in HTML or "rich text" format. Be kind to your fellow list members, some of whom have relatively slow dial-up connections!

 

Sending a Message to the Group

To send a message to the group, send an e-mail message to GBrown-L@yahoogroups.com. Send messages in plain text, not HTML, format.

You may also use the web interface to post messages.

If you are replying to a message, please use judicious quoting of a few lines from the original message rather than quoting the entire message.

Please use a meaningful subject in messages to the group (not blank or "Re: Digest Number...").

 

Additional Information about Yahoo Groups

Yahoo Groups does not charge group owners or users. They make their money by putting an advertisement at the bottom of each message (at the top of digests). Usually they consist of 3 or 4 lines of text. (If you specify a Message Format of "Convert to HTML" in your group membership, you may receive graphic ads in e-mail messages.) I generally find the ads unobtrusive, but of course "your mileage may vary."

Yahoo Groups' privacy policy is at http://privacy.yahoo.com.

In the web interface, e-mail addresses are partially hidden to protect the e-mail senders' identities from spammers. It is still possible, however, to reply an individual who posted a message; you just won't know what the poster's e-mail address is (unless he or she e-mails you back).

The group is set up to discard any attachments; however, the plain-text part of the messages should go through. If a message doesn't go through, the sender will be notified.

Postings by new members are moderated. This is done to prevent spammers from joining the list and sending out undesired messages.

Replies by default will go to the person who posted the original message. This may be overridden in the web interface or your e-mail program to send replies to the whole group when appropriate.

Using the web interface, you must be signed-in to Yahoo and you must be subscribed to GBrown-L in order to use features other than reading messages. And your browser must have cookies enabled in order for Yahoo Groups to recognize that you are signed-in as you move between pages.

 

Problems

Yahoo Groups Help

For help with Yahoo Groups, access http://help.yahoo.com/help/groups/.

Auto-responders

If you use an auto-responder to reply automatically to messages you receive (e.g., for vacation notices), make certain that the auto-responder does not reply to bulk messages (messages with a Precedence: bulk header). If you fail to do this and multiple auto-replies are sent back to Yahoo Groups, Yahoo will put your account in "auto-responder status," disabling all message delivery, and the only way to undo it is the manual action of a Yahoo support employee. (I can't do anything about it.)

You can avoid this problem by switching your Message Delivery option to "No email" for each Yahoo Group to which you are subscribed while you have an auto-responder enabled.

Bounced Messages

If you subscribe to a Yahoo Groups discussion group under one of the e-mail options ("normal" or "digest"), Yahoo Groups will suspend sending mail to you after repeated attempts "bounce back." To see your recent bounced messages, view your Yahoo Groups "preferences" at http://groups.yahoo.com/myprefs and click "Bounce history" for your e-mail address. For more information on bounced-message handling by Yahoo Groups, search Yahoo Groups help for the word "bounce".

Problems with E-mail Delivery

If you stop receiving e-mail messages from the group, there are a few common possible reasons:
  1. The first is that there hasn't been any traffic recently. You can check by using the web interface to view messages for the group.

  2. You may have been automatically unsubscribed from the group because of a problem with your account or your server (host). See the item above about Bounced Messages for more information.

  3. Make sure that you know which e-mail address you are subscribed with. Sometimes people have e-mail forwarded from one address to another and when the forwarding stops they stop receiving messages. You can check the address you are subscribed with by looking at your membership options for the group, or by looking at the "X-eGroups-Return" header in a old e-mail message that you received from the group.

  4. Another possibility is that your Internet Service Provider (ISP) may be blocking mail from Yahoo (or blocking all "bulk" e-mail). This has been reported to happen periodically with various ISPs. It has also been reported that AOL sometimes discards "bulk" e-mail when their servers are overloaded. Please note that I have no way to determine whether this is happening at your ISP! You need to talk with support at your ISP to determine if this is a possibility. You may wish to read the messages in Yahoo groups that deal with support issues, such as egroups-discuss-managers and emaillist-managers, to find out if other users are experiencing a similar problem and what they have learned.

Changing Your E-mail Address

If you want to change the e-mail address under which you are subscribed to group(s), the easiest way is to unsubscribe your old address and subscribe your new one (as described above).

Alternatively, via the web interface you can add a new e-mail address to your Yahoo Groups account. Then, after changing your group membership to use the new address, you can remove the old address (or simply leave it unused).

It is also possible to change change your e-mail address under the Account Info link on the Yahoo Groups page, but this is more complicated and I have not attempted to do it.

Other Questions/Problems

If you have questions about the operation of Yahoo Groups, please refer to their web site.

If you have questions about the set-up of the GBrown-L discussion group, please e-mail me. If you have questions or problems regarding your Yahoo account, you will need to contact Yahoo support, as I do not have access to the account information of others.

Ron Mura

Main Greg Brown Page