After being delayed a few days due to the attention required addressing the message delivery delays early this week (thanks again for your patience), here are the changes we’ve just implemented to Yahoo! Groups. (For those of you experimenting with the Beta, minor fixes we implemented earlier in the week are detailed here).

Improved Spam Filtering

We’ve reduced the number of both false positives (legitimate Groups mail that is wrongly tagged “spam”) and false negatives (real spam that doesn’t get tagged). And though no spam filtering system is going to be perfect, this upgrade will make a significant improvement.

If you have disabled the spam filter, please enable it, and let us know if there has been an improvement.

Also, you now have an option when moderating messages to mark a message as spam. Using this option also deletes the message and alerts us to block other groups from receiving it. Using this feature will help improve the Spam Guard system for all groups.

Better Bounce Systems

As we know, bouncing email messages, particularly when the ISP should not be bouncing them, is a problem for many Groups users, particularly Hotmail, Earthlink, and BellSouth users, of late. Only the ISP or email provider can solve this problem (unfortunately, we can’t force them to accept mail from Yahoo! Groups), but we have now stopped distinguishing between “hard bounces” and “soft bounces.” This will decrease the likelihood that technical problems at ISPs will mistakenly put users into “bouncing status.”

We’ve also made changes so that it’s less likely that messages sent from moderated groups are bounced; and we fixed what was causing error messages to appear when a user reactivated out of bouncing status.

And last, the number of bounced messages that appear on bounce history pages now correspond with the group’s normal message numbers. This number will be valid only for individual messages (not digests). Your group’s numbers may still be off if the group needs to be reindexed. If necessary, you can request that your group be reindexed through the standard Customer Care request form.

More Convenient to Search for Groups

You can now search for other groups in the “title bar” of all group pages, so you can find groups without backtracking to the home page. If you’re in an adult group, you can use this search box to find other adult groups.

We’ve also added a link to the “Best of Yahoo! Groups” on all group pages, which makes it easy to check out great ideas from other groups and nominate your own group..

Decreased Time Outs

We’ve extended the time for uploading large photos and files, which should solve most of the time-out problems, especially for those of you with relatively slow connections.

We look forward to your feedback on all these changes.

Thank you!

Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager