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Important Changes Coming to ACB E-Mail Lists

Many of you, particularly those who rely heavily on the ACB e-mail lists, have noticed that their usability has been steadily slipping over the past year. Even before this time, we ran into sporadic situations where some users would suddenly stop receiving messages even though they were subscribed to the list.

We conducted an investigation as to the nature of the problems we’d been experiencing and what it boiled down to, at first, is that we had to enforce some pretty tight restrictions on ACB’s Server infrastructure to reduce and even eliminate the spam we were receiving. That helped bring things back into order, but then, we found that our security was so tight that it did away with spam completely, but didn’t allow legitimate senders to get mail to us.

We loosened our restrictions a little, but the first issue reemerged where spam started trickling back into our network , causing ISPs to view our valid mail traffic as spam, therefor, blocking list traffic from getting to its subscribers.

One note of solace is that we are not alone in experiencing these problems. Since the pandemic began, many organizations have gone virtual and have found ways of conducting their business online. Their e-mail practices have had to undergo changes, as well.

Enter: Groups.io. Many of you may have heard of Groups.io and some of you may already be members of other lists on this platform. We spent time looking at their plans and the features they bring, deciding what plan would best serve us. Their service is longstanding in its reliability, integrity, and reputation. They are geared up for sending large volumes of e-mail and spam checkers know to give Groups.io room to do so without e-mails getting caught as potential spam. Their infrastructure has many redundant points along its network so that mail can be evenly-divided between their mail systems and sent out in a balanced way to all recipients. Our server, on the other hand, sent out all of our mail from one machine. And this is what looks suspicious to spam monitoring software, even though we are sending out perfectly valid e-mails.

Not only can lists be conducted on the platform, but it has various other features to keep everyone connected and engaged, including Calendar, Zoom Integration, Live Chat, Polls, and more.

We have decided that all of our ACB Lists, from acblists.org and acbradio.org, will be migrated to Groups.io. The lists from acbradio.org will be merged into the acblists.org domain. All members of all lists will be migrated to the new platform with the list’s names and address remaining the same and all members retaining their subscription and, if applicable, their moderation status. The case where the address domain changes is for those lists on acbradio.org that we are merging into the acblists.org domain. All archives from the lists on our server will be brought over, as well.

Are you already buzzing with questions? Have no fear. A number of community calls are in the works to discuss these changes and answer your burning questions. We are hoping to get someone directly from Groups.io to speak with us. Generally speaking, the process of posting to and reading from the list will be the same, but there are new aspects of what can be done with message threads and other users of each list. And, of course, group moderators will be looking at quite a different interface for managing their group than what was previously seen with our Mailman system.

Migration will begin soon in mid-December and more notices will become available as time gets closer to the point when we cut over from the old to the new platform. The notices will inform users what to expect, how to proceed, and give some optional information for educating oneself on groups.io. If you would like to jump right in and start learning, here are links to some helpful documentation: