An explanation for recent Yahoo Groups slowness

from another list I'm on:

"I know this sounds highly improbable to many, however Yahoo always
has difficulties as Mercury approaches retrograde, it usually settles
down again during the retrograde period, and then turns sour again
just before it goes direct.

"I'm not pretending that there is a scientific explanation for this,
but it is surprising how often that it is the case.

"For those who may be interested, Mercury turns retrograde on the 22nd."

Take care, Rodney Smith

Rod notes that he takes Astrology seriously, but doesn't expect everyone else to. Frankly I can only figure that something other than western science is needed to predict the behavior of complex email systems.

Comments

[Edward Vielmetti]

Yahoo is having problems right now, or so notices Google Trends:

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=yahoo+problems&date=2007-9-18&sa=X

Next time Mercury goes retrograde is from October 11 to November 1, 2007.

[l.m.orchard]

Apropos of this, might I suggest the song "Mercury in Retrograde" [1] by The Reverse Engineers [2]? Excellent band if you happen to like Rush and / or The Fixx

[1]: http://www.thereverseengineers.com/mercurylyrics.htm

[2]: http://www.thereverseengineers.com/

[Edward Vielmetti]

Problem reports are coming in on Yahoo Groups digest problems - see Yahoo Moderator Central for more details.

Mercury is, of course, retrograde at the moment.

[Edward Vielmetti]

a report from Valerie

[nnn] wrote that her digest is arriving fine but that it is now ending up in her bulk mail folder instead of in her regular inbox. I noticed that all three of you have Yahoo e-mail addresses, and [nnn] does too. So this may really be a problem with Yahoo marking the digests as spam, rather than a problem with
Yahoogroups failing to deliver the messages.

[Edward Vielmetti]

more mercury retrograde issue explained:

>Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 05:14:25 +0000
>Subject: [moderatorcentral] Yahoo! Mail bug mistakenly causing some
>Groups mail to be marked as spam
>
>Apologies for not posting to the blog about this issue earlier, but
>we do want to let folks know that we're aware of the problem with
>Yahoo! Mail mistakenly diverting some messages from Yahoo! Groups to
>the Yahoo! Mail spam or bulk folder.
>
>The Mail team has just tonight pushed a fix to the problem, but
>they're not yet sure if the fix will address the problem completely
>or only partially. So if you're still finding messages from Groups
>sent Wednesday (10/24) or later being wrongly diverted to your Spam
>or Bulk Mail folder, please let our Customer Care team know:
>http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/yahoogroups/general.html
>
>It will help us solve the problem more quickly.
>
>Thank you,
>
>- Yahoo! Groups Team

[Edward Vielmetti]

More Yahoo Groups issues seen recently include messages from GMail bouncing with "can't connect to SMTP server".