I joined a forum but I’m not getting their messages!

Does this sound like you? Have you wondered why that might be?

The chat forums are a great way to learn about your industry, mix and mingle with other VAs (or whatever your industry might be) and pick up work. However, unless you monitor your membership with these forums, you may find you’re missing out on information or worse still, a job referral! Because the forums have addresses that are used by hundreds of thousands of people, it also means that they have their fair share of spammers and people who misuse the system. Consequently there will be times when your ISP may block any email coming from a particular domain address, for example, yahoogroups.com. It means then that any group messages to your email address will bounce and you won’t be receiving them.

Of course the bounces can happen for all sorts of reasons and often for temporary situations where your mailbox might be full*, the mailserver overloaded or something else.

So, if you belong to a forum you know normally posts every day, or every few days and it’s been a week and you haven’t received a message, it’s time you logged in and checked that all is in order and there aren’t any messages saying your address is bouncing.

A good rule of thumb is to register more than one email address with your forum account so that if one address is experiencing receipt problems, you can swap to another address for a period of time so you don’t miss out.

* Note – if you’re running a business and dependent on your email, your mailbox should not get full regularly. You can’t afford to let that happen. Either increase your mailbox size or learn to clear it out every single day. You wouldn’t let the phone stay engaged indefinitely and you wouldn’t let your snail mail box overflow so nothing else could be delivered, so don’t do the same with your email.  KMT
chat forums, full mailbox, bounced email, virtual assistant