Ben said "All of this trouble suggests that it is important these days for a 
List Owner to have access to an auxiliary email address (even 
hotmail/yahoo/gmail would be OK for this) and have their list pre-configured for 
this auxiliary email address (both for List Owner access and for msg posting) to 
be able to work around such "helpful" mail blockages.  Unfortunately these 
blockaages are becoming extremely common.  :-(  "

Totally agree with this.  Ben has, in the past week, helped me with a problem I 
was having - not receiving ANY administration emails, ie from [log in to unmask] - 
and it turned out that my ISP was blocking them.

My ISP gives their customers the option of having them filter spam or not.  As 
soon as this feature was introduced I turned it off.  I'm reasonably clued-up on 
spam and viruses and felt I could manage on my own, and was concerned that I 
might miss emails that I wanted/needed to see if someone filtered the email 
before it reached me.  I never dreamed - until last week - that they would still 
have filters in place that affect me, despite turning their spam filtering off.

With Ben's help I was able to provide evidence showing that the mail was 
reaching my ISP.  Before that, their response had been simply that I didn't use 
their filtering service, therefore the problem had to be elsewhere.  After 
seeing the evidence, they admitted that they used SpamCop, and this was the 
reason my mail wasn't getting through.  Actions were taken in very short time to 
start releasing my emails, but I have not had any response to my question of 
"why were you filtering my mail when I turned your filtering off?".

In the meantime, it was incredibly frustrating not receiving the admin mail. 
I'm an assistant to the owner of a list, and take my turn during the day to 
watch for moderated posts and also assist any members with problems they're 
having interacting with the list.  Not being able to query members' settings, or 
make changes to settings, or receive the moderated posts (we prefer to use email 
rather than the web interface so there is a "paper" trail to follow, since two 
of us are doing the work) was a serious hindrance.

My ListOwner set up my old Yahoo address as an owner/moderator (I've never 
touched the list header before, and didn't think now was the time to start 
learning how!) and I continued my work using that; while it was still 
inconvenient, at least it wasn't impossible to do my work any more.

Lesson learned - don't assume that you will always be able to use your current 
address to do the work you're doing right now.  Something somewhere could happen 
to cause your mail to be incapacitated in some way.  Consider this and make 
arrangements for an alternative *before* you need it.

My personal preference in this situation is Yahoo, because (1) the mail box is 
1GB, so large enough to contain the incoming mail if I forget to check it for a 
while when all is running as it should, and (2) because I can forward the mail 
received there as an attachment, so send a copy to my usual address.  I like to 
keep admin mail, especially when it's in relation to contact with a member, and 
save such emails as discrete files on my hard drive (the only reason I still use 
Microsoft Outlook Express rather than an alternative).  By sending an attachment 
the time and date in local time is retained, which I find convenient, too.

Food for thought?  I hope none of you ever experience this problem that I had 
last week, but if you do I hope you have a contingency in place.  It is a 
dubious honour to be one of Ben's statistics in this situation.  Thanks again 
for your help, Ben!  :-)

Regards,
Wendy Howard
assistant to the list-owner, Guai-Support Group
Kaiwaka, New Zealand