For now, here's some details about addressing errors, content errors will be covered next. And these days there are more and more folks somehow managing to get on the lists who have no idea how email, computer networking and such all work. Some of the restrictions and policies may seem to cumbersome and odd to the novice, but trust me, I've been doing this for decades, there is a good reason somewhere behind it all.

You didn't send it to the list.

So, to begin with, make sure you are sending the message to the right place, something like list-name@autox.team.net. A simple reply may not work, depending on your mailer. The reply address may not be the list posting address. This is done as a preventive measure. Suppose that Ichabod Burris Kloolys gets a break from his kumquat bleaching job down at the plant, and heads off to bake in the desert sun for a week. He sets up a program to respond to incoming mails with a canned reply. Now, suppose that the mail headers from the list set the reply address to the list. List member Orville Oversteer sends a message to the list about his new teflon lined muffler trunnions. The message gets sent to the list. The vacation responder set up by our hero ibkloolys@kumquat.com sends back to the list a quick note about him being out of the office. So then the mail server at autox.team.net gets the reply, addressed to the list, so it sends it to the list. The vacation responder that ibkloolys@kumquat.com set up sends back to the list a quick note about him being out of the office. The mail server at autox.team.net gets the reply, and sends it to the list. The vacation responder that ibkloolys@kumquat.com set up sends back to the list a quick note about him being out of the office. The mail server at autox.team.net gets the reply, and sends it to the list. The vacation responder .... I'm sure that most of you get the idea by now. So make sure you are replying to the proper address if you'd like folks to see your note.

More on Reply-To

You aren't on the list.

Another major reason your mail does not get sent out is because you aren't on the list. As an anti-spam measure, only list members are allowed to post to the lists here.  Sure, you may be getting the messages, but majordomo has no idea who you are. Usually this is the result of sending in a subscribe command from one place, and then posting a submission from another place.    Often this situation occurs because people send majordomo commands like

which is not quite right, because their mailer says they are ax456-ooZ@td.com, the maybe_I_am@this.domain is just shorthand that only sort of works. Things would be slick if they would have just sent in the command

and let the majordomo program figure out their address.  This address mismatch can also cause troubles in
trying to unsubscribe from lists.  If you try to unsubscribe and keep getting the "you are not a member" reply, chances are you need to send majordomo
the command 'unsubscribe name_of_list your_old_address'

which
end

You can also try to use the which command to try to find out what address majordomo has for you if it isn't obvious by doing a search for some portion of your address. If you think you might be subscribed as frobble@froggle.com, you might try

which frob
end

and see what majordomo sends back.

This members-only policy also comes into play when various vociferous posters send a message to each and every list they think might have some interest in their missive. Poster-1 sends a message to Team.Net lists A,B,C,D and some others on various commercial servers. Poster-2, who reads it on lists B and C, sends a reply, which only goes to lists B and C. Poster-1 responds, his mail goes to lists A,B, C and D. Lists B and C see the original message, Poster-2's reply and Poster-1's response. Folks on lists A or D scratch their heads in wonder, since they saw the original message and the response from Poster-1, but never did see non-member Poster-2's message in between. Think before typing in all those list addresses on the 'To: ' line, or at least look at it and see if your mail is going
to the right place.

You didn't edit your reply.

When replying to a message, a fair number of mail programs stupidly include the entire original automatically as part of the reply. And most folks are quite happy to let it be so, rather than just quoting the relevant sentence or two in their reply. So instead of a simple, straightforward response like this:

From: aware@smart.host
To: list@server.net
Subject: Re: What color is your car?

Mine is red

From: klooless@diploma.mill.edu
To: list@server.net
Subject: Re: What color is your car?

Mine is red

>>>>> Mine is yellow
>>>>> blah blah blah
>>>> Mine is black
>>>> blah blah blah
>>> Mine is green
>>> blah blah blah
>> Mine is orange
>> blah blah blah
> Mine is blue
> blah blah blah

The "death trailer" was added to most of the autox.team.net lists due to the fact that some lists had over 80% of the bits they were pushing along the wire being stuff people had already seen, and had no need to see again. The analogy I used was it was like buying a 6 pack of your favorite beverage, and getting one can of fresh, 5 cans of, uh, used beverage. So some simple filters were put in place to reduce the waste.
There are lots of lists, and about 4 to 5 millions messages go out every month to around 15,000 addresses all over the world. All that useless quoting really adds up in congestion on the network line in and out of the server, archive sizes being much larger than they need to be, the indexing prgrams for the searchable web search having to do a lot extra work both in the initial indexing of repetitive paragraphs and performing searches for the user. I mean, how useful is it to return the default limit of 50 matches if 49 of them are the same paragraph?
There is no real reason to include the complete text below one's message. Quite often the subject line alone is sufficient context, sometimes you may need to include a sentence or two to provide proper references to your reply. I really doubt there are cases where one needs to include full headers, signatures, and complete texts of the original in replies.
Even with the death trailer, you still get people who for some reason think that 'Edit your replies' means "send as much extra useless stuff as you wish to bog down the server, the network and overfill peoples' mailboxes so mjb has more admin work to do and just take out the few added lines."
If for some reason you are using Microsoft's Virus Spreading Wizard, aka Outlook, in the Tools -> Options menu you can change the setting to NOT include the entire orginal message in your reply. Other mail programs should have similar settings, check your documentation.

I know you can't legislate common sense and the courtesy to show some respect for the thousands of other subscribers on the many team.net lists, but being an optimist at heart, I try anyway.

The message was too long.

An additional attempt to cut down on the strain caused by useless quoting, as well as to block various virus files and such that manage to sneak past other filters is the limit on message size.  Messages which exceed this size limit are shuffled off to the administrator mail, and eventually I get around to forwarding them on.

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