Revision 1 as of 2018-08-26 16:07:06

Clear message

I don't get my own posts

First, check if they're in the archives, or if other members are receiving them. If both are false, you will need the help of the admins at your email service provider and/or the mailing list owner. For some reason, the list is either not receiving them or rejecting them, and that is a problem beyond the scope of this FAQ.

Second, if the archives or other users are receiving them, there are several possible problems.

1. If you are receiving no mail at all from the list, it may think you are on vacation. Go to your list options page, and check if the "Mail delivery" option is set to "Disabled". If so, set it to "Enabled". Note: If you didn't set "no mail" yourself, it may be that some mail problem caused a few posts to bounce back to the list, which then disabled your subscription. You may want to check again in a week or so to make sure you haven't been disabled again. If that happens, talk to your email provider (not the list owner, who has no idea why your provider is rejecting mail sent to you).

2. If you receive others' posts, but not your own, you may have the "Receive your own posts to the list?" set to "No". Set it to "Yes".

3. Some spam filters give points to messages that appear to be from the address being delivered to. You'll need to talk to whoever manages your spam filter about that; the mailing list can't do anything about it. Perhaps you can change something in your posts that will reduce what the filter thinks is spamminess.

There are a number of less likely possibilities that won't be discussed here because they're rare and hard to diagnose. Ask your mail provider and/or mailing list administrator, or write to mailman-users@python.org.

And now we come to the elephant in the room: Gmail. Gmail, and sites that delegate their email service to Google, use the Message-ID to deduplicate your mail. If you post from Gmail, Gmail knows you already have a copy in your Sent folder, and throws away the copy from the mailing list. This is superficially reasonable (this is the kind of thing that Message-IDs are used for!), but for several reasons the mailing list copy is likely to be more useful than the Sent folder copy. Unfortunately, this policy is long-established and Google explicitly refuses to change it. The following procedure may help (I haven't tried it yet myself, and there are conflicting reports: most people who try it say it works, but some say it doesn't, and nobody knows why).

It is reported that you can use a GMail filter to prevent GMail from discarding your posts to a mailing list when they are sent back to you by the server. Thanks to Mike Barnett for pointing us to a page by Marvin Woodworth at

which has screenshots of the process if you prefer that kind of documentation.

The screenshots assume you're in the "traditional" GMail interface. I don't know how to access settings from the "Inbox" interface; updates are welcome.

1. Click on the gear in the upper right corner. A menu should be popped up.

2. In the menu, click on "Settings", typically the top choice below the central divider.

3. In the Settings screen, click on "Filters", which is usually in the center of the "menu" of links across the top of the page.

4. In the "Filters" screen, click on "Create a new filter". I think this appears at the bottom of the list of filters you have created (which may be empty).

5. Enter your Gmail address in the From field of the popup dialog. It's at the top.

6. Click on "Create filter with this search" at the bottom right of the dialog.

7. In the dialog of actions that appears, check the box for "Never send to spam" near the bottom of the dialog.

8. Click the "Create filter" button, and you're done!