Group Website Home Page:  https://stormmountain.groups.io/g/main

The new groups.io list is now active.  To ask to join this list, please go to the website home page, and read the information to understand the process.  Click on the “Apply for membership in this group” button near the bottom.

StormMountain Yahoo Group Issues and Transition to groups.io

Notice: May 2, 2018
Yahoo is failing to accept and deliver group messages to 45 @yahoo.com (or Yahoo hosted) email addresses that are members of the group.
If you have a @yahoo.com email address, or another serviced by Yahoo, I recommend switching to a non-yahoo email address, like from Google. Then, re-apply to the group with your new email address.

When Yahoo refused to accept a message, the error message was either a cryptic “request aborted” or more often “This user doesn’t have a yahoo.com account” when the Yahoo group member list shows this is not so.  This failure of Yahoo is also preventing you from receiving the email message that allows you to log in to the group website to set a password.

Some @yahoo.com email addresses appear to be working.  If you haven’t been receiving messages from the new group, Yahoo is failing to deliver your email messages.

Sent: Sunday, April 22, 2018 to StormMountain Yahoo Group members

In recent weeks, our ability to communicate with one another via Yahoo Groups has degraded, due to various Yahoo issues resulting in a failure of Yahoo to forward to all of us many of the messages sent to the stormmountain@yahoogroups.com email address.  Over the weekend, this failure extended even to messages sent via the “new topic” button on the group website.

As a result, I have been exploring alternatives.  I have been looking for something that retains the simplicity of the Yahoo group – sending an email to the group email address results in it being forwarded to all the members of the group (with the same options for daily digest or website-only viewing we have now).

The most promising possibility I have found is a commercial (i.e. pay-for-service, not free) company doing business as groups.io.  Unless another, clearly better, alternative is found, I will proceed to initiate the conversion.  The cost is reasonable – $110 / year.  I’ll talk about donations down the road, for those who want to help defray the cost to us.

I’m still learning about all this, so please understand if I get some details wrong.  Groups.io will perform the conversion from Yahoo, retaining most settings, files and archived messages – though attachments to archived messages will not be retained.  Similar to Yahoo, messages sent to stormmountain@groups.io will be forwarded to all members of the group.

As I understand the process, once the conversion is complete you will not need to do anything special to be able to send or receive messages via the groups.io service, except to send the message to the new group email address: stormmountain@groups.io.   You will receive a message from groups.io during the transition process – this is informational only, requiring no action on your part.  If you want to access the stormmountain group via the http://groups.io website, you will log in to it using the email address you receive group messages at, and will need to assign a password the first time you do so.

If you do not want to participate in the new group structure, either un-subscribe from the Yahoo group or let me know, and I will remove you from the Yahoo group before the transition takes place.  The transition process is an all-or-nothing proposition.

Please reply to this message if you have any comments / questions / suggestions about all this.  Meanwhile, if you have a message that needs to get to the community, please send it to me and I will send it out to the community in the same way this message is going out – a MailChimp distribution list that duplicates the recipients of the Yahoo group.

Thanks for your patience and understanding during this process – I guess nothing lasts forever, especially things that are free.  TANSTAAFL

John Green