This article describes why messages sent from your groups may be delayed or may not be received in your inbox.

In general, messages sent to Yahoo! Groups are delivered within minutes. Occasionally, you may experience delays due to one or more of the following factors:

• High volumes of Internet traffic.
• Problems or backlogs with your email provider's email delivery systems.
• Problems or backlogs with Yahoo! Groups email delivery systems.

Also, in groups where messages are moderated, messages are held in pending status until they are approved by a group moderator.

If you’re not receiving messages from your Yahoo! group -- even accounting for a possible delay -- please check your group's message archive to ensure that messages have actually been sent recently. We've found that a lull in group activity is sometimes misleading and members can mistake this for a problem receiving emails.

Once you've determined that there are messages in the archive that aren't in your email account, check with other members in your group to see if you are the only one who's not receiving emails or if the problem affects all group members.

If just you or a small subset of users in the group are not receiving messages, then the issue is related to your settings or to issues with your email provider. As a first step, we encourage you to check your spam folder. Often, the messages are inadvertently being directed there, but there are several other possible causes.

Note: These steps are valid even if your email provider is Yahoo! Mail. While the Yahoo! Groups and Mail teams work closely together, Groups messages are ultimately subject to the same treatment as all other messages sent to Yahoo! Mail users.

1. Check your email settings for the affected group, to be sure you are still set to “Individual Emails” or “Daily Digest” (rather than “Special Notices” or “No Email”). You can see the email settings for all your groups on the My Groups page.
2. Check your spam folder. Many email providers are likely to mark messages sent from mailing lists as spam, even in cases where the same message would not be directed to the spam folder if it were sent to you directly.
3. Did you post the messages you are not receiving to the group? Some email providers (most notably Gmail) will not deliver back messages you have sent.
4. Check your email preferences. If the status of your email address is "Bouncing" (rather than "Normal"), it means your email provider is not accepting messages sent to your account from Yahoo! Groups and we have stopped trying to send you messages. To remove yourself from bouncing status, click the "unbounce" link that will also appear in the Status column for bouncing users. NOTE: While Yahoo! Groups will again begin sending messages once you are no longer in bouncing status, the messages still won’t get there if your email provider continues to bounce them.
5. Check your Bounce History. To do this, go to Email Preferences, and click the "Show History" link next to relevant email address. This page will show you a record of the messages sent from Yahoo! Groups that were bounced back to us by your email provider and includes the explanation your email provider supplied for why they bounced the latest message. Unfortunately, if your email provider is bouncing messages from Yahoo! Groups,  Yahoo! Groups will not be able to send the message through. In this situation, please follow up with your email provider directly or try using a different email provider.
6. Follow up with your email provider. Even if your Bounce History is clean, your email provider still may be the root of problem. Some email providers, rather than bouncing messages, will simply “drop” them. Email providers generally do this because they think a message is spam, and they are particularly likely to use this approach with bulk messages coming from email lists and groups. Unfortunately, this is another situation where your only option is to contact your email provider to get their help in resolving the issue.

If no one in the group is receiving emails, then the problem is usually a Yahoo! Groups bug. If that is the case for your group, please contact us.

If you still have questions, try posting your question to other Yahoo! Groups users on Yahoo! Answers, or visit one of the Groups about Yahoo! Groups.