This article explains why you may have difficulty posting messages via email to a group. Includes information on why emails sent to the group may not appear in the group or be returned to one's inbox.

If you are unable to post to a group via email, the issue usually is caused by one of the following five reasons:

1. Your messages are coming from an email address that doesn't match the address used to subscribe to the group.

This is a common problem, and when this is the case, you should receive an error message back via email letting you know that the message did not post (although sometimes these error messages will get spam filtered). To learn why your email address may not match your subscription address, and how to fix it, please see this article.

2. You do not have permission to post to the group.

The only way to see if this is the case is to visit your group on the web. When you do, if you do not see a “Post” link in the left hand nav bar, it means that you do not have permission to post to the group. This may be because no one in the group has permission to do so or it may be because the moderator of the group has explicitly removed your posting privileges. Either way, only the moderator of the group can restore your ability to post. You can contact the moderator of the group by sending email to GROUPNAME-owner@yahoogroups.com (replacing “GROUPNAME” with the actual name of the group).

3. Your posts are not being approved by the moderator

You will only know if this is a possible cause if you try to post from the web. When you do, you will know if your posts require moderation before being posted if a message reading “Your message must be approved by the group owner before being sent to the group” appears at the top of the Post Page and after submitting your post you see a message reading “Your message is awaiting for approval.”

If the moderator if the group is not approving your posts, you can contact them to ask why by sending email to GROUPNAME-owner@yahoogroups.com (replacing “GROUPNAME” with the actual name of the group). But keep in mind that moderators have complete discretion over what messages they choose to approve. Yahoo! cannot contact them on your behalf to ask them to approve your posts.

4. You're replying to individual members (or the owner of the group) rather than the group as a whole.

For replies to a group's messages, some groups use a setting that prefills the "To" field with only the email address of the message sender. This means that if you click "Reply," by default, the group's email address will not appear in the "To" field unless you manually add it. To see if this case with your group, pay close attention after you click “reply” to the email address in the “To” field of your reply. If the address is that of an individual user (or the group owner address) rather than the group email address, your replies will only go to that user.

To reply to the group as a whole, you will need to change the “To” address to the group address. Or you can simply click the “Reply to the group” link in the original email rather than the Reply Button on your email client.

5. Your messages are successfully posting, but they aren’t being emailed back to you.

Some email clients, most notably Gmail, will not deliver message you send back to your email address (they assume that since the message is already in your “sent” folder, you don’t want another copy). To see if this is happening in your case, go to the group’s message archive to see if your message is there or ask other members of the group if they are getting your messages. If they are, then you will need to contact your email provider about why they are not delivering your messages back to you.