Submissions from Yahoo mail accounts
Over the past couple of months, at least eight of our rejections sent to Yahoo mail accounts have silently disappeared. We send the rejection, we get no bounce or other indication that anything has gone wrong, and then a few weeks later the author writes to ask us why we haven't responded to their story yet.
I contacted Yahoo about this; they said they can't do anything unless our ISP contacts them. I'm dubious about the likelihood of Pair customer service being willing to try to figure out why Yahoo is throwing away email, but I guess I'll give it a try.
But in the meantime, I thought I should spread the word that if you've submitted to us from a Yahoo account, you should be even more careful than usual to query us as soon as the 70-day time limit is up.
Email does just disappear sometimes; this isn't an issue unique to Yahoo. But usually if our rejections disappear without a bounce, that's a one-time fluke. Whereas this Yahoo thing is starting to look like a pattern.
It's an intermittent problem. I know of at least a couple of rejections sent to Yahoo addresses during that time period that have gone through just fine. But I'm no longer willing to guess that this might just be a series of flukes--eight flukes with the same symptoms over a two-month period (all to the same domain) is too much of a coincidence.