Thanks so much for all of your patience and emails as we've worked through some delivery issues with the weekly E-Sylum. While many of you never had issues, users of AOL, Yahoo and some other email providers have experienced problems in recent weeks. These providers were rejecting our emails as spam, which led to follow-on issues causing several subscriptions to be dropped.

As noted earlier, email providers will never tell you exactly why they reject a message (not wanting to tell actual spammers how to get round their rules). But that leaves legitimate senders like us in the dark, having to guess and experiment.

Last Sunday we tried an experiment that worked in a big way - dozens and dozens of readers reported receiving their issue after a multi-week dry spell. What worked was sending a very short email with links to the full issue on our website. We also sent a normal version with all of the content in the body of the email itself. These are actually far smaller than they look because images are not embedded in the message; rather, they are hosted elsewhere on our Flickr archive. But apparently the size of the issue was still triggering the problem for AOL, Yahoo and some others.

So for the time being we'll continue sending our both versions to everyone of the mailing list. Only one will get through to some of you. In time we'll likely switch to the shorter version for everyone.

Here are some of the reader reactions to last Sunday's experiment. The first came from Martin Purdy in Upper Hutt, New Zealand. -Editor

"Thanks for running the "short version" trial - as of a few minutes ago I have both versions via Gmail, but only the short version via Yahoo. So perhaps Yahoo does simply hiccup when the text length exceeds a certain amount."

"You may be on to something. Tonight the short version came through, but not the regular one. My Verizon e-mail address goes through AOL and they can be very annoying with their spam filters. I check the AOL online spam folder every day because it likes to filter things that are not spam, but the E-Sylum wasn't even there. Very frustrating when they just reject something and don't ever notify anyone. It looks like the size of the message may be part of the issue."

"Problem solved, and AOL was the problem! Since reactivating my old Gmail account anything you send is arriving! Yee haw - I'm back in the fold."

"After an absence of a couple months, your short email arrived safely tonight. The full issue did NOT arrive. Hope this helps you diagnose the delivery problems. Also, I thoroughly enjoy your issues and your work as editor, glad I am back among the living recipients! If there are advantages to being on my Gmail id rather than AOL, pls let us readers know in the future if appropriate."

I don't think we've ever had a report of trouble from a Gmail user. Outlook also seems to be working OK. -Editor

"So happy to find my E-Sylum in my mailbox this morning. Whatever you did, it worked. Please keep doing it! Thanks for all you do"

"I have not been getting the e-mail for a few weeks. Yes, this came through and was easy enough to click on to read the full one. Works for me!"

"I did receive your shortened version late yesterday evening. But I did not receive the long version. I think that the shortened version with links to the regular issue is the way to go in the future. And thanks for keeping this information coming! You do a fantastic job!!!!"

"I did receive it this week in the new format. I was able to use the links to access it and read online. Please continue to send it to me in the new format. This is very informative and I have purchased books after reading about them in your newsletter. Thank you very much."

But some who aren't getting the full issue anymore miss it. -Editor

"Last night's issue came to my mailbox. The link worked fine to the whole issue. I'd sure like to get the direct copy back via AOL, however.

"Let me add my thanks to the kind words of hundreds of others for what you do and have done for a long time on the e-sylum. It is, and remains, a mainstay of the hobby."

"The smaller issue arrived. I prefer the standard issue. I look forward to it every week and think you do a great job with it."

We can't control what AOL and Yahoo decide to do, but at least we seem to have found a workaround for now. Thanks again for everyone's patience and kind words. -Editor