No Yahoo Email

[cos]

If you use a @yahoo.com email account, I can't send you email. Nor can a lot of other people.

Yahoo either likes it that way, or is totally uninterested in fixing it.

Sometime this past weekend, the servers that receive mail for @yahoo.com addresses started deferring email from most IP addresses, as far as I can tell. For the geeky among you: Connect to any of Yahoo's MX's, and you get "451 Message temporarily deferred - 4.16.50" before you even get a chance to EHLO. For the non-geeky: Yahoo's basically saying "go away, come back later and try again", over and over and over, without even trying to find out what you're trying to send or who it's to. Ever since then, any email I've sent to an @yahoo.com address has just waited, deferred, for days. It seems that sometimes, on rare occasions, it gets through - but usually only after a day or longer.

Yahoo isn't doing this to everyone. I tried connecting to their mail servers from a number of places, and while I got immediate deferral from most, it didn't happen when I tried to connect from world.std.com. I'm not sure what exactly they're doing. Maybe they have a list of known major mail servers they allow through. Maybe they're giving special treatment to the companies that pay them for better email service (you might remember the brouhaha about that from this spring). Whatever they're doing, they're not telling, and they don't wanna talk.

I tried submitting requests through their online help form, twice. No response, days later.
I tried calling their corporate office, and their customer care number. I got dead ends.
They insisted I pay them for support or they couldn't help me. No transfers to managers (unless I know their full names). No messages for someone to call me. No tickets opened. Just a few hours wasted making phone calls.

If you use Yahoo for email, please leave them.

And if you want to get any emails from me, let me know what your non-yahoo address is.

Comments

[scromp.livejournal.com]

I've had problems with them for a while, and their overly aggressive spam filters. I consider yahoo drop boxes to be 95% lossy.

[cos]

You could think of this as an overly-aggressive spam filter. "If the email comes from somewhere that isn't paying us, we'll call it spam!" :/

[geoffroi.livejournal.com]

they're greylisting:

http://www.ahfx.net/weblog.php?article=107

[cos]

Nope. I'm greylisting. And that article describes greylisting. But that's not what Yahoo is doing. They're just giving a 451 and closing the connection, no matter how many times I retry. And it's before the EHLO, so they don't even know who the mail is from or to, just the IP address it's coming from.

Maybe their intent is to greylist, but if so, it's completely broken. It literally takes days for email to get through, if at all.

[bisky.livejournal.com]

That article is wrong about a lot of things including that Yahoo is greylisting and that DK will somehow fix it.

[cos]

It's right about at least one thing, though:
Yahoo is not communicating with administrators even after they submit multiple request forms.

[bisky.livejournal.com]

That does appear to be the case for some people, yes.

Thanks for the comments

[(Anonymous)]

That article is wrong about a lot of things including that Yahoo is greylisting and that DK will somehow fix it.
I am the "author" of the article in question. Whether you call it greylisting or deprioritizing, it is happening based on IP Address. All we know is that once we installed DomainKeys (and got an email through with the DomainKeys info), our connections improved.
We've had some comments that agree with that and others that still have no success. We were just trying to share the info that was able to help us and possibly help others as well. Thanks for your comments again!

Re: Thanks for the comments

[bisky.livejournal.com]

Greylisting and deprioritizing are two different things. You're completely confusing the issue by claiming they are the same. De-prioritizing is based on the content that you are sending, among other things and the IP address you're sending from. Greylisting is something completely different.

And, yes, I have heard from a Yahoo mail employee who says they ARE NOT greylisting.

Re: Thanks for the comments

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

You mean like this (http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-07.html)?

[kyra.livejournal.com]

Well, that's complete bullshit, innit?

I don't have a yahoo, but I'm not sure if you have my current email, but anything sent to kyra at livejournal dot come will go to my mail email, and I'll respond from there. :)

[cos]

550 <kyra@livejournal.com>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table

Contact LJ support?

(I tried sending the email to what I think is your current address, too)

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Shortly after I read this I stopped being able to get to Gmail's server to check my e-mail. Coincidence? ;P

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

Maybe they're giving special treatment to the companies that pay them for better email service (you might remember the brouhaha about that from this spring).

If you do remember that, what you're remembering is a bunch of completely counterfactual horseshit, all of which was a made-up nightmare scenario invented by the EFF and MoveOn.org after they read way too much into one poorly-reviewed one-page AOL press release. It's not just overly alarmist, it's also completely wrong, and this has been explained to them many many times, and yet dearAOL.com (http://www.dearaol.com/) is still there. The only obvious explanation for this I can see is that they're afraid to lose face by admitting they got it completely ass-backwards and stupid.

1) No one is paying anyone to get their mail delivered or avoid spamfilters. There is no amount of money that spammers would be willing to pay that would satisfy end-users or ISPs enough to deliver their spam. Spammers know that spam works because it doesn't cost them anything to send it, so nobody is going to pay more than a token amount to spam anyways, so 'dearaol.com' is idiotic on its face.

2) Some people are paying for certification programs that will put their bulk mail under heavier scrutiny of processes and tighter monitoring in exchange for increased consideration to keep it out of big ISPs spam-folders. In many cases, these are solicited mass-mail things like online airline ticket purchase receipts, and online trade confirmation emails, and other shit that you really don't want to block anyways, so if you can put a value-added mechanism on top of your spamfilter that'll keep you from pissing off your users, it's in both the ISPs and the mailers's best interests to do so.

3) However, the status quo (email is either accepted, spamfoldered, or rejected, based on existing criteria) does not, and will not change. Nobody is being punished for failing to spend money on their legitimate mail, in much the same way that nobody is getting a free pass for their spam because they are.

Paul Myers has a good article about this (http://www.talkbiznews.com/goodmail.html).

Now, actual facts of the extant case:

Yahoo has introduced something that's almost sorta not unlike greylisting. It appears to have not been terribly well-thought-out. They're aware of the problems, and they're fixing it. If you're the sort of person who keeps a tty open with the tail of your mail queue, you're probably seeing Yahoo mail back up. This is not the end of the world. If your queue retry time is set to five seconds, now might be a good time to set it to something a little more sane. Also, might want to give 'em a few days before gathering up friends, pitchforks, and torches and going to storm the building. ...just a thought.

[cos]

Actually, wrong on all counts, even though you seem to have some real information.

1. Yahoo is taking payments for "preferred email service" and this is an awful thing. They definitely have different levels or prioritized and "deprioritized" access to their SMTP servers, and you can pay them for priority access. It's arrogant and harmful, and reason enough to want them to wither away as an email provider, even if it is unrelated to the current problem.

2. My queue retry is pretty standard, something like 15 minutes the first time, then ramping up to 4 hours. And I didn't notice this by tailing my mail log, I noticed this when all my emails to people @yahoo.com utterly failed to get through this weekend (the first one finally got delivered in Tuesday, but others never did).

3. I gave Yahoo plenty of time and the benefit of the doubt. On the weekend, I submitted a report on their online form, then watched and waited. On Monday I began to experiment some more. On Tuesday I went to an ISP account and sent them some emails, and also tried the online form again. By yesterday, I got fed up and tried to find phone numbers to call them. The resulting frustrating waste of two hours is what made me want to "gather the pitchforks".

In several hours of making a number of phone calls to their support numbers, corporate offices, and WHOIS contact numbers, I got... nothing. Not even so much as a transfer to a manager, or a ticket opened, or a promise that someone would call me back, or a vague report that they know what the problem is and are working on it. None of those.

Don't give Yahoo any leeway on this. I don't care if they're drowning in spammers. They deserve to wither away and die.

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

Actually, wrong on all counts

I'm not, actually. But at least you've convinced me to stop trying to explain it to you.

[cos]

Nobody is being punished for failing to spend money on their legitimate mail,

Actually, yes - because if they are having resource issues, those resource issues are cutting out loads of mail from those who don't pay for priority SMTP access, while still letting through those who do. The more overloaded Yahoo's servers are, the less able they are to deal with delivering incoming mail, the more they favor those who pay, and punish all other legitimate senders along with the spammers. It's a two-tiered email system based on ability to pay.

in much the same way that nobody is getting a free pass for their spam because they are.

That's a strawman. The problems with Yahoo's scheme for taking payment for priority SMTP access are not that they give anyone a "free pass for spam". That doesn't make them not problems, or not serious. It just makes them not that specific problem which you say they're not.

[cos]

BTW, I just read the Paul Myers article, and it seems to address something entirely different from Yahoo's proposal to charge for priority SMTP access.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

I was going to lighten this response by starting with a phrase like Not to Quibble...

Until I thought about it.

Your first two points: No one is paying to avoid spamfilters and Some people are paying for ... programs that will keep their bulk mail out of ISPs spam-folders are in direct conflict. It's bulk mail. It's spam. I don't want to recieve mass-mailings. That's called 'Spam'. I accept that that's inconvenient for mailers (and have been on both sides of the transaction), but that's not relevant.

Final point: ticket purchase reciepts and trade confirmations are not solicited mass mailings. At least, they'd better the hell not be - I am certain I don't want anyone to recieve 50,000 copies of my trade confirmations.

[kirin]

I think people are operating under two different definitions of "bulk mail". There's 50,000 copies of the same commercial mail, and then there's companies that end up sending 50,000 different, individual mails to customers on the same ISP because that's they're volume. I'm not sure you and the person commenting above are talking about the same thing.

And then there's yet another category in between these two, of mailing or announcement lists that really are sending 50,000 copies of the same mail out to people who each individually honestly asked for it to be sent. Which can be awfully hard to differentiate from ones that weren't asked for.

I don't have any silver-bullet solutions for all this myself, but I do tend to agree that pay-for-whitelisting is a bad idea, since it puts non-profits and non-commercial groups with 50,000-person asked-for mailing lists at a distinct disadvantage.

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

Spam is both 'bulk' and 'unsolicited'. If two million people have signed up to a list that mails information about airline tickets on sale, that's not spam, because they signed up. If the two-million-and-first person added to the list is a guy I don't like who I added as a prank, it's spam to him, because he didn't ask for it, but it still isn't spam to those other two million people. If you don't want to receive mass mailings, don't sign up for 'em. Personally, I think I'm on a dozen-odd mailing lists, because I think they're useful.

Final point: 'bulk' is 'a group of messages that are substantively identical'. Fifty thousand messages that all say "Hello, (name), this is to confirm that your trade of (company) stock went through at (DTG) at (dollars per share) with (fees), so your account has been debited (amount)" are substantively identical, in the same way that Viagra and V1agra and V|agra and V1agra are substantively identical.

[simonbillenness.livejournal.com]

Another reason to quit Yahoo: the company rats out Chinese dissidents.

http://www.amnestyusa.org/business/censorship.html

[firegryphon.livejournal.com]

For all it's sometimes odd quirks, I'm still in love with gmail.

[jered]

I think they're just swamped. From my mail server, I find that if I randomly telnet to yahoo MX's port 25s, about 1 in 4 connections are accepted.

The problem is that postfix (and any good agent) does exponential backoff on a 451, which means that it could take weeks for a message to get delivered!

Yeah, they suck.

[cos]

When I first noticed the problem, I tried flushing my queue a few times, before I verified that they seemed not to be letting any connections through. It seemed to get better this evening (or late afternoon), now some connections get through. So it's possible they're just swamped, but if it's been happening since the weekend and as of Wednesday afternoon they still weren't even letting their people on the phone say so (and I made a number of calls!) I'm just as upset at them as if they'd done this on purpose.

[estheruth.livejournal.com]

my email goes down every time there's a high wind or big snow in southern Vermont...

[pde.livejournal.com]

pde@smilodon:[~]$ date
Thu Nov 2 19:57:28 CST 2006
pde@smilodon:[~]$ telnet mx1.mail.yahoo.com 25
Trying 4.79.181.14...
Connected to mx1.mail.yahoo.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mta202.mail.mud.yahoo.com ESMTP YSmtp service ready
ehlo smilodon.rfc822.net
250-mta202.mail.mud.yahoo.com
250-8BITMIME
250-SIZE 31981568
250 PIPELINING
mail from: <pete@ehlke.net>
250 sender <pete@ehlke.net> ok
rcpt to: <peteehlke@yahoo.com>
250 recipient <peteehlke@yahoo.com> ok
data
354 go ahead
blah
.
250 ok dirdel
quit
221 mta202.mail.mud.yahoo.com
Connection to mx1.mail.yahoo.com closed by foreign host.

[cos]

How consistent/repeatable is that for you? They seemed to improve some, late this afternoon sometime. Now I can connect about 1 out of every 3-5 tries, whereas before I think it was less than 1 out of 100.

[pde.livejournal.com]

Not one little bit of trouble at all. And smilodon is in SBC's residential DSL swamp, so it's not like I'm getting whitelisted due to address space cleanliness.

[rightkindofme.livejournal.com]

Interesting to me just because I have sent email to Noah on yahoo today from both my private account and from my gmail account and he received both instantly.

[cos]

I assume gmail has had priority access all along and was never affected by this. Your other account may have been at an ISP that was also not affected (like world.std.com, the place where I tried from at the beginning of the week and found that I could always connect). I assume that big ISPs and companies and other well known email providers have been able to mostly get through the whole time.