Is it just us or are there general problems with sending email to
yahoo in the past few weeks? Our queues to them are backed up though
they drain slowly.
(where MAILSERVERIP is one of our mail server ip addresses)
Yes I followed the link and filled out the form but after several days
no response or change.
Despite the wording of their message we're not aware of any cause for
"user complaints". For example if there were a spam leak you'd expect
to see complaints in general to postmaster, abuse, etc. None we're
aware of.
We host quite a few mailing lists and it seems like whatever they're
using is being touched off by the volume of (legitimate) mailing list
traffic.
I'm automatically moving all their email to a slower delivery queue to
see if that helps.
Just wondering if this was a widespread problem or are we just so
blessed, and any insights into what's going on over there.
Is it just us or are there general problems with sending email to
yahoo in the past few weeks? Our queues to them are backed up though
they drain slowly.
(where MAILSERVERIP is one of our mail server ip addresses)
....
Just wondering if this was a widespread problem or are we just so
blessed, and any insights into what's going on over there.
I see this a lot also and what I see causing it is accounts on my servers
that don't opt for spam filtering and they have their accounts here set to
forward mail to their yahoo.com accounts - spam and everything then gets
sent there - they complain to yahoo.com about the spam and bingo - email
delays from here to yahoo.com accounts....
Chris
- --------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Stone, MCSE
Vice President, CTO
AxisInternet, Inc.
910 16th St., Suite 1110, Denver, CO 80202
- --------------------------------------------------------------------
PH 303.592.AXIS x302 - 866.317.AXIS | FAX 303.893.AXIS
- --------------------------------------------------------------------
cstone@axint.net | www.axint.net
- --------------------------------------------------------------------
I had a similar problem recently and found someone at yahoo who
would tweak things so I was no longer getting delayed. The problem is
dumb users reporting list mail as spam in an attempt to unsubscribe.
This is common with a few mail services but the first time I personally
was impacted as I tend to run a nice clean 'ship'.
I do wish that the mail providers would do a better job of
warning people what is happening, why and give some warning. I have
400+ unique yahoo accounts that get list mail so short of sending them
all email saying they're idiots you have to wait for them to tweak their
delays. Worst part is if the lists are active you can quickly end up
with thousands of queued messages making it harder to clear the queue.
Is it just us or are there general problems with sending email to
yahoo in the past few weeks? Our queues to them are backed up though
they drain slowly.
I have ~3,000 messages (from today) stuck with this 421-ts01 problem. Mostly it's our "campus mail bag" which is a digest that goes out to students (many of whom forward their campus mail off-site).
Interestingly, it's only on the newest of our outbound SMTP boxes that's affected. The others (which have been in use for some years) still work just fine. Our SPF record is a permissive 'ptr ~all', btw.
Is it just us or are there general problems with sending email to
yahoo in the past few weeks? Our queues to them are backed up though
they drain slowly.
I know that Yahoo does greylisting, and we often have a large queue backup as a result of mailing lists with a lot of @yahoo.com addresses. As long as you keep retrying I find that they do eventually get through.
Between greylisting and sender callback verification, it seems that overall email delivery is increasing in latency and decreasing in reliability.
mostly. It feels like a poorly implemented spam prevention system.
Doing some Google searches will turn up some more background on the
issue. We've been telling our users that Yahoo mail is problematic
and if they can to switch away from using them as their private email
or hosted email.
Maybe we all should do the same to them until they quit spewing out all the
Nigerian scams and the like that I've been seeing from their servers lately!
Is it just us or are there general problems with sending email to
yahoo in the past few weeks? Our queues to them are backed up though
they drain slowly.
[ snip details ]
Just wondering if this was a widespread problem or are we just so
blessed, and any insights into what's going on over there.
Not only "been there, done that", but "am there, doing that".
We admin the server for a list in which one person sends out a weekly
post. Subscriber base is about 14,000 people, with around 2000 of those
subscribers using Yahoo boxes.
"Excessive" bounces trigger automatic unsubscribes. Although Yahoo
readership accounts for 14% of subscribers, it's not uncommon for 98% of
automated unsubscribes to be Yahoo-based... followed by Yahoo-using
people sending list-admin requests asknig why they were dropped, and
wanting to sign back up.
Following URLs in Yahoo's 4xx codes gives virtually-useless information.
The easiest fix to date has been for people to use less-presumptive
email services.
Is it just us or are there general problems with sending email to
yahoo in the past few weeks? Our queues to them are backed up though
they drain slowly.
(where MAILSERVERIP is one of our mail server ip addresses)
....
Just wondering if this was a widespread problem or are we just so
blessed, and any insights into what's going on over there.
I see this a lot also and what I see causing it is accounts on my servers
that don't opt for spam filtering and they have their accounts here set to
forward mail to their yahoo.com accounts - spam and everything then gets
sent there - they complain to yahoo.com about the spam and bingo - email
delays from here to yahoo.com accounts....
This thread got me checking logs and I just spotted several of those "deferred due to user complaints" tags. And compared to them, we're tiny. Don't know if it's widespread, but it appears you are not the only one so blessed.
I've been tempted to implement sort of a "reverse blacklisting". If an
(MX|provider) trips a 4xx threshold, have the local MTA s/4/5/ on emails
to the problem (MX|domain). If it trips a 5xx threshold, including
"upgraded" 4xx responses, simply refuse delivery altogether at the local
end.
"You don't like our email? Fine. You won't see it."
We've observed good success convincing people to switch away from
overly-draconian email providers... so a "reverse blacklist" might not
be as _Wolkenkuckucksheim_ as it seems. Or, then again, it might.
The most commonly understood form of "greylisting" is where an
SMTP server will reject every message the first time it is
attempted, and then accept it if the sending server retries
later. The theory is that spammers won't retry messages, while
legitimate senders will.
Is it just us or are there general problems with sending email to
yahoo in the past few weeks? Our queues to them are backed up though
they drain slowly.
(where MAILSERVERIP is one of our mail server ip addresses)
Yes I followed the link and filled out the form but after several days
no response or change.
I got the following auto-response to filling out the form:
"This is an automated message regarding your recent request for Yahoo!
Postmaster Customer Care Support. We have received your message but due
to a temporary problem we wanted to let you know it could take up to a
week until you receive a response. We apologize for this inconvenience.
Thank you for reaching out to us. We look forward to helping you!"
Makes me wonder exactly what their "temporary" problem is... a week of deferred mail could really stack up.
I have had to tell some dedicated server clients that they will need to disable their forwards to Yahoo or add something like postini for those accounts that forward to Yahoo...It generally works...however Yahoo! for the past three months is now blocking entire /24's if a few IP's get complaints. They have the feedback loops however when you have a network with 175,000 IP addresses and you sign up for a feedback loop for them all they tend to flood your abuse desk with false positives, or forwarded spam. They also don't keep track of which IP's are getting the complaints for you to investigate after the block on the /24 so asking them won't help :(. This potentially means one customer could easily effect the other customer. They offer whitelisting, but this won't get you passed their blocks on the entire /24. They apparently will eventually accept the message because they aren't necessarily 'blocked' but they are 'depriortized' meaning they don't believe your IP is important enough to deliver the message at that time, so they want you to keep trying and when their servers are not 'busy' or 'over loaded' they will accept the message. (Paraphrased from conversations with their 'Bulk Mail Advocacies and Anti-Abuse manager.)
I have had to tell some dedicated server clients that they will need to disable their forwards to Yahoo or add something like postini for those accounts that forward to Yahoo...It generally works...however Yahoo! for the past three months is now blocking entire /24's if a few IP's get complaints. They have the feedback loops however when you have a network with 175,000 IP addresses and you sign up for a feedback loop for them all they tend to flood your abuse desk with false positives, or forwarded spam. They also don't keep track of which IP's are getting the complaints for you to investigate after the block on the /24 so asking them won't help :(. This potentially means one customer could easily effect the other customer. They offer whitelisting, but this won't get you passed their blocks on the entire /24. They apparently will eventually accept the message because they aren't necessarily 'blocked' but they are 'depriortized' meaning they don't believe your IP is importan
t enough to deliver the message at that time, so they want you to keep trying and when their servers are not 'busy' or 'over loaded' they will accept the message. (Paraphrased from conversations with their 'Bulk Mail Advocacies and Anti-Abuse manager.)
I've had to tell some of our customers the same and that if they wanted to
continue the forwarding to their yahoo.com accounts, they'd need to add spam
filtering to their accounts here so that the crap is not forwarded,
resulting in the email delays for all customers. Works for some and
generated more revenue....
This thread got me checking logs and I just spotted several of those "deferred due to user complaints" tags. And compared to them, we're tiny. Don't know if it's widespread, but it appears you are not the only one so blessed.
We've seen this before too but this week it has been different. Every single host that relays email on our network has these in the queue. Now a couple of them do mailing lists and such so I could see it happening but a couple of them don't do anything high volume at all.
For some of them some mail goes through but only some of the time. It seems like if we hit the right MX machine it works and other times it does not.
We tried going around them by sending mail over to an employee's personal mail server (which does nearly no volume at all) but even it is blocked probably 1/2 the time.
I'm not sure what is going on but given all this I can't believe it is just "normal".
We filled out one of those forms but just got back a response that said it wasn't happening but if it was we should see their "best practices" URL. Only problem is we actually do everything on their list (including both DomainKeys and DKIM).
> Does Yahoo! use "greylisting" to reject messages?
> No.
The most commonly understood form of "greylisting" is where an SMTP server will reject every message the first time it is attempted, and then accept it if the sending server retries later. The theory is that spammers won't retry messages, while legitimate senders will.
Whatever they call it is immaterial. The end result to our system is indistinguishable from real greylisting. Perhaps there's a tiny fraction that aren't ever deferred, but in general I find the majority of our queue is destined to @yahoo.com addresses.
I think I'll followup on the other posters ideas of:
1) Implementing a separate outbound gateway just for yahoo.com
2) Advising users to switch to gmail.
I think it took a few weeks for me to get a reply through that system...I believe their 'Bulk Mail Advocacy' said they are typically 72hours. Try increasing your retries to extend beyond that.
Yeah, but without them saying which IP's are causing the problems you can't really tell which servers in a datacenter are forwarding their spam/abusing Yahoo. Once the /24 block is in place then they claim to have no way of knowing who actually caused the block on the /24. The feedback loop would help depending on your network size. When you have a few hundred thousand clients, and those clients have clients, and they even have client, it simply floods your abuse desk with complaints from Yahoo when it is obviously forwarded spam. So it's more of pick your poison deal with customer complaints about not being able to send to yahoo for a few days or get your abuse desk flooded with complaints which hinders solving actual issues like compromised accounts.
It's not you. Lots of people are seeing this, as Yahoo's mail servers
are apparently too busy sending ever-increasing quantities of spam to
have to accept inbound traffic. Sufficiently persistent and lucky
people have sometimes managed to penetrate the outer clue-resistant
shells of Yahoo and effect changes, but some of those seem ineffective
and temporary. There doesn't seem to be any simple, universal fix for
this other than advising people that Yahoo's email service is already
miserable and continues to deteriorate, and hoping that they migrate
elsewhere.
Yeah, but without them saying which IP's are causing the problems you can't really tell which servers in a datacenter are forwarding their spam/abusing Yahoo. Once the /24 block is in place then they claim to have no way of knowing who actually caused the block on the /24. The feedback loop would help depending on your network size. When you have a few hundred thousand clients, and those clients have clients, and they even have client, it simply floods your abuse desk with complaints from Yahoo when it is obviously forwarded spam. So it's more of pick your poison deal with customer complaints about not being able to send to yahoo for a few days or get your abuse desk flooded with complaints which hinders solving actual issues like compromised accounts.
I look at all my mail server log files and see which logs show obvious spam
being forwarded (a lot of times the MAIL FROM address is a dead giveaway) or
I tail -F the mail log for a bit and watch the spam coming in and forwarding
back out. When I see the forwarding domain that's who I have contacted to
upsell some spam filtering. But, we're a small ISP, so I don't have
thousands, let alone hundreds of thousands of clients, to deal with...
