Yahoo Email Issues

First of all, for those of you who may have contacted me via doombob at doombob dot com, I am sorry if I have not been able to respond the last few weeks. I have set this email address to forward to my doombob Yahoo! account. Unfortunately, Yahoo appears to be attempting to implement a “greylisting” feature in order to reduce the amount of SPAM their customers receive. Instead, all this is doing is aggravating those with Yahoo accounts. If you email at my contact address now, it goes to my account on this server, not forwarded to Yahoo. If you would like more information on these issues, read on…

doombob.com    

This guy appears to be a Yahoo fanboy, but has a good overview of what Yahoo is attempting to do, why they are doing it, and what is happening to people: http://www.realfreewebsites.com/blog/dropped-emails-yahoos-gain/
Yahoo is implementing their own spam control feature called DomainKeys. In the process of doing this, many servers cannot talk to the Yahoo Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs). The problem is that Yahoo initially denies all emails from systems it does not recognize, forcing the original sending server to attempt a resend. This appears to be happening to every server that is sharing multiple domains. Once a message finally gets through, it is placed on the Bulk (Spam) folder in a person’s Yahoo Mailbox.

This blog discusses in depth Yahoo’s (as well as many other) email issues: http://blog.wordtothewise.com/index.php/category/yahoo/
In general, what this describes is that all email systems have their own set of problems. Yahoo is just the only email provider that appears to be deliberately changing their systems to a proprietary format so that people will be forced to use their DomainKeys. I guess they’re hoping to be more like Microsoft so that they can get bought. Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

This is a semi-official Yahoo Mail Blog apologizing for delays in getting back to people requesting help on the system administrator side of things: http://ymailupdates.com/blog/2008/04/08/update-postmaster-queue-delays/
Not really heavy on the technical explanation, really. More excuses for why problems haven’t been taken care of.

Here’s a generic article talking about the issue: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3628827
Providers don’t appear to think that Yahoo is “malicious” in their attempts to improve spam filtering, but are impatient with the time it’s taking (since February) to get this problems solved.

I’ll post a summary on this page later Today (4/14)… Updated at 9:15pm.