Why Yahoo Can’t Deliver Email

What a crock. I’ve used Y! mail for time-critical business for years and have had fewer receive difficulties than you can count on one hand. And the certified sender program referred to at the end of this has nothing to do with delivery speed or server availability as you try to claim it does.

It looks like someone has a bone to pick with the biggest provider of email or maybe you’re trying to find a few unhappy users and guide them to lesser known mail services with misdirection and confusing data. Either way, this is lame.

@Joe.
Good to hear you’re delighted… but if you think legitimate senders and receivers aren’t having trouble with Yahoo Mail delivery… you’re not paying attention.

Check CraigsList to see how much luck they’ve had delivering messages to Yahoo Mail. (fyi: CraigsList is the largest classified ad provider in North America.) The link’s in the BackGrounder.

The Certified Sender program assures senders that their mail will be allowed to bypass the content filters, speeding delivery. You can read all about *that* at GoodMail.com. The GoodMail link’s in the article, another is in the BackGrounder.

Most network managers go nuts if one of their mail servers are down for ten minutes; hence, as you seem to be totally out of touch with the measurements, your version of critical is way different from ours.

Email is 100% about delivery, Joe.

You see, it’s kind of like your mailbox at home. It doesn’t matter if somebody sent you a check, if you never received it.

And finally, both the email providers mentioned have good reputations, but there are tons of excellent email service providers out there.

We try to produce short articles with links for those who want to follow our tracks. You may want to check them out… or try running a search on Goo… sorry, Yahoo.

it look like yahoo’s experiencing the mail server equivalent of rolling blackouts. not sure if the blackouts are intentional (possibly an anti-spam measure?), or just a sign that their mail servers are overloaded.

Thank you for this test.
I have actually been trying to break my head over how to over come this problem. This is a perpetual problem with all Email service providers like us. The end user may not really realise the issue. This test confirms the thing we have beed suspecting all the while without much proof.

Lets see how GMAIL will respond to this one. Send this article to the Sergey Brinn. They should kill Yahoo.

@Jignesh.
Thanks for your kind comments.

We built Mail Server Profiler to help experienced admins like you see the really tough mail server problems from a different perspective.

Interestingly, it helps casual admins understand their mail servers better, too.

Feel free to point Mail Server Profiler at any server that’s giving you headaches.
(http://www.trimmail.com/news/tools/). And when you see something interesting, submit your data here as an article, so we can all benefit.

@lolli.
RE: “not sure if the blackouts are intentional (possibly an anti-spam measure?), or just a sign that their mail servers are overloaded.”

Either Yahoo Mail’s staff is dumb, which makes this an accident, or their really smart, which makes this a design. As the message delivery problem’s been around for quite awhile, I’m guessing the rolling blackouts are by design.

Heck of a way to chop spam and legitimate mail in one whack. Why didn’t everyone else think of it?

“Rolling blackouts…” Great term. From now on, that’s what I’m calling this phenomenon.

I run a mail server for a third party company that does about 35-40k emails per week. We are always getting massive delays when sending to Yahoo due to “resources temporarily unavailable.”

Did you see closed ports or smtp 45x ‘not available’ errors? If it’s the latter, this is not a blackout but greylisting in action: http://projects.puremagic.com/greylisting/

This is a completely bogus test. I highly doubt that the availability for the port 25 determined by your scans (most likely detected and selectively blocked because your activity is suspect) can explain any service issues people might experience.

While there may be issues with the service at Yahoo for mail (I haven’t had any trouble personally), port scanning them is likely not going to uncover the problem.

Before you put up junk like this, talk to people who run email services first and ask them if port scanning is something they try to detect and block….

Duh.

this is totally lame, for the reasons noted in the comment above. If my servers were receiving 8 connections per minute for 30 minutes they’d start blocking you. I suspect Yahoo has something more sophisticated than this.

Regardless of this, Yahoo mail is a free service which Yahoo doesn’t need to provide, I don’t see how anyone can complain if the servers do indeed go down.

As a side note, I’ve experienced regular delays of up to 4-5 HOURS sending mail between Hotmail accounts. Go figure.

It seems like this article was thrown up because you had nothing better to do, and don’t know what you’re talking about.

I suspect it’s spam overload. But that doesn’t rule out poor planning and deployment by Yahoo.

BTW, I stopped accepting all email from Hotmail/MSN, except from whitelisted senders (supplied by my users). That cut spam workload down tremendously. Maybe if Yahoo were to do the same thing … of course THAT would create a huge furor. I can get away with it being a small time operation; Yahoo can’t.

Now my largest spam source is … Yahoo. Their outbound servers are working

@Tavis. Pick an IP and watch it.
@Doubting Thomas. Connecting to an SMTP port is not scanning. It’s what mail servers do. Abuse an MX and you’ll be blocked.
@anonymous coward. Wow.

Point the tool at any mail servers you like. Yahoo’s response flat ain’t normal. Duh.

I agree with Doubting Thomas. You’ve just demonstrated that if you act in a suspicious manner, Yahoo! responds.
Heck, I greylist. They just are probably monitoring for suspicious activity too, and giving you a cooling off.
Just checked my logs at home. 11 e-mails to Yahoo! addresses - 3 servers connected to. Connecting from a mail server that’s on a dynamic block. All delivered successfully, no problems. But they know me by now.

Now Hotmail is annoying. They flatout block all traffic from addresses on dynamic blocks. I added a rule as a result if they ever connect to bounce them and tell the hotmail user to try another service that I can actually reply to.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=183037&cid=15125171

RE: “Acting in a suspicious manner” and Greylisting.

C’mon folks, if the suspicious manner was triggering greylisting, IP #1 wouldn’t be accepting mail 8 times out of 16, while #3 accepted it 5 times, while #14 accepted it 12 times. And all of them doing so m/o/l randomly.

As this article has been both slashdotted and reddited today, I’ve seen this logic over and over again, along with an awful lot of trolling;-)

I’d like to see an explanation that makes sense.

Tell you what. Point the Mail Server Profiler at your own domain, and see what it tells you. I’m betting that, once you compare your mail server’s responses to Yahoo Mail’s, you’ll be as surprised as we were. And don’t forget to let us know how it worked out.
(http://www.trimmail.com/news/tools)

I don’t know about you folks, but I’d like to hear from a Yahoo Mail administrator. If you sleep with one, have ‘em contact us.

In the meantime, the only argument I’ve seen that truly holds water is, “How much did you pay for your *free* Yahoo Mail account?”

BJ Gillette, re: the randomness thing. I will agree my own personal greylist is more consistent. However, I have experienced in the past triggering firewalls with portscans enough to know that with many sensors, what triggers it can be rather variable. I think you’re too readily dismissing that explanation. Perhaps you *should* try contact Yahoo! for comment.
Additionally, folks, anyone here with mail logs of attempts to contact Yahoo!. If what BJ is saying is correct, you should have extremely high rates of delivery failures. However, if greylisting is correct, and your server has a history with Yahoo!, you should see what I see in my logs, which is a perfect delivery history.

@nemo.
“I have experienced in the past triggering firewalls with portscans enough to know that with many sensors, what triggers it can be rather variable.”

* Agreed. Yahoo’s first-pass behavior stood out against all other small/giant mail server ops we pointed at.

“If … your server has a history with Yahoo!…”

* Our mail servers have no history with Yahoo at all. Zero. Zip. Nada.

“If what BJ is saying is correct, you should have extremely high rates of delivery failures.”

* Some have experienced precisely the extremely high rates of delivery failure you describe. See: Craigslist Lockout of Hotmail and Yahoo Enters Month 4 (http://www.emailbattles.com/archive/battles/email_aadabdidgb_ci/). Also note some in this forum and those slashdotters who say they finally switched email suppliers.

“I think you’re too readily dismissing that explanation.”

* Agreed. Long day, and apologies to all concerned.

“Perhaps you *should* try contact Yahoo! for comment.”

* Agreed. We’ll let you know as soon as we hear something. BTW: Have *you* ever reached a human at Yahoo? (No disrespect intended.)

In an earlier post, you agreed with DThomas, who thinks the test is totally lame. As it has helped our techs solve mail server problems for some time, I most vehemently disagree. It has continuously proved its mettle in the real world.

If you or DT actually ran the test on a cluster, you might agree that Mail Server Profiler is capable of helping knowledgeable techs find anomalies they might otherwise overlook… especially if you used it daily.

In fact, I’m far more comfortable with the concept that our *interpretation* of what Yahoo Mail is doing is lame… with the caveat that Yahoo Mail’s poor message delivery is clearly a problem for many.

FYI: The theory we’re working on is that the unique reponse sets we get from Yahoo Mail are an artifact of the specific way that Yahoo Mail clustering is laid out, as opposed to other clusters we’ve queried.

While we ran first-pass surveys of several well-known domains, we did not go out of our way to find and tag clusters. Perhaps we should single out clusters for study.

As for HotMail, GMail, etc. Not to worry. We’ll be studying them, too.

Thanks for your valuable input, nemo. You caught *my* attention on *your* second-pass.

This is interesting but doesn’t prove anything.

If me and a bunch of my friends play “ring and run” and one house doesn’t answer as much as others, does it mean that they’re being anti-social? Does it mean that their door bell is broken? Does it mean that they don’t like “ring and run” so they installed a fancy security system so they don’t have to waste their time as much?

Any of those are plausible. Choosing one is speculation.

Personally, I think it’s unlikely that you’ve found a fatal weakness in the systems of a company with scores of smart engineers and a lot to lose if their systems were noticeably flawed.

Is the source code available for your server profiler tool?

The individual IP addresses behind Yahoo’s MX records are inaccessible so frequently that it’s easy to imagine a sending server being turned away every single time they legitimately retry, until the the sender gives up and bounces the message. I believe that Yahoo is focused on reducing spam, at all costs. If legit mail is turned away too, tough luck.

(Editor: Asif included links to every single snip below, which screwed up our comments formatting. The slashdot article is here: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/13/1949236)

Email Battles is correct.

jd: I’ve never had mail permanently go missing but I’ve known 2-3 DAY delays in receiving mail.

putzin: I lost a lot of email while using Yahoo as my webhost/email server when for brief periods all mail delivered would be dropped.

I actually dropped Yahoo as my webhost provider for this very reason. Too many bounced emails at random times. The outages were usually short, probably less than a couple of minutes, but would happen more than weekly.

networkBoy: Yahoo runs my ISP’s mail servers. Explains the shitty QOS I’ve been getting.

commanderfoxtrot: I often have to look at the mail queues on our servers and see that mail to our clients hosted by Yahoo is again unable to be sent; it happens to Hotmail and Yahoo fairly frequently, but Yahoo is more commonly unavailable.

Shacky: As the owner of a hosting company with 2000+ active accounts, I have alot of experience with yahoo’s mail servers. I’ve seen yahoo fail to send email from our client servers to yahoo email addresses 25-30% of the time, from servers in NYC, Chicago, and LA. We get bounces all the time saying that the email server mx(insert number).yahoo.com isn’t accepting connections at this time.

Their servers need a very big kick in the pants.

tigeba: If you have to deal with mailing lists or bulk email or lots of users you already know this is true. I create special sendmail queues just to handle Yahoo’s lousy SMTP servers. With a decent provider (like *gasp*, AOL) you can open up a connection and cram in just about any amount of email.

Doubting Thomas, anonymous coward and the others floating the theory that the test-server was blocked because of suspicious activity, go back and read the article:
(1) Only half of Yahoo’s IPs were available on the very first connection attempt.
(2) It wasn’t port scanning, but SMTP-connecting like any mailserver.

With half their IPs closed at any given time (for whatever reason), I’m sure Yahoo’s servers are quite used to repeat connection attempts. While there may be a threshold at some point where a sender’s behaviour is deemed suspicious, it’s most likely down the road… perhaps closer to 15 than to one. Even if it’s something like 3 or 4, the test stats from the first few attempts most likely will be consistent with the overall findings. Remember, on the very first attempt, half their IPs were closed.

anonymous coward seems to imply that Yahoo’s providing free email out of the goodness of their hearts, and therefore, no one has the right to complain. How naive. Yahoo is making money by selling advertising because they have all those users. There’s nothing altruistic about it.

Joe B says he has no problem receiving mail at his Yahoo account, but doesn’t even talk about sending to yahoo customers, which is what the test was all about. Trust me… sender and receiver can have very different perspectives. And his comments that Yahoo’s new hook-up with GoodMail has nothing to do with delivery speed and reliability… Joe, you can now open your mouth and remove your foot.

Joe B — Upon re-reading your post, I think I mis-interpreted your comments. My assumption that you weren’t commenting about sending to Yahoo accounts was probably wrong. My apologies.

A few thoughts:
1.) greylisting procedures in place
2.) MX preferences - legit MTA connect to lowest MX records first, spam bots typically connect to backup MX records without trying lowest MX record(indicating they’;re not legit MTA)
3.) half hour testing period? Thats low sampling period
4.) very aggressive behaviour from test program, automatic defenses would kick in and firewall/ratelimit/greylist/otherwise delay
5.) try this test again other *major* email providers who are the target of spam/phishing/email abuse and the results should be similiar.

@Tony.
RE: “try this test again other *major* email providers who are the target of spam/phishing/email abuse and the results should be similiar.”

Excellent advice. We intend to. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, comparing the reactions of similar architectures at large ESPs may yield more instructive results, especially as concerns your greylisting/ firewalling/ routing theory.

Specific suggestions on test methodology and evaluation are welcome.

I have used Yahoo mail for nearly 6 years and have never encountered delivery problems/or receipt problems.

So, I am not buying your analysis. I used Yahoo since I can store all my addy’s on line and some critical files - so that no matter what internet provider I might use now or in the future - or no matter what platform I am on…I can always get at that information

If there is any criticism of Yahoo Mail - I wish they could become even more intense on spam control.

But in short, I don’t buy the rhetoric that Yahoo mail is unreliable.

Hi Michael
RE: “If there is any criticism of Yahoo Mail - I wish they could become even more intense on spam control.”

Sounds like you’re a perfect match… except for your complaint that Yahoo doesn’t do enough to control your spam.

RE: “I don’t buy the rhetoric that Yahoo mail is unreliable.”

Yahoo is chock-full of great people. Without a doubt, they’ll be delighted to see that you’re delighted… except for your complaint that Yahoo doesn’t do enough to control your spam.

The Yahoo Mail message delivery issues have been covered on many forums across the web. We simply took a few measurements.

We saw nothing that Yahoo Mail can’t fix, given enough motivation.

BTW: You don’t need to burn legitimate senders to throttle spam to minimal levels… but of course, you’ve never seen Yahoo Mail do that.

You guys do realize that greylisting requires a sender+recipient+ip triplet, and that the tests in this article are simply connecting to port 25, getting the smtp greeting and disconnecting, thus greylisting doesn’t even come into play?

I do agree that a sampling period of 30 minutes isn’t what I’d like to base an article on. Run the tests for at least a week.

For real world data, our mail server is seeing 2.8% of all our mail to yahoo.com defered and an average delivery time of 1.5 minutes (worst being 21.1 hours) for the last month or so.

If you do plan on making your tool worthwhile, I’d make the following changes:

1) Don’t originate tests from a host which has no DNS A record.

2) Don’t originate tests from a PTR record which clearly indicates it is on DSL/Cable/Dialup

3) Many mail servers will throttle your sessions if you connect at too high of a rate (we use postfix’s anvil service to do such.)

4) You should at least provide all the (mail related) DNS info that dnsreport.com provides

5) Add in basic open relay testing, checking to make sure they meet the various RFC’s for compliance etc.

Right now the tool is so basic that it only serves to help noobs, IMO. If a mail admin can’t tell what his MX records are and whether or not he can get to port 25 he needs to be fired and replaced with someone who can.

My final comment is that I don’t have a beef with their delivery record. My beef is that they do not support sender verification. You can mail “account_doesnot_exist@yahoo.com” and they’ll happily receive the mail and bounce it, rather than just reject it outright, which makes it hard to deal with forged mail from @yahoo.com. (Yes there are associated other evils with this, but IMO there are other ways to deal with the evils it creates.)

For the last four or five years, I had been using a Yahoo email account as my main email address, and didn’t have any reason to suspect problems, until Jan. 15, 2006. I had been subscribing to several newsletters, and every one of them stopped arriving all at once, that weekend. Shortly after that, I stopped getting direct emails from my brother.
When I looked into why this was happening, last week, I confirmed that Yahoo was just dropping most of my incoming emails into the proverbial bottomless bit bucket, never to be seen again. Yahoo did not route them to my spam folder, they were just gone.
I use an email redirection service for my main published email address and when I pointed that account to a new Gmail account, then almost all those old newsletters started showing up again, on schedule. Needless to say, I am not going to pay money to upgrade to Yahoo Mail Plus service. I’m staying with Gmail from now on.
Thanks for confirming independently what I had suspected.
Jeff

Hi Jeff.
We’ve had articles tossed around by fanboys, but rarely have I been so up-to-my-ears in trolls.

Looks like we hit a sore spot.

Thanks for sharing your experience. And feel free to use Mail Server Profiler or any of our other tools anytime you feel the urge.

Oh. And when we do a GMail test… Please remember today and think of us kindly.

We’re just trying to help make email better.

@Todd.
A. If our IP-by-IP response results were greylisting, it’s a really, really, really dumb greylisting scheme.

B. Our tool has been worthwhile and solving customer problems for some time.

“1) Don’t originate tests from a host which has no DNS A record.

2) Don’t originate tests from a PTR record which clearly indicates it is on DSL/Cable/Dialup

3) Many mail servers will throttle your sessions if you connect at too high of a rate (we use postfix’s anvil service to do such.)”

See A. Like Yahoo, we offer our service as a freebie, so we’ll keep it on-the-cheap as long as possible. As it sits, that line just sets around waiting for s-l-o-w mail servers to respond.

“4) You should at least provide all the (mail related) DNS info that dnsreport.com provides”

Why do what dnsreport already does? Our tool works great for a different set of needs.

“5) Add in basic open relay testing, checking to make sure they meet the various RFC’s for compliance etc.”

It’s on the list.

“Right now the tool is so basic that it only serves to help noobs, IMO.”

The tool is convenience. Noobs can learn from it, and experienced admins can shortcut several steps with it.

Sorry it can’t help you, but you know how it goes. We can’t please everybody.

@BJ Gillette

Sorry if it wasn’t clear, by “you guys” I mean all the people who keep commenting that you were greylisted. You could not be greylisted since you never attempt delivery.

WRT why have your tool do what dnsreports does…because of what you said: convenience. If you could be a one stop shop and then it would add (more) value.

@Todd.
Thanks for the clarification on your greylisting comment.

RE: “why have your tool do what dnsreports does…because of what you said: convenience. If you could be a one stop shop and then it would add (more) value.”

Good point. And for brilliant DNS analysis, don’t forget one of our favorites, Men & Mice (http://www.menandmice.com). DNS insight doesn’t get much better than that.

But Mail Server Profiler was built for a different task. While it uses DNS (like cars use fuel injectors), it is not a DNS tool, per se. It was built to help admins install and troubleshoot their spam and content filters. And the response from our customers has been nothing short of delight.

Truth is, Mail Server Profiler has been a boon for us, dropping tech support time tremendously. We’re in the process of adding more functionality with that goal in mind.

Other tools on our page perform DNS tasks. In addition, where we don’t have an in-house test, we link to external tools, like the excellent open relay test at Laboratory for the Processing of Analog and Digital Signals.

I pointed this little tool around and didn’t find a single closed port except on the yahoo servers, interestingly enough. Something odd going on there. However, I can’t help but wonder if it’s just how they have their servers set up. There’s a note under the diagnostic that specifically states that this is for inbound traffic only, and it could be that those hosts are outbound only. When I ran the tool 1/4 was down, which indicate to me that they are outbound servers, while the other 3 are inbound. If I ran an absolutely huge mail server farm like they do, that might well be a decent enough way to run it.

On the problems issue, I’ve not personally had problems with my email account, however, a few friends of mine have when I send them something and it doesn’t arrive for several hours. *shrug*

Serax, run the tool against yahoo.com several times, and every single time different IPs will be inaccessible. Doesn’t seem likely that they’re configured as outbound-only.

Starting about a week or so ago, our mail server has about a 15% success rate with Yahoo (instant delivery). 70% get delivered within 2 days. The other 15% get bounced after our 2 day limit. How do we contact Yahoo to ask what the problem is? Everything was fine up until about a week-10 days ago.

There are those of us that are paying for Yahoo email. (OK, you can stop calling me stupid). As a paying customer, I can *EXPECT*, rather *DEMAND* my emails get through 100% of the time. This morning, someone asked me to comment on an email he had received, and assumed that I had since I was on the distrution list. However, I hadn’t received it. It was sent to both of us two hours prior. Only he received it. Looks like I’m dumping Yahoo…

Yes I have a cable broadband connection to the internet through my cable tv provider– I say this because I’ve read some infer that this may have some effect on the results. Anyway — I got my brother’s e-mail address the afternoon of 7/22/06 and I haven’t been able to contact him yet. I tryed everyday but yesterday. Out of 4-5 attempts, all were “undelivered mail returned to sender”. I tryed to reply to “mailsupport@broadbandsupport.net” 3-4 times and all were returned “undelivered mail returned to sender. I even tryed from a yahoo account. Not being able to deliver mail from an outside account is one thing, but not even being to deliver from an account “inside” there own system, now that’s bad!!! PS: Ijust realized —- 8 attempts in 3 days and all were returned undelivered , now that’s bad ~~~~~ though there have probably been worse.

This is not BS. I run mail systems for major company and yahoo is definitely doing something weird to limit how often you can send to them. The yahoo.com queue is always around 10-15 messages. Yesterday and today, we’re not getting mail through to them at all.

/frustrated exchange admin

I’ve always been very content with the excellent free service from Yahoo. Lately, however, my friends and customers have started complaining about mails being bounced. During the last four days messages have not even been bounced, they have just disappeared in thin air.
I would have expected to receive an explanatory message from the Yahoo staff. If so, I might have considered becoming a paying customer…..

I am glad I found this as I was thinking something was wrong on my end! I sell on ebay and alot of ebayers use yahoo. It is very frustrating when I respond to their question, or send them any info, only to get the same Mailer daemon bounced back at me with: SMTP module(domain yahoo.com) reports:
connection with mx3.mail.yahoo.com is broken The bad thing is, it can’t be fixed. Anyone who sells on ebay knows that some people get very upset if they think you are not responding to them and may leave you negative feedback. At any rate, it is frustrating. Thank you, dee

The morons at yahoo, for no reason and with no warning, closed my email account. I didn’t ask to close it and I wasn’t violating their “policies”. I am now unable to access business names and addresses all because some inept minimum wage flunkie screwed up and the company thinks it isn’t responsible for its employees’ actions. Their “customer care” won’t respond, and if I write to anyone else at yahoo, their idiotic comeback is “write to customer care”. I don’t if they’re stupid, lazy, or both.

No, one shouldn’t expect too much from “free” email accounts, but if they run the rest of their company the same way, one wouldn’t have much faith in getting what is paid for.

Remember yahoo’s “clickthrough” fraud of a few years ago? They claimed more web surfers saw ads than actually did, and yahoo overcharged its customers. It seems their entire company is based on such “values”.

Well I pay Yahoo Domains a yearly fee to provide my domain name and host my email. So it’s not free for me. And I have a tech support call open from December for lost email (mail sent with no bounce but not received by me) and currently am experiencing delays of > 9 hours and counting for trying to receive new emails.

Yahoo is full of crap.
I get frustrated as none of my mails make it the yahoo inbox.

1HKHwh-00065y-Vm SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection: host c.mx.mail.yahoo.com

I have tried and tried, no results, I never managed to get a single e-mail passed their filter.
I’m thinking that I’m on some kind of a list, since I can send out e-mails to other email providers with out problems.
I have been trying now for 3 months to get at least 1 single message passed the filters.
I have called yahoo and asked them, why are my messages being blocked? they responded with the line: we can’t tell you, our policy does not allow us to do so.
How about that for an answer?
It’s like their playing some kind of a stupidity game with me, “we can’t tell you, you are going to have to guess.”
I’m never instaling domain keys, it’s a bunch of crap, an e-mail should resolve with out domain keys, it’s normal that an e-mail resolves with out them.
I made sure my PTR is properly set up.
I made sure I do I am spotles at dnsreport.com under the MX and the MAIL sections.
I made sure my SMTP is set up in a correct way.
And still……….421 temporarily deferred.
They think they are kings and that they can do anything by giving nightmare problems to small providers like me.
I can see sites already stating please avoid using free e-mail services such as yahoo, hotmail.
The filter they have setup is a joke, I get spam e-mail every day in my yahoo account,get it in my inbox while perfectly good mail from others gets filtered.

I have conducted my own little experiment. I have GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. When I email between the Hotmail and the GMail I receive the emails either side almost instantly.

I sent emails from Yahoo! Mail to both my Hotmail and GMail and both worked fine. However, sending an email from both my GMail and Hotmail to my Yahoo! Mail and I am still waiting to receive the messages. This isn’t the first time this has happened either, so it must be a problem with Yahoo! Mail. I almost use GMail exclusively now and I am glad I do. One minor gripe though…I have set up forwarding from my university email, it used to work fine but now it sends duplicates for every message received. Is this GMails problem or the universities?

Thanks.

We run a small hosting company for 12+ years and in the past 8 months noticed the blocking and delaying of all yahoo.com email. We have only 5 small mailing lists and clients that forward to their “free” yahoo email addresses. Our email server is not on any spamblocking email lists and we use spamcop blacklists on our servers to control the spam and NO open relays to allow spamming from our mail servers.

Now my clients are complaining to us - that they’re not getting email.

We have tried to open a ticket with Yahoo but to no avail. No phone number to talk to either - for free anyway.

It possibly has now started with pacbell.com but no notice of delay - receiving fine but then blocking.

If Yahoo or these companies told us how to become legitimate partners than maybe we would consider it - but no where on their site is a place for this.

Very frustrated!

I use two Yahoo email accounts for light correspondence but also as storage space (now that the accounts hold so much!) for large manuscript files. These are files of books I have written and revised and edited, that I email to myself from my Outlook Express, because if I lost them, I would die. Guess where Yahoo likes to put them? BULK FOLDER.

I can open these emails, click “not spam” until the cows come home, but in a month or two, back into BULK FOLDER they start to go.

Meanwhile, my inbox fills up with all the ways there are to grow a larger penis.

Hotmail doesn’t do this to me. Gmail doesn’t either. Only Yahoo does it.

I, too, am having “anomalies” with yahoo mail. First, a little background…

I have my business domain auto-forward to a Gmail account. The Gmail account also auto-forwards to my Yahoo sbcglobal.net account which came free with home DSL service.

I then use email client to grab the emails from Yahoo. Why do I do this? Well, because when Gmail first came out, it wasn’t that great at POP, probably because if its lame conversation feature (I sure hope it’s better now). But I loved Gmail’s search so much, I had to keep my domain forwarding there.

So here’s what just happened…

1. Sheer luck, I logged into Gmail to see I had a couple emails that didn’t get auto-fwded to Yahoo and therefore my email client, my daily trusted business communication app. Well, when I forcibly sent test emails using both the Yahoo and Gmail outgoing servers to the Yahoo account, they didn’t show up either, so it wasn’t Gmail’s fault. Yahoo wasn’t picking them up. I tried forcibly forwarding the emails to my Hotmail account. Hotmail picked them up, no problem.

2. I tried sending a *new* mail from Hotmail to Yahoo. To my shock, it worked.

3. I tried forwarding an original email that made it from Gmail to Hotmail, to Yahoo. To my amazement, THE FORWARDED EMAIL IS NOT MAKING IT FROM HOTMAIL TO YAHOO.

Yet *new* emails are making it from Hotmail to Yahoo. Gotta be some greylisting of some sort, some filtering gone horribly wrong, or something to do with nested/threads of emails. We’re talking about business emails here.

This totally makes no sense. I would love to hear an explanation from Yahoo.

Buh-bye Yahoo.

How can we publicize this more so other people aren’t losing BUSINESS and DOLLARS to Yahoo’s ineptness?

I am not a technical expert, I have no IT qualifications, I have no idea what a lot of the above blurb is all about. I concentrate on performance and results, and if something is not performing to my satisfaction, then I look for an alternative product or service and eliminate whatever is causing the problem wherever possible. Simple as that.

I run an online conference center. We frequently hold special events, which require mailings to our members database to ensure maximum attendance at the events.

I have had customers complain about receiving email AFTER the event, and I had sent it days and even a week or more before the event. As a result, those members who received late emails they could not attend. I checked the members email addresses and in every case, yahoo was the registered address.

I added my own yahoo email address to the database as a check, to see if the situation was repeated with my address. Sure enough, the emails were coming through up to 10 days delayed! UNREAL! The most recent case was mail I sent on June 10th, I just received it today, June 17th. We have not experienced any similar issues with any other email service with the exception of failed deliveries (not delayed deliveries) with 2 other major service providers, whom I shall not name here, but you can probably guess who they are.

Now, the person above who said “If legit mail is turned away too, tough luck.” obviously is not running an online business, which relies heavily on dependable, timely mail deliveries.

As a result, we have made the decision to ban yahoo along with 2 other major mail carriers from our database, and recommend when members attempt to register with a Yahoo, or one of the other 2 providers email addresses, that they try an alternate email carrier. We have commissioned our IT support to carry out the modifications as soon as possible.

Mick

I want to send email music and it comes back on my email. I write my friends messages and it never gets to them. i love sending cards . Please help me resolve this matter. Or you’ll lose a custmer.

I agree there is a problem with Yahoo mail. In my experience it is limited to bulk emailings such as newsletters. I have had sporadic delivery or complete delivery failure from sites such as “Gizmo’s Support Alert Newsletter”, “I, Cringely” notifications and newletters/alerts from MarketWatch. These problems were eliminated when I switched to my Gmail address.

We are a company that sends about 30,000 statements out per month via email. About 4000 of these statements go to customers with Yahoo email addresses. These emails sit in our out queue waiting for Yahoo to allow it to be sent until they eventually time out. We then take those 4000 emails and resend them by hand, one at a time. We are now working on a project to send Yahoo emails a few at a time over a couple of days, hoping that this will eliminate the need for hand delivery. Don’t try to tell us that Yahoo is not an issue!

I see typical server overload at the prime email checking times of the day. By typical server overload, I mean that I can’t even reach the mail server, or can’t get authenticated, or can’t get to my mail, or can’t post replies, depending regularly these days on the time of day.

Yahoo blows.. plain and simple…. and they know people trust Yahoo and wont talk bad about them, and will instead blame the people trying to send them mail. The simple fact is, instead of actually working on effective SPAM filtering they just grey-list or block anyone who sends more than a few messages….. so people who have thousands of users who have addresses at Yahoo.com end up getting no email delivered from newsletters etc…..

The fact yahoo wants you to PAY to be a certified sender is CRAP, they make more than enough money to have a real mail solution, and should implement RBL or SBL lists to stop people from sending SPAM through their network.

I’ve been having big problems with Yahoo for about a month now. I run a website which, like many others, require new users to activate their account by email. Well, while all the users with a non-Yahoo email address have activated their account, only 25% of those with a Yahoo address have activated. The reason? They didn’t receive the activation message. I don’t know about you but for me this is very very bad. More than half of my users have their email address at Yahoo, and this means I’m losing a LOT of new members.

I am really surprised this isn’t more talked about. I will advise my users to use a Gmail or Hotmail account instead of Yahoo and I suggest you do the same.

Thanks and Merry Christmas!

I have experienced problems delivering mail to Yahoo! servers. My biggest issue is with thier grey listing. The company I work for maintains a mailing list of all customers that have signed up to recieve commercial emails. Our mailing list is CAN-SPAM compliant and by signup I mean these customers actually check a box and sign there name on a paper document if they wish to recieve these emails. The mailing list is small (20,000 or so) and not all of these addresses are Yahoo!.

The issue begins when a bulk email is sent to customers on this list as a lot of them are using Yahoo! mail. After x number of emails delivered Yahoo! begins to defer all emails coming from our mail server and they will continue to defer them for days… yes I mean days. During this time if you are a customer using Yahoo! mail and are waiting for an email from an employee at our company, you will never receive that message as it too is greylisted (more like a temp blacklist imo). Messages are greylisted so long that they expire and drop from our mail servers queue… thats 3 days.

I understand Yahoo! is a target of spammers, but my company is not in any way, shape, or form a spammer. Yahoo! needs to get a grip.

As a responsible sysadmin looking after a number of mail systems, I was baffled then disbelieving at the ‘anti-spam’ measures that Yahoo has taken. Their poorly thought out mail policy is not only causing untold loss of earnings to legitimate businesses worldwide, but is also lowering the credibility of email as a message medium. (To say nothing of the misery it inflicts on it’s own customers)

As mentioned numerous times in this thread, mail to yahoo is delayed or never reaches recipients.

Yahoo are wholly unresponsive to sysadmins and managers of responsible websites who request whitelisting. After many requests, they ask that a large ‘bulk senders’ form be completed, then don’t respond for months, if at all.

If Yahoo mail customers realised just how unreilable their mail service has become, there would be an mass exodus. As potential loss of profits is the only thing likely to make yahoo change their ridiculous policy, I suggest that anyone reading this contributes to the growing quantity of posts on the internet about yahoo’s mail policy.

Jeff

not really caring about how all the back end tech stuff works at Yahoo email here are my results of the last 18 months of using three Yah email accounts

some days when clicking on an inbox link I get a message “sorry for the inconvenience, temporary tech. problems blah blah, other stuff, try again later” hmmmmmm

k, how about this; testing several times a week I find that emails may take from two minutes to over eight hours to move from one of my Yahoo acc to another one of my Yahoo acc. - happens quite often - hmmmmmmm

Result of my high tech testing - Yahoo email delivery sucks - no matter what causes it.

My server is in a Faculty in an University. I’ve seen single mails go out allright but when I send mails to our mail lists Yahoo! begins giving the “deferred” errors, so it must be related to the quantity of emails in a minute.

From the mail lists:

Mar 25 16:08:40 localhost postfix/smtp[20840]: 867326F8163: to=, relay=c.mx.mail.yahoo.com[216.39.53.3]:25, delay=16644, delays=16592/8.3/26/18, dsn=4.0.0, status=deferred (host c.mx.mail.yahoo.com[216.39.53.3] said: 451 Message temporarily deferred - [170] (in reply to end of DATA command))

8 minutes later to another account:

Mar 25 16:15:58 localhost postfix/smtp[20928]: 0C7F86F80A2: to=, relay=e.mx.mail.yahoo.com[216.39.53.1]:25, delay=2.7, delays=0.28/0.01/1.4/1, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 ok dirdel)

why my email messagges can’t deliver to the reciever?