When working on mailservers, I’ve noticed that Yahoo’s mailservers seem to “punish” others by sending code 421 (service not available) for a few minutes for a first report of spam that originated from there, longer for a second report and so on. Yahoo’s help pages suggest they do this if you don’t “comply with our guidelines (described below)” (which aren’t actually described below).
That system seems to completely screw everyone on a server if a user forwards their own email to Yahoo and then flags some as spam, or if a website user who registered with a Yahoo mail address then closes their Yahoo account without updating their registration details. In the worst cases, a server’s mail queue can become clogged with stuff that it can’t forward to Yahoo. I’ve suggested that server owners ban forwarding to Yahoo, but not all have done that yet.
Yahoo’s server-punishing tactics are particularly unfair because of the amount of spam we receive from Yahoo – when I tried rejecting that, the server tested seemed to get more 421 punishment for that. I now usually direct it to a blackhole, which feels a bit dangerous.
Now I’ve just seen this from Indymedia which makes it sound like Yahoo’s getting even worse recently:-
“Yahoo doesn’t make it so easy for us. They do (unintendedly) transport a remarkable amount of spam, often sent by robots which automatically (and wide scale) crack Yahoos’ new account signup CAPTCHAS (those images with the cats + dogs + digits + letters in them) just to relay their spam through Yahoo. So it’s not easy to determine who sends legitimate email through Yahoo and who does not.”
I wrote about some alternative service providers back in 2006, including ippimail, which Yahoo users might like to change to. I’d be interested in comments about any new arrivals in this field.
BT internet customers are probably using Yahoo-hosted email too. I recommend changing to The Phone Co-op, but my company is an agent for them, so I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Yes Yahoo sucks – even if your domain has domain keys (dkim) thats Yahoo’s standard and the other common stuff we all expect to see in a mail message.
I have a throwaway account at yahoo and even yahoo i observe don’t bother to check dkim at times. I could drop yahoo, but the messages do go through after 24 hours form a ‘bad’ email server.
Clearly unless your one of those large email providers yahoo consider you to be a spammer.
DKIM sucks big time and your any host with more than one domain on it means you need some rather nifty plumbing.
Yahoo has become a bit of mickey mouse operation with there attempts to reinvent the wheel in social network clones, and blog clones with a huge space for adverts while the tech people still use wordpess.
Yahoo has lost its way. I find it humourous that Yahoo dont bother to check dkim signatures in signed mail being there the cheerleaders for it
Anyhow lets not embarass Yahoo too much
Yahoo had never been good on spams, no matter which way you look at it. On my Yahoo account, close to 100% of what I get is spam.
But this is really not a Yahoo problem, but much more systemic (or maybe I should say endemic): Just about everyone except us small admins has lost any common sense of how email actually works. You can see Google doing random IP blocks without giving you any reason (or logs, when you ask for them), Yahoo silently blocking Google, and medium-sized providers putting on questionable RBL lists for their own use. In short, it’s a real mess out there in email world.
FWIW, I would say the spammers have already won. I have always thought that destruction of email as a communications medium—not selling stuff—is their ultimate true goal, and if what I think is right on track, they have already accomplished their true goal.
BTW, Sympatico (which used to the telco monopoly here in Toronto, Canada) is also using Yahoo. Lots of people are using Yahoo, knowingly or unknowingly. Email is practically useless these days.
Despite all of the above, I still get useful communication by email, thanks in part to whitelists and scoring. However, it is increasingly unreliable and it is a source of stress when users don’t realise how unreliable it is. It also doesn’t help when telephone lines aren’t working correctly either and a certain user’s office software is also corrupting things… but that’s another story, maybe.
[…] least it got through eventually. If only Yahoo was as responsive as debian […]
Just a note of interest. I notice no one seems to want to discuss the obvious option here. Train users that they should set up their email accounts to only accept email from known addresses, the same way we set up accounts for our kids.
That’s because in practice it won’t work. How would that supposed to work if your Yahoo address is used for work purposes? Ignore all your potential clients? Ignore everyone who happen to have sent you things from the “wrong account”?
Even for personal communications it won’t work. Ignore messages from mailing lists you subscribe to (first-time confirmation messages always come from a different address so the first post always come from an “unknown” address)? Ignore replies from your mobile phone provider (they always ask you to fill in a web form but reply by email so their address is always “unknown”)? You might as well cancel your email account.
It is precisely this (thinking that “receiving email only from known addresses”) that the spammers want: Complete destruction of email as a useful means of communications.
I agree to a degree. I prioritise emails from known addresses and put spam-like things into a once-a-day folder, but I still look at them all. Once there’s enough of them together, it’s usually pretty obvious to me which are spam repeats and which are ham, but I do very occasionally miss a work email. Email isn’t a guaranteed reliable service though, so senders need to be prepared for that and chase up unconfirmed emails if they’re important.
Oh and if anyone uses Yahoo for important work email, they’re foolish and in for a world of pain from the dodgy vigilante tactics described in the original article above, so please let’s not use that as an example.
The question of whether “anyone uses Yahoo for important work email” is “foolish” or not as straightforward as you think. There are large telco providers here that provides email service but uses Yahoo in disguise, so you might not even know you are using Yahoo (even if you agree that using Yahoo is foolish), and you can’t control your customers/clients (lots of our customers/volunteers use Yahoo…)
Besides, this is not only a problem with Yahoo. I have a small but significant number of serious problems with Gmail already, and some corporate email systems also behave in stupid ways (random blocking, or sending your mail to /dev/null, for example). I would say that between corporate and “free” email systems, as well as between various “free” email systems, and to some degree even between corporate systems, email is no longer reliably interoperable. The spammers have already won; we have already lost, and to a certain degree we have helped them won.
All of the big unpaid webmails have problems. You can’t control your customers and volunteers, but you can gently point out that the reason you haven’t seen their email is partly a result of their actions. If we don’t educate customers, they might not realise why they’re having a bad time with email.
I don’t make a special exception any more for UK customers of telcos like BT who are using Yahoo. They should change telco. I have more sympathy for customers of Yahoo-using telcos in places where you can’t switch (so much for a competitive market in telco service).
Amen to the lament about spammers winning. I’d love to work on solving this, but I’m not sure that’s possible with email as we currently know it.
[…] a small discussion has broken out in the comments of Is Yahoo Now Even Worse On Spam? about whitelisting and business-critical uses of free webmails. […]
[…] other main point in my argument was that free webmails are unreliable, thanks to tactics like Yahoo’s shoddy anti-spam attacks on other mailservers. There’s no telling whether the email will get through such bad behaviour and […]