Yahoo delays
People are reporting delivery delays into Yahoo over the last day or so. Yahoo is having some general connectivity problems and are working to correct the issue.
People are reporting delivery delays into Yahoo over the last day or so. Yahoo is having some general connectivity problems and are working to correct the issue.
Yahoo posted some suggestions about contacting their postmaster group over on the ymail blog. They also explained what they were doing to solve the problems with response delays.
Some of the problem is being caused by excessive follow-up emails, either because senders did not provide all the necessary information initially or because they are asking why they have not heard anything. Each of these requires more work on the part of Yahoo and throws the queues into further disarray and puts everyone even more behind.
Yahoo asks that people be patient, they are working through things. On their end, they have added more staff to the postmaster team. They also suggest senders can help by providing ALL the information they ask for at http://postmaster.yahoo.com/ before submitting the request. Incomplete requests contribute even more to the backlog as Yahoo employees have to chase down senders to get their full information.
… wherein I rename this blog “What change did Yahoo make today.” No, really, I like the guys at Yahoo a lot, but really, occasionally I would like to blog about something different!
Today’s change, actually yesterday’s, is that Yahoo has closed their beta FBL program to changes or additions. It is a beta program, this is not unexpected. They will be making changes based on the results of that program and will open it up sometime in the future.
Yahoo!’s announcement
A number of people have posted to various mailing lists and made blog posts pointing to the Yahoo Mail blog post discussing recent problems Yahoo was having with mail. The general feeling seemed to be “AHA! That’s what is wrong!”
Unlike many of my peers, I do not think this explains the delivery problems senders have been seeing while attempting to deliver mail to Yahoo. The Yahoo mail blog article is talking about the Yahoo outgoing mailservers (smarthosts) for their non-webmail users. It is extremely unlikely that these are the same servers used for incoming email.
While I sympathize with everyone who had the AHA! moment and thought their delivery problems were being acknowledged and addressed by Yahoo! I do not think this is really what that blog post is saying.
I am hearing from people that Yahoo is aware of a problem with delayed incoming email, and they are working on fixing it. This does seem to be a broader problem than just bulk mailers, I am hearing from small and mid-size ISPs that they are having significant problems delivering email to Yahoo, too.
For more information about what Yahoo is doing to filter mail check out my previous post Greylisting: that which Yahoo! does not do.