Lycos delivery problems

Lycos has had some ongoing problems this week. Their alert on the issue says:

Some Lycos Mail users may be experiencing poor performance of their email service, including slow loading times while viewing or responding to emails and slower than usual mail delivery. The Lycos team is aware of these issues and are working to resolve the problems for all users. […] Additional equipment for Lycos Mail service has arrived and we are rolling it into service for all users. This will continue over the weekend and into next week. You should see improvements soon with your mail.  We are continuing to work hard to get this resolved for all of users and we are very sorry for any problems that you have experience thus far.

A number of delivery monitoring companies are showing slow delivery to Lycos addresses over the past week. It’s likely to take a little longer for this to resolve, but should get better as hardware gets installed.
I became aware of this because one of my clients started getting worried about poor delivery at Lycos. There was a problem, but it had nothing to do with my client’s mail. There isn’t a reputation problem, there isn’t a content problem, the recipient mailserver is just under a bit of strain.

Related Posts

Return Path Changes certification standards

Return Path recently announced changes to their certification program. They will no longer be certifying 3rd party mailers.

Read More

Delivery problems are not all spam related

Not every delivery failure is due to poor reputation or spam. Sometimes ISPs just have problems on their mailservers and so mail doesn’t get through. It’s often hard for delivery experts (and their bosses and their customers and their clients) to watch email delays or rejections without being able to do anything about it.
Sometimes, though, there is nothing to do. The rejections are because something broke at the ISP and they have to sort through it. Just this week there’s been a lot of twitter traffic about problems at a major cable company. They are rate limiting senders with very good reputations. They have admitted there is a problem, but they don’t have a fix or an ETA. From what I’ve heard it they’re working with their hardware vendor to fix the problem.
Hardware breaks and backhoes eat fiber. Yes, ISPs should (and all of the large ones do) have backups and redundancies. But those backups and redundancies can’t always handle the firehose worth of mail coming to the ISPs. As a result, the ISPs start rejecting some percentage of mail from everyone. Yahoo even has a specific error message to distinguish between “we’re blocking just you” from “we’re shedding load and temp failing everyone.”

Read More

Yahoo and Goodmail

The industry has been abuzz the last few days with the news that of Feb 1, Yahoo will no longer be supporting Goodmail in their interface. I did get a chance to get a response from someone at Yahoo, but didn’t get a chance to talk to anyone from Goodmail. Look for a post next week discussing the breakup, what impact it has on the industry and what this may mean for other ISPs.

Read More