Not just you

This morning (9 or 10 am Pacific) my various mailing lists were lighting up with questions about Yahoo delays. A lot of people reported they were seeing Yahoo respond “420 Resources Unavailable, try again later” on connect.
What everyone wanted to know was is if other senders were seeing this.
The answer was a resounding YES.
And, in fact, Yahoo commented on Facebook around 2pm Pacific that they had a mail outage and were trying to bring services back up before close of business today.
As with many things, the Internet rumor mill is one of the fastest and astonishingly accurate sources of information about mail servers falling over.
I started hearing reports that queues were clearing mid-afternoon pacific, but not everyone is seeing that.
So, yes, Yahoo is having a bad day. And it’s not you, it’s not spam, it’s just that some of their mail servers fell over and they’re struggling to accept all the mail headed their way.
It happens.
If you’re interested in hearing more timely updates, I will often announce things like this on twitter when I hear about them.

Related Posts

Censorship, email and politics

Spamfiltering blocks email. This is something we all know and understand. For most people, that is everyone who doesn’t manage an email server or work in the delivery field or create spamfilters, filtering is a totally unseen process. The only time the average person notices filters is when they break. The breakage could be blocking mail they shouldn’t, or not blocking mail they should.
Yesterday, a bunch of people noticed that Yahoo was blocking mail containing references to a protest against Wall Street. This understandably upset people who were trying to use email as a communication medium. Many people decided it was Yahoo (a tool of the elites!) attempting to censor their speech and stop them from organizing a protest.
Yeah. Not so much.
Yahoo looked into it and reported that the mail had gotten caught in their spam filters. Yahoo adjusted their filters to let the mail through and all was (mostly) good.
I don’t think this is actually a sign of filters being broken. The blocked mail all contained a URL pointing to a occupywallst.com. I know there was a lot of speculation about what was being blocked, but sources tell me it was the actual domain. Not the phrase, not the text, the domain.
The domain was in a lot of mostly identical mail coming out of individual email accounts. This is a current hallmark of hijacked accounts. Spammers compromise thousands of email accounts, and send a few emails out of each of them. Each email is mostly identical and points to the same URL. Just like the protest mail.
There was also a lot of bulk mail being sent with that URL in it. I’ve been talking to friends who have access to traps, and they were seeing a lot of mail mentioning occupywallst.com in their traps. This isn’t surprising, political groups have some horrible hygiene. They are sloppy with acquisition, they trade names and addresses like kids trade cold germs, they never expire anything out. It’s just not how politics is played. And it’s not one party or another, it’s all of them. I’ve consulted with major names across the political spectrum, and none actually implement best practices.
As I have often said the secret to delivery is to not have your mail look like spam. In this case, the mail looked like spam. In fact, it looked like spam that was coming from hijacked accounts as well as spam sent by large bulk mailers. I suspect there was also a high complaint rate as people sent it to friends and family who really didn’t want to hear about the protests.
To Yahoo!’s credit, though, someone on staff was on top of things. They looked into the issue and the filter was lifted within a couple hours of the first blog post. A human intervened, overruled the algorithm and let the mail out.
I bet this is one of the few times anyone has seen that Yahoo does outbound filtering. Given it’s a politically charged situation, I can see why they assume that Yahoo is filtering because of politics and censorship. They weren’t though.
More on politics, filtering and censorship.

They’re not blocking you because they hate you

It really can be your email
More on Truthout
Another perspective on the politico article

Read More

Robust protection under the CDA

Venkat also commented on the Holomaxx v. MS/Y! ruling.

As with blocking or filtering decisions targeted at malware or spyware, complaining that the ISP was improperly filtering bulk email (spam) is likely to fall on unsympathetic ears. It would take a lot for a court to allow a bulk emailer to conduct discovery on the filtering processes and metrics employed by an ISP. (Hence the rulings on a 12b motion, rather than on summary judgment.) Here the court reiterates the “good faith” standard for 230(c)(2) is measured subjectively, not objectively. That puts a heavy burden on plaintiffs to show subjective bad faith.

Read More

Amendment was futile

Judge Fogel published his ruling in the two Holomaxx cases today.

Read More