Ongoing Yahoo delays

I’ve been hearing from folks over the last few days that they’re seeing an uptick in deferrals from Yahoo! The deferrals are not uniform. ESPs report they’re seeing some, but not all, customers affected. Other ESPs aren’t seeing any changes.
It’s not just you. But it would be very worthwhile to dig into engagement and other stats. It’s possible this is a new normal at Yahoo! and they’re tightening filters to catch mail that doesn’t fit their standards but was previously difficult to filter.

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Yahoo problems

I’m seeing scattered reports today that a lot of places are seeing backed up queues to Yahoo. They’ve had some problems over the last few days and seem to be still recovering. It’s looking like it’s something internal to Yahoo. One set of error messages I’ve seen reported by numerous people is: “451
4.3.2 Internal error reading data.”
It’s not you, and it’s not spam related. But it is putting a crimp in a lot of companies attempts to send lots of email ahead of black friday and cyber monday.

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June 2014: The month in email

Each month, we like to focus on a core email feature or function and present an overview for people looking to learn more. This month, we addressed authentication with SPF.
We also talked about feedback mechanisms, and the importance for senders to participate in FBL processes.
In our ongoing discussions about spam filters, we took a look at the state of our own inboxes and lamented the challenge spam we get from Spamarrest. We also pointed out a post from Cloudmark where they reiterate much of what we’ve been saying about filters: there’s no secret sauce, just a continuing series of efforts to make sure recipients get only the mail they want and expect to receive. We also looked at a grey area in the realm of wanted and expected mail: role accounts (such as “marketing@companyname.com”) and how ESPs handle them.
As always, getting into the Gmail inbox is a big priority for our clients and other senders. We talked a bit about this here, and a bit more about the ever-changing world of filters here.
On the subject of list management, we wrote about the state of affiliate mailers and the heightened delivery challenges they face getting in the inbox. We got our usual quota of spam, and a call from a marketer who had purchased our names on a list. You can imagine how effective that was for them.
And in a not-at-all-surprising development, spammers have started to employ DMARC workarounds. We highlighted some of the Yahoo-specific issues in a post that raises more questions.
We also saw some things we quite liked in June. In the Best Practices Hall of Fame, we gave props to this privacy policy change notification and to our bank’s ATM receipts.
We also reviewed some interesting new and updated technology in the commercial MTA space, and were happy to share those findings.

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Yahoo China Email Services Shut Down

Via mailing lists and Al Iverson’s Spamresource blog, Yahoo China domains (yahoo.com.cn and yahoo.cn) are no longer accepting email.  Yahoo announced in April of 2013 they are shutting down their email services in August of the same year and advises users to create new accounts with Alibana.  While the domains still have valid MX records, they are no longer accepting mail.  There is no direct mapping from Yahoo China addresses to Alimail (Alibana’s email service).
When attempting to send emails to these two domains, the reject will be a “550 relaying denied” message.  Now would be a good time to update your lists and remove any yahoo.com.cn and yahoo.cn addresses.

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