More Yahoo domains get DMARC'd

Yahoo is turning on p=reject for 62 of their international domains on March 28, 2016. These domains include:
y7mail.com
yahoo.at
yahoo.be
yahoo.bg
yahoo.cl
yahoo.co.hu
yahoo.co.id
yahoo.co.il
yahoo.co.kr
yahoo.co.th
yahoo.co.za
yahoo.com.co
yahoo.com.hr
yahoo.com.my
yahoo.com.pe
yahoo.com.ph
yahoo.com.sg
yahoo.com.tr
yahoo.com.tw
yahoo.com.ua
yahoo.com.ve
yahoo.com.vn
yahoo.cz
yahoo.dk
yahoo.ee
yahoo.fi
yahoo.hr
yahoo.hu
yahoo.ie
yahoo.lt
yahoo.lv
yahoo.nl
yahoo.no
yahoo.pl
yahoo.pt
yahoo.rs
yahoo.se
yahoo.si
yahoo.sk
yahoogroups.co.kr
yahoogroups.com.cn
yahoogroups.com.sg
yahoogroups.com.tw
yahoogrupper.dk
yahoogruppi.it
yahooxtra.co.nz
yahoo.ca
yahoo.co.in
yahoo.co.nz
yahoo.co.uk
yahoo.com.ar
yahoo.com.au
yahoo.com.br
yahoo.com.hk
yahoo.com.mx
yahoo.de
yahoo.es
yahoo.fr
yahoo.gr
yahoo.in
yahoo.it
yahoo.ro
These may cause some delivery issues with international Yahoo domains during the transition period. Anyone using these domains in mail not sent through the Yahoo interface is likely to experience increased bounces at ISPs who are respecting the p=reject request in the DMARC record.

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Spammers react to Y! DMARC policy

It’s probably only a surprise to people who think DMARC is the silver bullet to fixing email problems, but the spammers who were so abusing yahoo.com have moved on… to ymail.com.
In the rush to deploy their DMARC policy, apparently Yahoo forgot they have hundreds of other domains. Domains that are currently not publishing a DMARC policy. Spammers are now using those domains as the 5322.from address in their emails. The mail isn’t coming through any yahoo.com domain, but came through an IP belonging to Sprint PCS.
ymail_dmarc
This is just one example of how spammers have reacted to the brave new world of p=reject policies by mailbox providers. If only the rest of us could react as quickly and as transparently to the problems imposed by these policy declarations. But changing software to cope with the changes in a way that keeps email useful for end users is a challenge. What is the right way to change mailing lists to compensate for these policy declarations? How can we keep bulk email useful for small groups that aren’t necessarily associated with a “brand”?
The conversation surrounding how we minimize the damage to the ecosystem that p=reject policy imposed hasn’t really happened. I think it is a shame and a failure that people can’t even discuss the implications of this policy. Even now that people have done the firefighting to deal with the immediate problems there still doesn’t seem to be the desire to discuss the longer effect of these changes. Just saying “these are challenges” in certain spaces gets the response “just deal with it.” Well, yes, we are trying to deal with it.
I contend that in order to “just deal with it”, we have to define “IT.” We can’t solve a problem if we can’t define the problem we’re trying to solve. Sadly, it seems legitimate mailers are stuck coping with the fallout, while spammers have moved on and are totally unaffected.
How is this really a win?

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Email predictions for 2015

Welcome to a whole new year. It seems the changing of the year brings out people predicting what they think will happen in the coming year. It’s something I’ve indulged in a couple times over my years of blogging, but email is a generally stable technology and it’s kind of boring to predict a new interface or a minor tweak to filters. Of course, many bloggers will go way out on a limb and predict the death of email, but I think that’s been way over done.
ChangeConstant
Even major technical advancements, like authentication protocols and the rise of IPv6, are not usually sudden. They’re discussed and refined through the IETF process. While some of these changes may seem “all of a sudden” to some end users, they’re usually the result of years of work from dedicated volunteers. The internet really doesn’t do flag days.
One major change in 2014, that had significant implications for email as a whole, was a free mail provider abruptly publishing a DMARC p=reject policy. This caused a lot of issues for some small business senders and for many individual users. Mailing list maintainers are still dealing with some of the fallout, and there are ongoing discussions about how best to mitigate the problems DMARC causes non-commercial email.
Still, DMARC as a protocol has been in development for a few years. A number of large brands and commercial organizations were publishing p=reject policies. The big mail providers were implementing DMARC checking, and rejection, on their inbound mail. In fact, this rollout is one of the reasons that the publishing of p=reject was a problem. With the flip of a switch, mail that was once deliverable became undeliverable.
Looking back through any of the 2014 predictions, I don’t think anyone predicted that two major mailbox providers would implement p=reject policies, causing widespread delivery failures across the Internet. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted it, all of my discussions with people about DMARC centered around business using DMARC to protect their brand. No one mentioned ISPs using it to force their customers away from 3rd party services and discussion lists.
I think the only constant in the world of email is change, and most of the time that change isn’t that massive or sudden, 2014 and the DMARC upheaval notwithstanding.
But, still, I have some thoughts on what might happen in the coming year. Mostly more of the same as we’ve seen over the last few years. But there are a couple areas I think we’ll see some progress made.

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