Spike in Yahoo error codes

A number of people have mentioned over the last couple weeks that they’re seeing a spike in Yahoo rejecting mail with
554    delivery error: dd Requested mail action aborted
Discussions on various mailing lists indicate these messages are related to inactive accounts. Addresses that bounce at Yahoo with these codes should be handled as inactive addresses and removed from future mailings.

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Thoughts on bounce handling

This week’s Wednesday question comes from D.

What are your thoughts on bounce handling

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Relaying Denied

I’ve got multiple clients right now looking for insights about bounce handling. This means I’m doing a lot of thought work about bounces and what they mean and how they match up and how different ISPs manage delivery and how different ESPs manage delivery and how it all fits together. One thing I’ve been trying to do is contextualize bounces based on what the reason is.
Despite what people may thing, spam filtering isn’t the only reason an email fails to deliver. There are lots of other reasons, too. There is a whole category of network problems like routing issues, TCP failures, DNS failures and such. There are address issues where a recipient simply doesn’t exist, or is blocking a particular sender. There are spam and authentication issues. The discussion of all these issues is way longer than a blog post, and I’m working on that.
One of the interesting bounces that is so rare most people, including me, never talk about is “Relaying Denied.” This is, however, one of the easier bounces to explain.
Relaying Denied means the mail server you’re talking to does not handle mail for the domain you’re sending to. 
Well, OK, but how does that happen?
There are a couple reasons you might get a “Relaying Denied” message, most of them having to do with a misconfiguration somewhere. For whatever reasons, the receiving server doesn’t handle mail for a domain.
DNS records are incorrect. These can be due to a number of things

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Yahoo collaborating with US intelligence agencies

Today it was revealed that Yahoo has been scanning people’s email for the federal government.

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