Possible spike in Yahoo unknown users

Multiple folks are mentioning seeing an increase in “user unknown” responses from Yahoo. Some people are discussing this with Yahoo.
Right now, best advice is to believe these are accurate user unknowns. UPDATE: There is increasing evidence these are not valid user unknowns. See next post.

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Yahoo disabled forwarding

Al posted about this over on his blog earlier this week. Yahoo has disabled the ability to forward email from one Yahoo account to an email account on a different system.
There is, of course, all sorts of speculation as to why forwarding has been disabled including speculation this has to do with holding on to accounts during the Verizon purchase. It’s certainly possible this is the case.
However, forwarding email is hard. Forwarding email on a large scale can result in spam blocks and delivery problems. It’s such an issue M3AAWG published a forwarding best practices document. It’s possible that Yahoo is making some changes on the back end to better implement the best practice recommendations. I don’t know, but it’s possible that Yahoo is telling the truth that they’re improving technology.

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Indictments in Yahoo data breach

Today the US government unsealed an indictment against 2 Russian agents and 2 hackers for breaking into Yahoo’s servers and stealing personal information. The information gathered during the hack was used to target government officials, security employees and private individuals.
Email is so central to our online identity. Compromise an email account and you can get access to social media, and other accounts. Email is the key to the kingdom.

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More on AOL transition to Oath Infrastructure

AOL posted on their blog today about changes to DMARC reporting and FBL messages as they continue to transition domains to the OATH infrastructure. As AOL domains go to the new infrastructure, DMARC reports for those domains will be included in the existing Yahoo DMARC reports.
After the MX migration is done, they’ll start migrating the actual user mailboxes. Right now, FBL messages for AOL properties are coming from AOL and will continue to do so until the actual mailbox is transitioned to the new infrastructure. Once the mailbox is transitioned, then any FBL emails from that address will come from the Yahoo infrastructure. The blog post at AOL suggests signing up for both AOL and Yahoo FBLs during this transition phase.
It does bring up an interesting question as to whether or not the combined FBL is going to be IP based, DKIM based or a mix of both. It sounds like at least during some part of the consolidation there will be a DKIM only FBL. It could be that there will be some expansion to an IP system in the future. Or, it could be that all FBLs from AOL addresses will be based on DKIM domain.

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