Email news today

Ironport have rolled out an update to their rule engine which has a bug causing mail problems. According to discussion on the mailop list, the new rule engine is folding the header with a line feed (LF) rather than a carriage return (CRLF). This is breaking things, including DKIM signatures. Ironport is aware of the issue. I expect an updated rollout shortly.

AOL migrated the last few users onto the Yahoo infrastructure today. It’s really gone. Also, while looking up some info related to this post, I discovered Verizon Media has a postmaster blog hosted on Tumblr.

I’ve seen a number of reports in different areas talking about an increase in Yahoo user unknowns. The same thing happened almost a year ago. This may be when Yahoo does clean up or it could be a coincidence. Folks at Verizon Media are looking into it

Be careful purchasing lists of DigiMarCon NY 2019 Attendees. There’s at least one list being sold out there that is just a scraped list of addresses. I’ve gotten emails asking for meetings and offering services because I am on the exhibitor list. I’m actually not on the exhibitor list, nor have I ever been to that conference in any capacity.

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OATH and Microsoft updates

I’ve seen multiple people asking questions about what’s going to happen with the Yahoo and AOL FBLs after the transition to the new Oath infrastructure. The most current information we have says that the AOL FBL (IP based) is going away. This FBL is handled by the AOL infrastructure. As AOL users are moved to the new infrastructure any complaints based on their actions will come through the Yahoo complaint feedback loop (CFL). The Yahoo CFL is domain based. Anyone who has not signed up for the Yahoo CFL should do so.
When registering you will need each domain and the selectors you’re planning on using. Yahoo will send an email with a confirmation link that needs to be clicked on within a short period of time in order to activate the FBL.
Microsoft’s SNDS program had an outage at the end of last week. That’s been fixed, but the missing data will not be back populated into the system. This has happened a couple times in the past. It seems the system gets a live feed of data. If, for some reason, the data is interrupted, then it’s gone and doesn’t get populated.

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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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AOL Postmaster page changes

AOL has disabled the IP reputation check and the rDNS lookup on their postmaster pages. Given AOL isn’t handling the first mail hop any longer, this makes perfect sense. They simply don’t have the kind of data they did when they were handling mail directly from the sender MTA.
There’s no information, yet, on whether or not that functionality will be added / replicated over at Yahoo.

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