We've just been notified by a user about a potential problem with Yahoo email accounts - if you're trying to sign up with a Yahoo account or wondering why you're not getting any other email notifications, it appears emails sent to that provider are mysteriously vanishing after reaching the Yahoo mail servers.

We've hit their contact page to try and chase this up and will see what happens (past experience trying to contact mega-companies for support has not exactly been positive).

Ausgamers is on a spammer blacklist.

Some of our mail servers are/have been, but I don't think the one we're currently using is. Also, normally when it is on some sort of blacklist system, the mails aren't delivered to their servers - they're rejected at the SMTP level usually with a helpful URL telling us why they're not coming through.

In this case they're getting accepted by their SMTP server then they just vanish.

I've gotten an email from Yahoo saying they've gotten my request and will get back to me in 48 hours. I will be super-impressed if that's the case!

I had problems with Yahoo mail as well.. we run an opt-in cash reward prize thing for people doing online surveys and we've got about 25,000 users on various yahoo email addresses.

One day they all stopped being delivered with the SMTP response from Yahoo that the mail is being deferred. After going through their support (which was pretty quick and helpful surprisingly) they explained it's just part of their spam blocking technique.

If they register too many connections from the same /24 then they will defer all mail connections. The tech guy said 99% of spammers will get that defer message and then never try again whereas legit operations would do the right thing and defer the delivery for 4 hours or more and then send again and which by then the email gets delivered.

Sure enough after a few days all the mail held up on our MTA for yahoo started delivering through to them.

I had the same problem with Yahoo (I am on the committee of a soccer club and email 350+ people). I tried to sort it out through a web-interface and didn't get anywhere. I just asked people to give me alternative email addresses (which everyone has) - the way I see it, Yahoo's loss.

f they register too many connections from the same /24 then they will defer all mail connections. The tech guy said 99% of spammers will get that defer message and then never try again whereas legit operations would do the right thing and defer the delivery for 4 hours or more and then send again and which by then the email gets delivered.

That's the same principle as greylisting iirc?

yeh
we do it too

Updated: heard back from a human at around 5am this morning asking for 3 things (...2 of which were already supplied in my original email, other was the mail server IP address). So they're doing well so far; will see how they go with the followup.

I am surprised people still yahoo!
gmail! way of the future!

Yeh every time I try another web-based email I'm amazed at how s*** it is compared to gmail. I try and use it for a while thinking it's just because I'm so used to gmail, but it just seems to blow everything else out of the water in terms of speed and usability.

Actually turns out they ARE working, they're just delayed significantly. They still might end up in your spam folder. Still talking to Yahoo about it.

Sounds to be like their greylisting are borked.