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Just a perspective from the other side of the coin: I host various services for schools like online registration for parent - teacher conferences. When the plat

Just a perspective from the other side of the coin: I host various services for schools like online registration for parent - teacher conferences. When the platform is live hundreds of parents are logging in, choosing their appointments and have to confirm them via email (only one email per person not per appointment) And Yahoo is the Single worst email service to send to. I have correctly configured sfp, dmarc, dkim, reverse dns for the Mailserver and have tested the wording with multiple mail testing services to make sure it doesn't have keywords that get automatically flagged. And yet after like 50 emails to parents with yahoo email addresses they are giving me errors because of "unusual volume of emails from your domain" There is no form, no human to talk to and they just block you. Angry parents come to me or course because they never redeived the activation link so I had to put up a disclaimer stating that if they should not use a yahoo email address if they have a different one

Phelinofist 3y ago
Why confirm via mail at all?
- justoreply 3y ago
  maybe to confirm that the email is valid?
  - geek_at 3y ago
    Correct! With schools and students there is always incentive for shenanigans. If I didn't test for emails they could just book-block all teachers. There would be other ways to clog the system using trashmail providers but thankfully no student cared enough for that yet
- carstenhag 3y ago
  This is a requirement in some jurisdictions (double opt in) for some cases. Not sure about "User has a confirmed email + account at our service, he wants to sign up for a reminder" use case though.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    "Double opt-in"is a spammer term for what normal folk refer to as "confirmed opt-in".
zo1 3y ago
I seriously don't get why we can't have some sort of licensing authority for this type of thing. Maybe they issue you a secret key to include in email headers, or put your entire domain on some sort of whitelist. And complaints get handled by a human to confirm that it's not a "oh I don't like this, or I don't remember signing up for this" non-sense complaint that would get you blocked or have your license revoked with a normal provider. Am I crazy or just missing some super obvious gap with this path?
- newshackr 3y ago
  SMS has something similar to this. You have to honor requests to stop sending or are banned.
- autoexec 3y ago
  You should try starting one. You'd just need to work with every email provider on the planet (including people running personal email servers) and convince them to let you decide for them what is spam or not, get them to implement a massive list of IPs/domains to whitelist on their servers, get them to let you edit that list whenever new mass mailers sign up for your "We're totally not spam" service, and then get them to provide some way for complaints to come back to you so that you can enforce your rules. It'd be a hard sell for mail providers, and it wouldn't solve the spam problem for any messages that aren't sanctioned by your service. You'd also have to do a lot of work to validate new senders long before they send their first message and you start getting complaints or else you're just letting spammers pay you to completely bypass every mail provider's spam filters until they finally get blocked and have to create a new account with you under a different company name. If you can convince everyone to trust you, and your service, and that it'd be worth it for mail providers to do all that work on their end on top of everything they're doing currently to prevent spam, it really could improve deliverability.
  - aembleton 3y ago
    > You'd just need to work with every email provider Why would you need to do that? Just work with those that'll pay you for it. The others won't care as they'll just ignore the header.
tzs 3y ago
I have no idea if this still works, and it probably wouldn't work for a school, but 15-20 years ago the way to get Yahoo to stop blocking your emails was to call up your ad rep and say something like "Why the heck should we keep spending $10000/month buying ads on Yahoo when any new customers we get from those ads that use Yahoo email end up pissed off at us and maybe even charge back because it looks like we are completely ignoring them because they don't see our emails????". That would get you added to a "never block mail from this domain" whitelist that had higher precedence than everything else.
- IMTDb 3y ago
  Aka: extortion
  - throwuxiytayq 3y ago
    What does outward rotation about an axis or fixed point have to do with politely asking corporate overlords to get their shit together?
U8dcN7vx 3y ago
There is a form and people you can talk to if the form doesn't work. The form should have been mentioned in the reject message but is at <https://senders.yahooinc.com/contact#sender-support-request https://senders.yahooinc.com/contact#sender-support-request> though you should first review their information, rules, etc, starting at <https://senders.yahooinc.com/ https://senders.yahooinc.com/>, and the mailop mailing list at <https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop> is where you can ask for help if the former doesn't suffice that will often result in direct contact with someone at Yahoo! that can get things done or at least give knowledgeable advice.
defulmere 3y ago
> And yet after like 50 emails to parents with yahoo email addresses they are giving me errors because of "unusual volume of emails from your domain" Scandalous, it's almost as if the established major providers have a financial interest in making it difficult for smaller providers and individuals to send mail using their own domains!
- aunterste 3y ago
  It is - this would be the better antitrust angle to pursue
gus_massa 3y ago
> And Yahoo is the Single worst email service to send to. During the pandemic we had a lot of problems with the confirmation email for our 5000 T.A. in the virtual campus of the university. I had to guess what was happening because I was not part of the administration team, just collecting forwarded messages form the T.A and guessing: * Gmail: Most of the time it works. * Yahoo: The server receives a few hundred emails per day and the other are delayed. These were confirmation emails with half an hour tolerance, if they were lucky to pass the next day they were not useful. (After a week the sending server stops retrying.) * Hotmail: Sometimes the email is received and sometimes it just disappears. No spam folder. No bounce email. It just evaporate. (Try sending an email from hotmail to the no-reply address and cross your fingers.) * Others: No enough data to have a good guess.
- everybodyknows 3y ago
  > sometimes it just disappears. No spam folder. No bounce email. It just evaporate. Gmail will do this too. Happened a few months ago with a single (important) message from a private individual sender on Hotmail, one unknown to my Google account. The fix was adding the Hotmail address to a Google Contact.

Phelinofist 3y ago

Why confirm via mail at all?

justoreply 3y ago
maybe to confirm that the email is valid?
- geek_at 3y ago
  Correct! With schools and students there is always incentive for shenanigans. If I didn't test for emails they could just book-block all teachers. There would be other ways to clog the system using trashmail providers but thankfully no student cared enough for that yet
carstenhag 3y ago
This is a requirement in some jurisdictions (double opt in) for some cases. Not sure about "User has a confirmed email + account at our service, he wants to sign up for a reminder" use case though.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  "Double opt-in"is a spammer term for what normal folk refer to as "confirmed opt-in".

zo1 3y ago

I seriously don't get why we can't have some sort of licensing authority for this type of thing. Maybe they issue you a secret key to include in email headers, or put your entire domain on some sort of whitelist. And complaints get handled by a human to confirm that it's not a "oh I don't like this, or I don't remember signing up for this" non-sense complaint that would get you blocked or have your license revoked with a normal provider. Am I crazy or just missing some super obvious gap with this path?

newshackr 3y ago
SMS has something similar to this. You have to honor requests to stop sending or are banned.
autoexec 3y ago
You should try starting one. You'd just need to work with every email provider on the planet (including people running personal email servers) and convince them to let you decide for them what is spam or not, get them to implement a massive list of IPs/domains to whitelist on their servers, get them to let you edit that list whenever new mass mailers sign up for your "We're totally not spam" service, and then get them to provide some way for complaints to come back to you so that you can enforce your rules. It'd be a hard sell for mail providers, and it wouldn't solve the spam problem for any messages that aren't sanctioned by your service. You'd also have to do a lot of work to validate new senders long before they send their first message and you start getting complaints or else you're just letting spammers pay you to completely bypass every mail provider's spam filters until they finally get blocked and have to create a new account with you under a different company name. If you can convince everyone to trust you, and your service, and that it'd be worth it for mail providers to do all that work on their end on top of everything they're doing currently to prevent spam, it really could improve deliverability.
- aembleton 3y ago
  > You'd just need to work with every email provider Why would you need to do that? Just work with those that'll pay you for it. The others won't care as they'll just ignore the header.

tzs 3y ago

I have no idea if this still works, and it probably wouldn't work for a school, but 15-20 years ago the way to get Yahoo to stop blocking your emails was to call up your ad rep and say something like "Why the heck should we keep spending $10000/month buying ads on Yahoo when any new customers we get from those ads that use Yahoo email end up pissed off at us and maybe even charge back because it looks like we are completely ignoring them because they don't see our emails????". That would get you added to a "never block mail from this domain" whitelist that had higher precedence than everything else.

IMTDb 3y ago
Aka: extortion
- throwuxiytayq 3y ago
  What does outward rotation about an axis or fixed point have to do with politely asking corporate overlords to get their shit together?

U8dcN7vx 3y ago

There is a form and people you can talk to if the form doesn't work. The form should have been mentioned in the reject message but is at <https://senders.yahooinc.com/contact#sender-support-request https://senders.yahooinc.com/contact#sender-support-request> though you should first review their information, rules, etc, starting at <https://senders.yahooinc.com/ https://senders.yahooinc.com/>, and the mailop mailing list at <https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop> is where you can ask for help if the former doesn't suffice that will often result in direct contact with someone at Yahoo! that can get things done or at least give knowledgeable advice.

defulmere 3y ago

> And yet after like 50 emails to parents with yahoo email addresses they are giving me errors because of "unusual volume of emails from your domain" Scandalous, it's almost as if the established major providers have a financial interest in making it difficult for smaller providers and individuals to send mail using their own domains!

aunterste 3y ago
It is - this would be the better antitrust angle to pursue

gus_massa 3y ago

> And Yahoo is the Single worst email service to send to. During the pandemic we had a lot of problems with the confirmation email for our 5000 T.A. in the virtual campus of the university. I had to guess what was happening because I was not part of the administration team, just collecting forwarded messages form the T.A and guessing: * Gmail: Most of the time it works. * Yahoo: The server receives a few hundred emails per day and the other are delayed. These were confirmation emails with half an hour tolerance, if they were lucky to pass the next day they were not useful. (After a week the sending server stops retrying.) * Hotmail: Sometimes the email is received and sometimes it just disappears. No spam folder. No bounce email. It just evaporate. (Try sending an email from hotmail to the no-reply address and cross your fingers.) * Others: No enough data to have a good guess.

everybodyknows 3y ago
> sometimes it just disappears. No spam folder. No bounce email. It just evaporate. Gmail will do this too. Happened a few months ago with a single (important) message from a private individual sender on Hotmail, one unknown to my Google account. The fix was adding the Hotmail address to a Google Contact.