5 ms·

Yahoo Mail Is The Worst

13 points by twampss 17y ago

prodigal_erik 17y ago
At first glance, this is an autoresponder that doesn't require a confirmed subscription. If that's correct, when some idiot spammer sends it a message with a spoofed envelope address (because they don't realize or care that 88fortunes is an autoresponder, not a person), it will send an unsolicited message to whatever address the spammer used. Anyone know how many "this is spam" clicks it takes for them to ban a sender having no history with them?
SwellJoe 17y ago
Welcome to the wonderful world of email, Zed. Self-righteousness won't solve the problem. I suspect the problem is that the IP in question has been used in the past for nefarious purposes. The whole "It's a new server" argument is moot if the IP address it lives on had been used in the past (and it certainly has). Get right with RFC Jesus, make sure your DNS resolves both ways, get your SPF records right, and if that still doesn't do it, setup DKIM. If that still doesn't allow mail to go through to Yahoo addresses unimpeded, you'll have to contact them.
- schammy 17y ago
  Exactly what I was going to say. Very likely, the IP of this guy's server is the same IP that an old spamming server used to have. It's happened to me more than once, and that's very likely the case here.
sil3ntmac 17y ago
About a year ago I worked in support at a large webhosting company. 99% of the blacklisted email issues we ever had came from Yahoo. Some of the cases were legitimate (or is it illegitemate?) spam being sent out from our servers, but we would always find and eliminate these accounts. Unfortunately, Yahoo would blacklist the entire server IP, so none of the other users on the shared server could send email to yahoo either. This caused obvious problems, and we would spend days contacting support at yahoo to explain and get us un-blacklisted. I also remember this happening with emailing addresses on the entire AT&T ISP. That effected about 40 shared servers (around 16000 hosting accounts, each with unlimited email). So yeah. Bad news.
- SwellJoe 17y ago
  You're speaking of a whole other kettle of fish. You had high volume servers providing mail service for barely trusted users. This post is about one mail server providing service for, presumably, one guy. It's entirely possible to reliably send mail to Yahoo if you control the server. In fact, it's not even that hard. I've explained how in another post. We have a few hundred (mostly small) hosting providers running our software which includes a mail processing stack, and quite frequently they ask about stuff like this (and yes, Yahoo comes up more than GMail, but about the same as Hotmail). And, there is very often anger involved, just as in this case. But, the fact is...if you follow RFCs strictly (Zed has written his own newfangled mail server in Python; I suspect he's made some mistakes, as the mail RFCs are notoriously difficult to get right, though the MTA isn't necessarily dealing with all of the messiness of the protocols), have DNS that resolves in both directions, and have accurate SPF records, delivering to Yahoo will work reliably and fast. We've occasionally gotten comments that DKIM is necessary to deliver to Yahoo, but whenever I hear it, I'm surprised to hear that a major provider has finally started actually blocking on DKIM. So, I go check. I always find that no, DKIM is still not required to deliver to Yahoo. It probably helps, though. I'm not saying Yahoo doesn't have an itchy trigger finger on the blacklisting process. Maybe they do. They certainly aren't as good as Google at non-obtrusively, but effectively, blocking spam, but very few providers are.
pilif 17y ago
What is going on here is a process called "Greylisting" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting). The idea is that spammers don't use real mail queues and thus, if you send a temporary error, genuine clients will requeue the message, whereas spammers will just drop it. Over time, this assertion has become false and now it's just annoying.
- asjo 17y ago
  The idea is that spammers don't use real mail queues and thus, if you send a temporary error, genuine clients will requeue the message, whereas spammers will just drop it. Over time, this assertion has become false and now it's just annoying. Do you have some evidence for this claim? Greylisting heavily reduced the amount of spam I received when I started using greylisting years ago. I still see large amounts of spam rejected, so I'd like to hear more about how it doesn't work any more - it seems to reduce the spam-level significantly for me.
thwarted 17y ago
I'm having a similar problem with hotmail currently, although hotmail seems to have firewalled our source IP (can't even connect) anymore, and the various contacts we have at Microsoft/hotmail can't even acknowledge that they are blocking a certain IP range, and keep making us run around asking us to "try connecting with telnet" (how do they think I've been verifying that one IP is blocked and other isn't?) and what our email client settings are, and how we've configured Exchange. And yes, reverse DNS is proper, as is SPF, and we've had this IP for years and hotmail has accepted mail from it in the past, and hotmail correctly accepts and delivers mail when sent from another IP. I don't mind the blocking, I recognize that as a legit way of controlling access, but what is really frustrating is that the hotmail folks assume that I don't know anything about email and that they can't even acknowledge that they have a certain IP blocked. If they could just say "Yes, we've blocked that, and there's nothing you can do or say to get us to unblock it", then we could move on; but when it looks like no one at hotmail knows what's going on, everyone continuously believes that if they just say the magic words or contact the right person, it can all be cleared up.
- jonursenbach 17y ago
  The problem that I've experienced with Hotmail is even with proper SPF, if you do not stay below their 1% spam threshold, they reject your IP. The solution that I came to in the past to overcome this, working for a large online dating site, was to build a mail relay system that would monitor the response ratio on each IP, and if it dropped below a certain percentage to switch it off onto another. Worked fairly well, only downside is having to manage a lot of IP addresses on your mailer boxes.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

13 points by twampss 17y ago

At first glance, this is an autoresponder that doesn't require a confirmed subscription. If that's correct, when some idiot spammer sends it a message with a spoofed envelope address (because they don't realize or care that 88fortunes is an autoresponder, not a person), it will send an unsolicited message to whatever address the spammer used. Anyone know how many "this is spam" clicks it takes for them to ban a sender having no history with them?

SwellJoe 17y ago

Welcome to the wonderful world of email, Zed. Self-righteousness won't solve the problem. I suspect the problem is that the IP in question has been used in the past for nefarious purposes. The whole "It's a new server" argument is moot if the IP address it lives on had been used in the past (and it certainly has). Get right with RFC Jesus, make sure your DNS resolves both ways, get your SPF records right, and if that still doesn't do it, setup DKIM. If that still doesn't allow mail to go through to Yahoo addresses unimpeded, you'll have to contact them.

schammy 17y ago
Exactly what I was going to say. Very likely, the IP of this guy's server is the same IP that an old spamming server used to have. It's happened to me more than once, and that's very likely the case here.

sil3ntmac 17y ago

About a year ago I worked in support at a large webhosting company. 99% of the blacklisted email issues we ever had came from Yahoo. Some of the cases were legitimate (or is it illegitemate?) spam being sent out from our servers, but we would always find and eliminate these accounts. Unfortunately, Yahoo would blacklist the entire server IP, so none of the other users on the shared server could send email to yahoo either. This caused obvious problems, and we would spend days contacting support at yahoo to explain and get us un-blacklisted. I also remember this happening with emailing addresses on the entire AT&T ISP. That effected about 40 shared servers (around 16000 hosting accounts, each with unlimited email). So yeah. Bad news.

SwellJoe 17y ago
You're speaking of a whole other kettle of fish. You had high volume servers providing mail service for barely trusted users. This post is about one mail server providing service for, presumably, one guy. It's entirely possible to reliably send mail to Yahoo if you control the server. In fact, it's not even that hard. I've explained how in another post. We have a few hundred (mostly small) hosting providers running our software which includes a mail processing stack, and quite frequently they ask about stuff like this (and yes, Yahoo comes up more than GMail, but about the same as Hotmail). And, there is very often anger involved, just as in this case. But, the fact is...if you follow RFCs strictly (Zed has written his own newfangled mail server in Python; I suspect he's made some mistakes, as the mail RFCs are notoriously difficult to get right, though the MTA isn't necessarily dealing with all of the messiness of the protocols), have DNS that resolves in both directions, and have accurate SPF records, delivering to Yahoo will work reliably and fast. We've occasionally gotten comments that DKIM is necessary to deliver to Yahoo, but whenever I hear it, I'm surprised to hear that a major provider has finally started actually blocking on DKIM. So, I go check. I always find that no, DKIM is still not required to deliver to Yahoo. It probably helps, though. I'm not saying Yahoo doesn't have an itchy trigger finger on the blacklisting process. Maybe they do. They certainly aren't as good as Google at non-obtrusively, but effectively, blocking spam, but very few providers are.

pilif 17y ago

What is going on here is a process called "Greylisting" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting). The idea is that spammers don't use real mail queues and thus, if you send a temporary error, genuine clients will requeue the message, whereas spammers will just drop it. Over time, this assertion has become false and now it's just annoying.

asjo 17y ago
The idea is that spammers don't use real mail queues and thus, if you send a temporary error, genuine clients will requeue the message, whereas spammers will just drop it. Over time, this assertion has become false and now it's just annoying. Do you have some evidence for this claim? Greylisting heavily reduced the amount of spam I received when I started using greylisting years ago. I still see large amounts of spam rejected, so I'd like to hear more about how it doesn't work any more - it seems to reduce the spam-level significantly for me.

thwarted 17y ago

I'm having a similar problem with hotmail currently, although hotmail seems to have firewalled our source IP (can't even connect) anymore, and the various contacts we have at Microsoft/hotmail can't even acknowledge that they are blocking a certain IP range, and keep making us run around asking us to "try connecting with telnet" (how do they think I've been verifying that one IP is blocked and other isn't?) and what our email client settings are, and how we've configured Exchange. And yes, reverse DNS is proper, as is SPF, and we've had this IP for years and hotmail has accepted mail from it in the past, and hotmail correctly accepts and delivers mail when sent from another IP. I don't mind the blocking, I recognize that as a legit way of controlling access, but what is really frustrating is that the hotmail folks assume that I don't know anything about email and that they can't even acknowledge that they have a certain IP blocked. If they could just say "Yes, we've blocked that, and there's nothing you can do or say to get us to unblock it", then we could move on; but when it looks like no one at hotmail knows what's going on, everyone continuously believes that if they just say the magic words or contact the right person, it can all be cleared up.

jonursenbach 17y ago
The problem that I've experienced with Hotmail is even with proper SPF, if you do not stay below their 1% spam threshold, they reject your IP. The solution that I came to in the past to overcome this, working for a large online dating site, was to build a mail relay system that would monitor the response ratio on each IP, and if it dropped below a certain percentage to switch it off onto another. Worked fairly well, only downside is having to manage a lot of IP addresses on your mailer boxes.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]