My hosting company tells me that the mail logs indicate that the majority of Mailman's messages to Yahoo addresses return a "deferred" message. Here is the complete message:
whateveraddress@yahoo.com R=lookuphost T=remote_smtp defer (0): SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection: host g.mx.mail.yahoo.com [206.190.53.191]: 421 4.7.0 [TS02] Messages from 216.104.33.122 temporarily deferred due to user complaints - 4.16.56.1; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts02.html
All of my outgoing email uses the same server located at 216.104.33.122 and any single email that I send to any Yahoo address using any client is received just fine.
My Mailman list is very small with < 20 members and only 3 Yahoo addresses and the user complaint thing is bogus. This is a golf list for crying out loud.all of the members want to know what their tee times are for Saturday! All of Yahoo addresses have the same issue, even my own which I added to the list for testing. And I said majority, because 1 in 15 or so messages will miraculously come through.
Does anyone else have any experience with this, and is there something that I can do on my end that would help?
Rick Harris
Hi,
2008/2/20, Rick Harris <rick@learntime.com>:
My hosting company tells me that the mail logs indicate that the majority of Mailman's messages to Yahoo addresses return a "deferred" message. Here is the complete message:
This is not even remotely mailman related. I have the same issue with normal mail. Contact yahoo, they reply initially, then keep quiet and nothing changes. The bigger the company, the worse it gets.
-- Zbigniew Szalbot
Thank you for the response.
I have spent time testing individual mail to the same addresses from the same source and I am successful.
What I failed to note in my posting is that this occurs when the mail is going to multiple addresses as in a normal post. If I go into my list and turn everyone off except for my Yahoo address, it will work EVERY time. Then I go back in and turn all of the addresses back on and the Yahoo addresses get "deferred" including mine.
I'm not blaming Mailman...I'm just asking if there is something about Mailman that I can change that will overcome this. Changing anything about Yahoo would be like changing heaven and earth. Surely, someone else is experiencing this issue.
Thanks again,
Rick Harris
-----Original Message----- From: Zbigniew Szalbot [mailto:zszalbot@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 5:41 AM To: Rick Harris Cc: mailman-users@python.org Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman postings deferred by Yahoo
Hi,
2008/2/20, Rick Harris <rick@learntime.com>:
My hosting company tells me that the mail logs indicate that the majority of Mailman's messages to Yahoo addresses return a "deferred" message. Here is the complete message:
This is not even remotely mailman related. I have the same issue with normal mail. Contact yahoo, they reply initially, then keep quiet and nothing changes. The bigger the company, the worse it gets.
-- Zbigniew Szalbot
On 2/20/08 6:06 AM, Rick Harris at rick@learntime.com wrote:
Thank you for the response.
I have spent time testing individual mail to the same addresses from the same source and I am successful.
What I failed to note in my posting is that this occurs when the mail is going to multiple addresses as in a normal post. If I go into my list and turn everyone off except for my Yahoo address, it will work EVERY time. Then I go back in and turn all of the addresses back on and the Yahoo addresses get "deferred" including mine.
I'm not blaming Mailman...I'm just asking if there is something about Mailman that I can change that will overcome this. Changing anything about Yahoo would be like changing heaven and earth. Surely, someone else is experiencing this issue.
Turn on VERP or full personalization. That will force mailman to generate a separate message for each recipient and Yahoo will see several messages each addresses to one recipient rather than one message addressed to multiple recipients.
Unfortunately, when a recipient chooses to use a free e-mail service, they get what they're paying for.
-- Larry Stone lstone19@stonejongleux.com http://www.stonejongleux.com/
Quoting Larry Stone (lstone19@stonejongleux.com):
I'm not blaming Mailman...I'm just asking if there is something about Mailman that I can change that will overcome this. Changing anything about Yahoo would be like changing heaven and earth. Surely, someone else is experiencing this issue.
Turn on VERP or full personalization. That will force mailman to generate a separate message for each recipient and Yahoo will see several messages each addresses to one recipient rather than one message addressed to multiple recipients.
VERP does not necessarily solve the issue. I have VERP running on my lists, and yahoo is still deferring me and delivering to the spam box when they DO deliver.
dd
This sounds like an anitspam tactic to me. Messages addressed to multiple recipients are deferred, since a lot of spammers won't try sending a deferred message again; It's not worth their time or resources to keep track of deferred messages, and then go back and retry them. A legitimate mail will go through, just not until your MTA sends it a second time, upon which their servers will most likely accept it.
On 2/20/2008 at 6:15 AM, in message <006c01c873b1$f8442400$e8cc6c00$@com>, "Rick Harris" <rick@learntime.com> wrote: My hosting company tells me that the mail logs indicate that the majority of Mailman's messages to Yahoo addresses return a "deferred" message. Here is the complete message:
...
My Mailman list is very small with < 20 members and only 3 Yahoo addresses and the user complaint thing is bogus. This is a golf list for crying out loud.all of the members want to know what their tee times are for Saturday! All of Yahoo addresses have the same issue, even my own which I added to the list for testing. And I said majority, because 1 in 15 or so messages will miraculously come through.
Does anyone else have any experience with this, and is there something that I can do on my end that would help?
Rick Harris
The user complaint notice is bogus. I monitored a batch that had several yahoo addresses in. When I tried to manually push through the batch, I received a 451 and 421 error message from yahoo. The third yahoo address when through fine. So in just one batch I received 3 different responses from yahoo.
This is not a mailman issue but a yahoo problem. I have also tried getting my servers whitelisted and to sign up for their feedback loop but all to no avail.
If your hosting company is running exim as their mta, ask them to run one of the following commands every 5 minutes are so:
exim -Rff yahoo.com
or
exim -qff
Those are the commands that I use to get my clients' posts pushed through to yahoo accounts in a relatively short time.
Running VERP is not a viable alternative for those of us who host multiple mailing lists due to the resource hit that the server takes.
I think the long term solution is to get your members signed up to your list with another e-mail address. If only yahoo's free email users knew how yahoo is interfering with their mail delivery.
Regards, Brian
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Thanks for your reply. I understand that ultimately it is a Yahoo problem and ultimately something that will never be cured. I was hoping since I only run one small list that there was a "magic" switch that I could flip that would get past Yahoo.
Rick Harris
-----Original Message----- From: Brian Carpenter [mailto:brian@emwd.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 7:13 AM To: 'Rick Harris'; mailman-users@python.org Subject: RE: [Mailman-Users] Mailman postings deferred by Yahoo
My Mailman list is very small with < 20 members and only 3 Yahoo addresses and the user complaint thing is bogus. This is a golf list for crying out loud.all of the members want to know what their tee times are for Saturday! All of Yahoo addresses have the same issue, even my own which I added to the list for testing. And I said majority, because 1 in 15 or so messages will miraculously come through.
Does anyone else have any experience with this, and is there something that I can do on my end that would help?
Rick Harris
The user complaint notice is bogus. I monitored a batch that had several yahoo addresses in. When I tried to manually push through the batch, I received a 451 and 421 error message from yahoo. The third yahoo address when through fine. So in just one batch I received 3 different responses from yahoo.
This is not a mailman issue but a yahoo problem. I have also tried getting my servers whitelisted and to sign up for their feedback loop but all to no avail.
If your hosting company is running exim as their mta, ask them to run one of the following commands every 5 minutes are so:
exim -Rff yahoo.com
or
exim -qff
Those are the commands that I use to get my clients' posts pushed through to yahoo accounts in a relatively short time.
Running VERP is not a viable alternative for those of us who host multiple mailing lists due to the resource hit that the server takes.
I think the long term solution is to get your members signed up to your list with another e-mail address. If only yahoo's free email users knew how yahoo is interfering with their mail delivery.
Regards, Brian
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Rick Harris wrote:
Thanks for your reply. I understand that ultimately it is a Yahoo problem and ultimately something that will never be cured. I was hoping since I only run one small list that there was a "magic" switch that I could flip that would get past Yahoo.
Rick Harris
Rick, the last time Yahoo did this was in December, and I spent a week trying to contact someone there with a pulse, tried getting added to their whitelist, filled in forms, read their automated responses, etc. After about two weeks, the deferrals went away. Until now. Even with my postfix configured for a "slow" Yahoo, as in the following, I still have 2600 Yahoo deferrals in my retry queue.
postfix/master.cf yahoo unix - - n - 1 smtp
postfix/main.cf yahoo_destination_recipient_limit = 5 # matches Yahoo's limit yahoo_destination_concurreny_limit = 2
postfix/transport yahoo.ca yahoo: yahoo.com yahoo: (with subsequent 'postmap transport')
-- Dennis Black System Admin Academic Information and Communication Technologies (AICT) (780-)492-9329 This communication is intended for the use of the recipient to which it is addressed, and may contain confidential, personal, and/or privileged information. Please contact us immediately if you are not the intended recipient of this communication. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication, do not copy, distribute, or take action on it. Any communication received in error, or subsequent reply, should be deleted or destroyed.
On 2/20/2008, Dennis Black (dblack@ualberta.ca) wrote:
postfix/main.cf yahoo_destination_recipient_limit = 5 # matches Yahoo's limit yahoo_destination_concurreny_limit = 2
I may be wrong, but I don't think you can add comments like that, only on lines that START with a '#'... so it should be:
# matches Yahoo's limit yahoo_destination_recipient_limit = 5
yahoo_destination_concurreny_limit = 2
--
Best regards,
Charles
Charles Marcus wrote:
On 2/20/2008, Dennis Black (dblack@ualberta.ca) wrote:
postfix/main.cf yahoo_destination_recipient_limit = 5 # matches Yahoo's limit yahoo_destination_concurreny_limit = 2
I may be wrong, but I don't think you can add comments like that, only on lines that START with a '#'... so it should be:
# matches Yahoo's limit yahoo_destination_recipient_limit = 5
yahoo_destination_concurrency_limit = 2
It was for focusing purposes only, in the message only.
The 'yahoo_destination_recipient_limit = 5' is the one that matches Yahoo's rules, not the block of two: yahoo_destination_recipient_limit = 5 yahoo_destination_concurrency_limit = 2
Then why did I bother to show both? In case someone wanted to mess with the numbers on their system... it was a quick-and-dirty-cut-and-paste...
Yahoo doesn't supply a concurrency limit number, but states that you should keep it low to be nice to their resources.
The values don't matter anyway. It sounds like the Mailman admins who have written, have tried everything and it hasn't made a difference.
-- Dennis Black System Admin Academic Information and Communication Technologies (AICT) (780-)492-9329 This communication is intended for the use of the recipient to which it is addressed, and may contain confidential, personal, and/or privileged information. Please contact us immediately if you are not the intended recipient of this communication. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication, do not copy, distribute, or take action on it. Any communication received in error, or subsequent reply, should be deleted or destroyed.
Rick Harris wrote:
Thanks for your reply. I understand that ultimately it is a Yahoo problem and ultimately something that will never be cured. I was hoping since I only run one small list that there was a "magic" switch that I could flip that would get past Yahoo.
If you are convinced that sending to only one Yahoo recipient per message will avoid the problem, set Non-digest options-> personalize to Yes. It doesn't have to be Full as another poster suggested, and you don't actually have to personalize any header or footer information. Setting personalize to Yes is enough to cause messages to be sent individually.
If you don't see this option, you have to ask your provider to put
OWNERS_CAN_ENABLE_PERSONALIZATION = Yes
in mm_cfg.py.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Mark Sapiro wrote at 08:21 AM 2/20/2008:
Thanks for your reply. I understand that ultimately it is a Yahoo problem and ultimately something that will never be cured. I was hoping since I only run one small list that there was a "magic" switch that I could flip that would get past Yahoo.
If you are convinced that sending to only one Yahoo recipient per message will avoid the problem, set Non-digest options-> personalize to Yes. It doesn't have to be Full as another poster suggested, and you don't actually have to personalize any header or footer information. Setting personalize to Yes is enough to cause messages to be sent individually.
If you don't see this option, you have to ask your provider to put
OWNERS_CAN_ENABLE_PERSONALIZATION = Yes
in mm_cfg.py.
It even happens when sending to a single yahoo address.
I ran into this error message when sending an email to three people: one a yahoo account, one gmail, and the other was an account on our server. The email was sent yesterday, and the message was waiting for me this morning.
Michael Welch, volunteer Redwood Alliance PO Box 293 Arcata, CA 95518 707-822-7884 mwelch@redwoodalliance.org www.redwoodalliance.org
On Wed, 20 Feb 2008 05:15:58 -0600 "Rick Harris" <rick@learntime.com> wrote:
whateveraddress@yahoo.com R=lookuphost T=remote_smtp defer (0): SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection: host g.mx.mail.yahoo.com [206.190.53.191]: 421 4.7.0 [TS02] Messages from 216.104.33.122 temporarily deferred due to user complaints - 4.16.56.1; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts02.html
Same here, although i get a TS01 instead of a TS02. And 10'000 a day of those.
All of my outgoing email uses the same server located at 216.104.33.122 and any single email that I send to any Yahoo address using any client is received just fine.
As far as i can tell, they only do it for certain IPs and only certain MX have that problem (although i didn't check which ones they are and whether it changes over time). So, finally all mails will arrive somewhen.
My Mailman list is very small with < 20 members and only 3 Yahoo addresses and the user complaint thing is bogus. This is a golf list for crying out loud.all of the members want to know what their tee times are for Saturday! All of Yahoo addresses have the same issue, even my own which I added to the list for testing. And I said majority, because 1 in 15 or so messages will miraculously come through.
Just wait a bit. If you set up your MTA correctly, it will choose a random MX and hit one that accepts your mails.
Does anyone else have any experience with this, and is there something that I can do on my end that would help?
Pester yahoo. Although i doubt that this will help much. I'm now in "contact" with them for over two weeks. The first respond i got from them was a standard mail that i should contact my mail admin (ie they haven't even read what i wrote). After repeating the same thing 4 or 5 times, because they asked for the same stuff (domain name, server ip, log file) over and over again i threatened them to unsubsribe all subscribers from yahoo (a total of about 600 of them) and tell everyone to choose a different freemailer. Since then, they appologize in every mail, but nothing changed so far.
Now over two weeks after my initial "contact", i consider really unsubscribing all yahoo users and put a news entry on our webpage with the explenation if the situation doesn't change by this weekend. I'm quite sure that this will catch their attention... even if it's too late.
Attila Kinali-- Praised are the Fountains of Shelieth, the silver harp of the waters, But blest in my name forever this stream that stanched my thirst! -- Deed of Morred
My Mailman list is very small with < 20 members and only 3 Yahoo addresses and the user complaint thing is bogus. This is a golf list for crying out loud.all of the members want to know what their tee times are for Saturday! All of Yahoo addresses have the same issue, even my own which I added to the list for testing. And I said majority, because 1 in 15 or so messages will miraculously come through.
Just wait a bit. If you set up your MTA correctly, it will choose a random MX and hit one that accepts your mails.
It seems Rick is probably on a shared hosting environment and the time it takes for his mail to finally be delivered will depend how large the hosting company's mail queue is.
Does anyone else have any experience with this, and is there something that I can do on my end that would help?
Pester yahoo. Although i doubt that this will help much. I'm now in "contact" with them for over two weeks. The first respond i got from them was a standard mail that i should contact my mail admin (ie they haven't even read what i wrote). After repeating the same thing 4 or 5 times, because they asked for the same stuff (domain name, server ip, log file) over and over again i threatened them to unsubsribe all subscribers from yahoo (a total of about 600 of them) and tell everyone to choose a different freemailer. Since then, they appologize in every mail, but nothing changed so far.
Now over two weeks after my initial "contact", i consider really unsubscribing all yahoo users and put a news entry on our webpage with the explenation if the situation doesn't change by this weekend. I'm quite sure that this will catch their attention... even if it's too late.
I really think the best option is to get our mailman list subscribers to start using another e-mail provider. I think Yahoo should be sued for their interference of legitimate e-mail communications and the way they have wasted a large number of ISPs' time by the process that they make us go through to try to get white listed with them or to even be placed upon their feedback loop. In fact I haven't come across one ISP yet who has had their servers successfully white listed with yahoo.
Regards, Brian
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Yes. I am on a shared server. It seems that Yahoo picks up on the fact that this is going to multiple recipients (apparent 5+ raises the flag). Since I am on a shared server, it appears that my option for personalization is turned off. If I understand correctly, personalization might overcome the Yahoo problem but might cause a problem with my host if my list was a large one. That may be an easier fight.
Thanks,
Rick Harris
-----Original Message----- From: Brian Carpenter [mailto:brian@emwd.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 9:48 AM To: 'Attila Kinali'; 'Rick Harris' Cc: mailman-users@python.org Subject: RE: [Mailman-Users] Mailman postings deferred by Yahoo
My Mailman list is very small with < 20 members and only 3 Yahoo addresses and the user complaint thing is bogus. This is a golf list for crying out loud.all of the members want to know what their tee times are for Saturday! All of Yahoo addresses have the same issue, even my own which I added to the list for testing. And I said majority, because 1 in 15 or so messages will miraculously come through.
Just wait a bit. If you set up your MTA correctly, it will choose a random MX and hit one that accepts your mails.
It seems Rick is probably on a shared hosting environment and the time it takes for his mail to finally be delivered will depend how large the hosting company's mail queue is.
Does anyone else have any experience with this, and is there something that I can do on my end that would help?
Pester yahoo. Although i doubt that this will help much. I'm now in "contact" with them for over two weeks. The first respond i got from them was a standard mail that i should contact my mail admin (ie they haven't even read what i wrote). After repeating the same thing 4 or 5 times, because they asked for the same stuff (domain name, server ip, log file) over and over again i threatened them to unsubsribe all subscribers from yahoo (a total of about 600 of them) and tell everyone to choose a different freemailer. Since then, they appologize in every mail, but nothing changed so far.
Now over two weeks after my initial "contact", i consider really unsubscribing all yahoo users and put a news entry on our webpage with the explenation if the situation doesn't change by this weekend. I'm quite sure that this will catch their attention... even if it's too late.
I really think the best option is to get our mailman list subscribers to start using another e-mail provider. I think Yahoo should be sued for their interference of legitimate e-mail communications and the way they have wasted a large number of ISPs' time by the process that they make us go through to try to get white listed with them or to even be placed upon their feedback loop. In fact I haven't come across one ISP yet who has had their servers successfully white listed with yahoo.
Regards, Brian
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-----Original Message----- From: Rick Harris [mailto:rick@learntime.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 10:57 AM To: 'Brian Carpenter'; 'Attila Kinali' Cc: mailman-users@python.org Subject: RE: [Mailman-Users] Mailman postings deferred by Yahoo
Yes. I am on a shared server. It seems that Yahoo picks up on the fact that this is going to multiple recipients (apparent 5+ raises the flag). Since I am on a shared server, it appears that my option for personalization is turned off. If I understand correctly, personalization might overcome the Yahoo problem but might cause a problem with my host if my list was a large one. That may be an easier fight.
Thanks,
Rick Harris
I doubt any web hosting company is going to enabled personalization on a shared server environment. I know we won't. It is just too large of a resource hit.
I also am not seeing this magic number (5) triggering Yahoo's response in my observations of our mail logs. I think people are just speculating when they try to find out why Yahoo is delaying their mail.
Regards, Brian
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Brian Carpenter wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: Rick Harris [mailto:rick@learntime.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 10:57 AM To: 'Brian Carpenter'; 'Attila Kinali' Cc: mailman-users@python.org Subject: RE: [Mailman-Users] Mailman postings deferred by Yahoo
Yes. I am on a shared server. It seems that Yahoo picks up on the fact that this is going to multiple recipients (apparent 5+ raises the flag). Since I am on a shared server, it appears that my option for personalization is turned off. If I understand correctly, personalization might overcome the Yahoo problem but might cause a problem with my host if my list was a large one. That may be an easier fight.
Thanks,
Rick Harris
I doubt any web hosting company is going to enabled personalization on a shared server environment. I know we won't. It is just too large of a resource hit.
I also am not seeing this magic number (5) triggering Yahoo's response in my observations of our mail logs. I think people are just speculating when they try to find out why Yahoo is delaying their mail.
Regards, Brian
The "5" limit comes from a Yahoo page, http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/postmaster-277515.html
-- Dennis Black System Admin Academic Information and Communication Technologies (AICT) (780-)492-9329 This communication is intended for the use of the recipient to which it is addressed, and may contain confidential, personal, and/or privileged information. Please contact us immediately if you are not the intended recipient of this communication. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication, do not copy, distribute, or take action on it. Any communication received in error, or subsequent reply, should be deleted or destroyed.
-----Original Message----- From: Dennis Black [mailto:dblack@ualberta.ca] Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 11:24 AM To: Brian Carpenter Cc: mailman-users@python.org Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman postings deferred by Yahoo
Brian Carpenter wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: Rick Harris [mailto:rick@learntime.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 10:57 AM To: 'Brian Carpenter'; 'Attila Kinali' Cc: mailman-users@python.org Subject: RE: [Mailman-Users] Mailman postings deferred by Yahoo
Yes. I am on a shared server. It seems that Yahoo picks up on the fact that this is going to multiple recipients (apparent 5+ raises the flag). Since I am on a shared server, it appears that my option for personalization is turned off. If I understand correctly, personalization might overcome the Yahoo problem but might cause a problem with my host if my list was a large one. That may be an easier fight.
Thanks,
Rick Harris
I doubt any web hosting company is going to enabled personalization on a shared server environment. I know we won't. It is just too large of a resource hit.
I also am not seeing this magic number (5) triggering Yahoo's response in my observations of our mail logs. I think people are just speculating when they try to find out why Yahoo is delaying their mail.
Regards, Brian
The "5" limit comes from a Yahoo page, http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/postmaster-277515.html
-- Dennis Black
I might not be understanding Yahoo's statement correctly but that answer doesn't seem to apply to connections being terminated for deferred reasons, hence the " When this limit is reached, no further messages will be accepted for delivery as our server automatically terminates the connection (without giving an error code)." "Reestablish connections if you do not get an error code" statements.
Regards, Brian
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Hello,
2008/2/20, Rick Harris <rick@learntime.com>:
Yes. I am on a shared server. It seems that Yahoo picks up on the fact that this is going to multiple recipients (apparent 5+ raises the flag). Since I am on a shared server, it appears that my option for personalization is turned off. If I understand correctly, personalization might overcome the Yahoo problem but might cause a problem with my host if my list was a large one. That may be an easier fight.
Not really. I generate email to yahoo separately for each recipient and I am still having problems. Fortunately, I am using exim so -Rff helps a lot. In short, while it may help, don't count too much on this.
-- Zbigniew Szalbot
On Wed, 20 Feb 2008 09:57:22 -0600 "Rick Harris" <rick@learntime.com> wrote:
Yes. I am on a shared server. It seems that Yahoo picks up on the fact that this is going to multiple recipients (apparent 5+ raises the flag). Since I am on a shared server, it appears that my option for personalization is turned off. If I understand correctly, personalization might overcome the Yahoo problem but might cause a problem with my host if my list was a large one. That may be an easier fight.
Yes, it might overcome this problem, but you'll get another, even worse one: maintenance problems. Every setting you have in your MTA needs to be checked over updates and might cause undesired effects in case something, somewhere (even a remote host) changes. Thus i will not add any special setting for yahoo or any other freemailer/ISP/whatever
If yahoo wants to receive mails from my server (and i'm sure they want because their users subscribed to my lists), then they have to play nice like everyone else too.
Attila Kinali-- Praised are the Fountains of Shelieth, the silver harp of the waters, But blest in my name forever this stream that stanched my thirst! -- Deed of Morred
"Rick Harris" <rick@learntime.com> wrote:
Yes. I am on a shared server. It seems that Yahoo picks up on the fact that this is going to multiple recipients (apparent 5+ raises the flag). Since I am on a shared server, it appears that my option for personalization is turned off. If I understand correctly, personalization might overcome the Yahoo problem but might cause a problem with my host if my list was a large one. That may be an easier fight.
Yes, it might overcome this problem, but you'll get another, even worse one: maintenance problems. Every setting you have in your MTA needs to be checked over updates and might cause undesired effects in case something, somewhere (even a remote host) changes. Thus i will not add any special setting for yahoo or any other freemailer/ISP/whatever
Actually personalization is made within mailman not at the MTA level.
If yahoo wants to receive mails from my server (and i'm sure they want because their users subscribed to my lists), then they have to play nice like everyone else too.
I like your attitude!
Regards, Brian
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Brian Carpenter writes: [ IIRC it was Attila Kinali who wrote: ]
If yahoo wants to receive mails from my server (and i'm sure they want because their users subscribed to my lists), then they have to play nice like everyone else too.
I like your attitude!
You're welcome to like the attitude, but it's really just the flip side of Yahoo's. The problem is spam, not Yahoo, and Yahoo serves a clientele that in general cares more about spam getting through when they don't want it than ham not getting through when they do want it.
If you really want to stick it to Yahoo, they claim that they respect authenticated mail. PGP sign everything that goes through your server. If they're serious about delivering mail that their users want, that had better be good enough.
Not-yet-caring-enough-to-sign-my-own-mail-ly y'rs,
I guess the point of this and other messages regarding spam is that Yahoo is being very cautious and erring on the side of protecting their clients. Meanwhile, in my Yahoo mail account this morning, I flagged as spam a message supposedly coming from Yahoo mail offering me random prizes, an offer for me to claim some cash from Nigeria, and some porn.
All my list is trying to do is to communicate with 15 golfers about what time they are supposed to show up to play on Saturday. Only 3 of those are Yahoo addresses.
Rick Harris
-----Original Message----- From: Stephen J. Turnbull [mailto:stephen@xemacs.org] Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 11:31 AM To: Brian Carpenter Cc: 'Attila Kinali'; 'Rick Harris'; mailman-users@python.org Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman postings deferred by Yahoo
Brian Carpenter writes: [ IIRC it was Attila Kinali who wrote: ]
If yahoo wants to receive mails from my server (and i'm sure they want because their users subscribed to my lists), then they have to play nice like everyone else too.
I like your attitude!
You're welcome to like the attitude, but it's really just the flip side of Yahoo's. The problem is spam, not Yahoo, and Yahoo serves a clientele that in general cares more about spam getting through when they don't want it than ham not getting through when they do want it.
If you really want to stick it to Yahoo, they claim that they respect authenticated mail. PGP sign everything that goes through your server. If they're serious about delivering mail that their users want, that had better be good enough.
Not-yet-caring-enough-to-sign-my-own-mail-ly y'rs,
On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 02:30:38 +0900 "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
Brian Carpenter writes: [ IIRC it was Attila Kinali who wrote: ]
If yahoo wants to receive mails from my server (and i'm sure they want because their users subscribed to my lists), then they have to play nice like everyone else too.
I like your attitude!
You're welcome to like the attitude, but it's really just the flip side of Yahoo's. The problem is spam, not Yahoo, and Yahoo serves a clientele that in general cares more about spam getting through when they don't want it than ham not getting through when they do want it.
You are right, the key problem is Spam. But the way yahoo behaves is like the DDR (Problem: People are running away, Solution: errect a wall and shot everyone who tries to get over it), it might seem to be working for the higher ups, but if you really look at what you are doing, you have to reallize that you are just making it worse.
Actualy, i'm not angry at them, because they try to get a solution to the spam problem, but rather that they are also hitting legitimate users and refuse to talk about possible solutions.
I care about the users of the mailinglists i manage. If i see that anyone has a problem that might be on my side, i try to contact them to figure out how to solve it. It was a lot of work in the first months, but the result now is that our mail setup works very well and that even strange and broken setups on the receiving side have little or no effects.
I also made the observation, that if i, as a mail server admin, contact an ISP about problems that might be on their side, that they are very responsive and helpfull in finding a solution.
It's just yahoo that behaves like a black sheep in this game.
Attila Kinali-- Praised are the Fountains of Shelieth, the silver harp of the waters, But blest in my name forever this stream that stanched my thirst! -- Deed of Morred
Attila Kinali writes:
It's just yahoo that behaves like a black sheep in this game.
But that's simply not true. AOL has a deservedly bad reputation, as does Hotmail. I've had problems with a number of universities, as well (deserved, in a sense, but it was damn hard to get off the ban list once we got on).
On 2/21/08, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
It's just yahoo that behaves like a black sheep in this game.
But that's simply not true. AOL has a deservedly bad reputation, as does Hotmail. I've had problems with a number of universities, as well (deserved, in a sense, but it was damn hard to get off the ban list once we got on).
Actually, fighting spam is one area where AOL has historically done pretty well. I know that it was the biggest part of my job when I was the Sr. Internet Mail System Administrator there, and I took my job very seriously. We did a lot of things to prevent our customers from spamming, and we did a lot of things to try to protect them from getting spam. We also set up the feedback loop mechanism (and I think AOL was the first site to create such a thing), so that admins at other sites around the world could get reports about what was happening through their mail servers.
Where AOL has fallen down is by making the "Report as Spam" button far too easy to hit, and doesn't require any kind of confirmation or anything.
And they don't give any negative feedback to their users when they just hit the "Report as Spam" button when they are actually getting mail that they really did ask for, but they're just being stupid.
-- Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 08:52:29 +0900 "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
Attila Kinali writes:
It's just yahoo that behaves like a black sheep in this game.
But that's simply not true. AOL has a deservedly bad reputation, as does Hotmail. I've had problems with a number of universities, as well (deserved, in a sense, but it was damn hard to get off the ban list once we got on).
Sure, i'm not saying that there aren't any other black sheep. But yahoo is the only one i have problems with. Aol and even hotmail work fine.
Attila Kinali-- Praised are the Fountains of Shelieth, the silver harp of the waters, But blest in my name forever this stream that stanched my thirst! -- Deed of Morred
-----Original Message----- From: Stephen J. Turnbull [mailto:stephen@xemacs.org]> You're welcome to like the attitude, but it's really just the flip side of Yahoo's. The problem is spam, not Yahoo, and Yahoo serves a clientele that in general cares more about spam getting through when they don't want it than ham not getting through when they do want it.
If you really want to stick it to Yahoo, they claim that they respect authenticated mail. PGP sign everything that goes through your server. If they're serious about delivering mail that their users want, that had better be good enough.
Not-yet-caring-enough-to-sign-my-own-mail-ly y'rs,
Well we have been using domain keys as per yahoo's instructions and I haven't seen any reductions in yahoo's deferrals.
Regards, Brian
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Brian Carpenter writes:
Well we have been using domain keys as per yahoo's instructions and I haven't seen any reductions in yahoo's deferrals.
Well, they don't promise that any of those measures will get your mail through. And, to be sure, if I were them, I would not count domain keys as a way to improve a bad reputation, only as a way to preserve a good one.
Are you getting the "deferral based on customer complaints"? If so, do you think they're lying about that, or something? (I'm not claiming that you or any of your clients are spamming, and I don't really care whether Yahoo customers are on average dumber than a fencepost; the question is about Yahoo procedures.)
-----Original Message----- From: Stephen J. Turnbull [mailto:stephen@xemacs.org] Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 7:05 PM To: Brian Carpenter Cc: mailman-users@python.org Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman postings deferred by Yahoo
Brian Carpenter writes:
Well we have been using domain keys as per yahoo's instructions and I haven't seen any reductions in yahoo's deferrals.
Well, they don't promise that any of those measures will get your mail through. And, to be sure, if I were them, I would not count domain keys as a way to improve a bad reputation, only as a way to preserve a good one.
Are you getting the "deferral based on customer complaints"? If so, do you think they're lying about that, or something? (I'm not claiming that you or any of your clients are spamming, and I don't really care whether Yahoo customers are on average dumber than a fencepost; the question is about Yahoo procedures.)
Yes, I am seeing "deferral based on customer complaints" messages as well as just a plain vanilla "temporarily deferred" messages. As I stated earlier, I received 3 different responses in the same message batch from Yahoo.
As for customer complaints, I would not be able to tell since Yahoo makes it just about impossible to get on their feedback loop program. Believe me AOL is a breeze to work with in comparison to Yahoo. All I know is based upon AOL's feedback, not having any of my IPs blacklisted, not hearing anything from my datacenter (who is pretty quick to let me know if something is out of the ordinary in regards to my outgoing mail) and being able to deliver to all the other major e-mail providers such as hotmail, gmail, etc, I do not have a spam problem. So though I am not willing to say Yahoo is lying, I think that they have some serious problems with their mail servers that they are not letting others know about. However I am merely speculating here.
Regards, Brian
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On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 6:42 PM, Brian Carpenter <brian@emwd.com> wrote:
As for customer complaints, I would not be able to tell since Yahoo makes it just about impossible to get on their feedback loop program. Believe me AOL
Couldnt this just be an issue of people on the list marking the email as SPAM or the mail finding its way into the Bulk mail folder for the yahoo, sbc/ameritech, etc domains?
There are plenty of people that have this issue with forgot password reminders, account activations and what not with yahoo (according to google search). This seems reasonable rather than them actual accusing you of spamming.
Gabriel Millerd
-----Original Message----- From: Gabriel Millerd [mailto:gmillerd@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 7:51 PM To: Brian Carpenter; mailman-users@python.org Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman postings deferred by Yahoo
On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 6:42 PM, Brian Carpenter <brian@emwd.com> wrote:
As for customer complaints, I would not be able to tell since Yahoo
makes it
just about impossible to get on their feedback loop program. Believe me AOL
Couldnt this just be an issue of people on the list marking the email as SPAM or the mail finding its way into the Bulk mail folder for the yahoo, sbc/ameritech, etc domains?
There are plenty of people that have this issue with forgot password reminders, account activations and what not with yahoo (according to google search). This seems reasonable rather than them actual accusing you of spamming.
Gabriel Millerd
I don't know since I can't get Yahoo to communicate with me, that is outside of them deferring e-mail from my servers and their generic email communications.
I find it very problematic when a large ISP such as AOL and Yahoo allows their users to define what is spam is and what is not.
Regards, Brian
EMWD.com - 'Powered by Techies' Blog.emwd.com - "Curious comments from a web hosting techie"
Brian Carpenter wrote:
I find it very problematic when a large ISP such as AOL and Yahoo allows their users to define what is spam is and what is not.
Well, in one sense, only the final recipient can determine what is spam and what is not, but I certainly agree that providing a "this is spam" button that a user can click by accident or for any number of spurious reasons, and then using that click to label the sending server as a (possible, probable, ?) spam source is fraught with difficulty.
I would hope that any service that does this would make it simple for senders to get reports of this so they can try to address people's problems. I think AOL does, although I haven't tried to sign up for their feedback loop.
Certainly Yahoo doesn't seem to make it easy (although I just submitted their request form, we'll see), and it is not easy (so far impossible for me) to get on Microsoft's Junk Mail Reporting Partner program.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
-----Original Message----- From: Mark Sapiro [mailto:mark@msapiro.net] Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 8:23 PM To: Brian Carpenter; 'Gabriel Millerd'; mailman-users@python.org Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman postings deferred by Yahoo
Brian Carpenter wrote:
I find it very problematic when a large ISP such as AOL and Yahoo
allows their users to define what is spam is and what is not.
Well, in one sense, only the final recipient can determine what is spam and what is not, but I certainly agree that providing a "this is spam" button that a user can click by accident or for any number of spurious reasons, and then using that click to label the sending server as a (possible, probable, ?) spam source is fraught with difficulty.
This wouldn't be a problem if they just applied a filter to that person's e-mail address but to block an server's IP from sending any e-mail to all their users? <shudders>
The really bad situation is when an e-mail forwarder that is setup on my server that forwards both legitimate mail and spam (when it makes it through my anti-spam system) to their AOL or Yahoo account and the user then clicks that wicked "spam" button and inadvertently reports my server as a source of spam. It's a tragic case of mistaken identity and none of the major e-mail providers are willing to come up with a system that doesn't target the middle man.
I would hope that any service that does this would make it simple for senders to get reports of this so they can try to address people's problems. I think AOL does, although I haven't tried to sign up for their feedback loop.
AOL is very easy to get on their feedback loop and they have at least demonstrated a willingness to work with a mail administrator.
Certainly Yahoo doesn't seem to make it easy (although I just submitted their request form, we'll see), and it is not easy (so far impossible for me) to get on Microsoft's Junk Mail Reporting Partner program.
Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Wait till you get Yahoo's response asking you to add every single domain name you want a report on, to a text file along with its domainkeys. For a hosting company that hosts thousands of domains, such a request is ridiculous. AOL does it by the IP address not by domain.
Regards, Brian
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<<AOL does it by the IP address not by domain.>>
I thought so Brian, so AAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGG!!!!!
And I only have prob with ONE aol'er (who HAS a comcast account but keeps forgetting his comcast password!!!). So periodically I have top open a Service Ticket with my provider and ask them to RE-contact (POS) aol.<sigh>
Goog thing is tho, only 3 or 4 times a YEAR!!!<G>
Ed
Brian Carpenter writes:
This wouldn't be a problem if they just applied a filter to that person's e-mail address but to block an server's IP from sending any e-mail to all their users? <shudders>
Hold that shudder ...
and none of the major e-mail providers are willing to come up with a system that doesn't target the middle man.
That's because an *effective* system *must* target the middleman. (Well, it could target *their* customers. Not likely, right?) It's not possible to target the ultimate source (without widespread use of strong authentification by the good guys -- but both you and Mark have objected to plausible implementations of that in this thread); that's like trying to target the Milky Way galaxy with a spitball.
Just read the FAQ for this list. You will find Brad Knowles (a recognized expert on the subject) advising over and over again that to keep spam out of your users' mailboxes, you need to stop it before it reaches your server. And the only way to do that (that you can implement in your own servers) is to refuse suspicious mail.
Full circle.
Granted, Brad himself often criticizes the implementation at AOL, Yahoo, et al. But the underlying strategy is the same. "Stop spam as far upstream as you can."
Wait till you get Yahoo's response asking you to add every single domain name you want a report on, to a text file along with its domainkeys. For a hosting company that hosts thousands of domains, such a request is ridiculous.
... do you still have that shudder? Here comes the punchline! ...
AOL does it by the IP address not by domain.
You can't have it both ways. If AOL's database is organized by IP, when you get filtered, you will get filtered by IP. If you want Yahoo to distinguish your "diligent" (and/or "lucky") domains from the less so, you're going to have to give them domain keys so the good ones can't be spoofed by the bad ones (or worse, by the bad guys themselves).
You don't have to like it; I don't like it at all. But it's not very useful to propose that the 600-lb gorillas "stop targeting the middlemen," nor to complain about gorillas that ask for authentication of every domain that wants to clear its reputation with the simians' systems. Not until we can provide an alternative that looks like it might work.
I for one don't have one.
On 2/21/08, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Granted, Brad himself often criticizes the implementation at AOL, Yahoo, et al. But the underlying strategy is the same. "Stop spam as far upstream as you can."
Yeah, but SPF/SenderID and DKIM/DomainKeys are not the right tools to be forcing everyone else in the industry to be using to achieve this goal. You might as well force everyone to use only 24lb sledgehammers when they want to fasten any two objects together, and ignore all other fastening technologies like screws, glue, etc....
The DKIM guys did their homework -- they identified the weaknesses in SPF, and they found ways to avoid pretty much all of them. Problem is, they brought out the crypto-nuclear weapons to use against the spammers, and they forgot that the spammers are like cockroaches, and they're the only ones who'll be left on this planet when the nuclear weapons actually get used.
You can't have it both ways. If AOL's database is organized by IP, when you get filtered, you will get filtered by IP. If you want Yahoo to distinguish your "diligent" (and/or "lucky") domains from the less so, you're going to have to give them domain keys so the good ones can't be spoofed by the bad ones (or worse, by the bad guys themselves).
I don't think you can effectively protect these assets by domain. Among other things, there are far too many places out there that might have a valid need to send e-mail on my behalf, using my address, and any domain-level protection mechanism would almost certainly break that aspect of e-mail. There go all your e-mail greeting cards, there go all your e-mail notifications of birthdays or other events, and a whole host of other things.
You can't even protect these assets completely by IP address. If the spammers can get friendly with an ISP so that they can advertise bogus routes to your network, then they can send out mail from their machines using your IP addresses, and all your IP-based security mechanisms go out the window.
The mail will be treated by the other end as if it really had been sent by your mail servers, and then they'll go away in five minutes. But the damage has already been done -- the spam has been sent, and someone else has been blamed. And all those ephemeral routing advertisements never get logged anywhere, so no one would ever know that it wasn't really you that was sending e-mail from that IP address.
You don't have to like it; I don't like it at all. But it's not very useful to propose that the 600-lb gorillas "stop targeting the middlemen," nor to complain about gorillas that ask for authentication of every domain that wants to clear its reputation with the simians' systems.
I don't mind them targeting the middleman. I just want them to target using the appropriate tools.
I want them to have enough intelligence to know when a user has set up forwarding on our system to their system, so that when a spam message comes in and the user clicks "report as spam", they can look through the headers of the message and avoid blaming us for sending spam to that user, because we were actually just doing what the user asked us to do.
The alternative is to just refuse to forward e-mail anymore. And I don't really like that.
Oh, and btw, this also affects mailing lists, because all the low-level mechanisms for forwarding e-mail are functionally identical to operating a mailing list.
Not until we can provide an alternative that looks like itmight work.
They've got the money. Let them pay to come up with something that will actually work.
-- Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
On 2/20/08, Brian Carpenter wrote:
The really bad situation is when an e-mail forwarder that is setup on my server that forwards both legitimate mail and spam (when it makes it through my anti-spam system) to their AOL or Yahoo account and the user then clicks that wicked "spam" button and inadvertently reports my server as a source of spam. It's a tragic case of mistaken identity and none of the major e-mail providers are willing to come up with a system that doesn't target the middle man.
Yup. I had one of these today. This is not the first time we've had this problem with this particular account, and in my reply to the AOL postmaster this time I told them that future complaints of this sort may result in that users account getting terminated. I made sure to send copies to both our internal address and their AOL account.
I won't have our mail servers reputation dirtied by morons who can't tell the difference between the "Delete" button and the "Report as spam" button. If they want to keep that mail.utexas.edu account and have it forward their mail somewhere outside of our system, then they had damn well better be careful with that "Report as spam" button.
-- Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Are you getting the "deferral based on customer complaints"? If so, do you think they're lying about that, or something? (I'm not claiming that you or any of your clients are spamming, and I don't really care whether Yahoo customers are on average dumber than a fencepost; the question is about Yahoo procedures.)
Note: The following is an incoherent rant from a deranged and totally frusted person. You've been warned.
I'm getting the "deferral based on customer complaints" message. I looked it up on Yahoo's web site, and I followed a link to "Does Yahoo! Mail offer a feedback loop program to help senders minimize complaint rates?". I thought "good, I can sign up and find out who's reporting my mail as spam". Then I read further and found "To participate in the program, senders must sign their outbound emails with DomainKeys (DKIM is not currently supported)."
This is the second time in recent weeks that some large mail service has used it's 600 lb. gorilla status to try to coerce me into something, and I don't like it.
Actually, I don't care that much about Yahoo, because they do seem to accept my mail. My real complaint is with Microsoft and Hotmail. Several weeks ago, Hotmail started discarding some of my list mail, this quickly escalated from some to most to all. Note that they didn't reject it. Their MXs accepted it, but it never got delivered to any recipient, regardless of any whitelisting the recipients applied.
I eventually found my way to <https://support.msn.com/default.aspx> and submitted a report via the form linked as "Sender Information for Hotmail Delivery". I got a response to that (to their credit, they always responded) suggesting I add SPF records in DNS (more 600 lb. gorilla tactics), and giving me a hotmail.com address to send sample messages to, and requesting that I inform the responder of the subject header of any messages I send.
I tried to do this. I don't know what happened to the message I sent to the hotmail.com address, but my reply to the support rep bounced per
Action: failed Status: 5.1.0 Diagnostic-Code: smtp;554 5.1.0 Sender Denied
I took great pains to always use my postmaster address in reports and replies. I went through several iterations of submitting forms, receiving replies and being unable to respond to the follow-up questions in the replies (always with the same reject as above).
Also, at one point after putting SPF records in DNS, I tried to send an email per something I found on the support site to inform them of the domains (I can no longer find this instruction - I think it's been replaced by yet another web form). Here is the email I sent in it's entirety.
Return-path: <mark@msapiro.net> Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]) by msapiro.net with esmtp (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from <mark@msapiro.net>) id JW535E-00003K-OA for senderid@microsoft.com; Tue, 12 Feb 2008 10:53:38 -0800 Message-ID: <47B1EB32.80602@msapiro.net> Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2008 10:53:38 -0800 From: Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> Organization: Not Very Much User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 (Windows/20071031) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: senderid@microsoft.com Subject: SPF records updated X-Enigmail-Version: 0.95.6 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
grizz.org msapiro.net sbh16.songbird.com
And the ironic thing is here's what happened when my MTA tried to send it.
SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
host mailb.microsoft.com [131.107.115.215]: 550 5.7.1 <Your e-mailwas rejected by an anti-spam content filter on gateway (131.107.115.215). Reasons for rejection may be: obscene language, graphics, or spam-like characteristics. Removing these may let the e-mail through the filter.>
Ultimately, I started submitting the web forms describing the problem as an inability to respond to follow-up information requests on outstanding tickets. This got someone's attention, and I am currently (temporarily) on a mitigation whitelist which is supposed to allow time for the filters to retrain.
We'll see.
If you read this far, thanks for listening. I don't expect any advice (but if you have some, I'm interested). I've just been so frustrated by this process that I had to vent a bit.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Mark Sapiro writes:
Then I read further and found "To participate in the program, senders must sign their outbound emails with DomainKeys (DKIM is not currently supported)."
This is the second time in recent weeks that some large mail service has used it's 600 lb. gorilla status to try to coerce me into something, and I don't like it.
C'mon, Mark, you know that the only problem here is that there's no accepted standard; they have to authenticate "you" somehow (do you really want me to be able to spoof you and get information about your mail to Yahoo customers?), and the right "you" to authenticate is the apparent source of allegedly objectionable mail. So it's going to be SPF or DomainKeys or something like that.
But you've identified the problem correctly (in more ways than one). 600lb gorillas don't move very fast most of the time, but once they do get in motion they're terrifying.
Sorry to say, I don't think there's much chance the gorillas are going to slim down, either. There are too many advantages to being big in this industry.
Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Mark Sapiro writes:
Then I read further and found "To participate in the program, senders must sign their outbound emails with DomainKeys (DKIM is not currently supported)."
This is the second time in recent weeks that some large mail service has used it's 600 lb. gorilla status to try to coerce me into something, and I don't like it.
C'mon, Mark, you know that the only problem here is that there's no accepted standard; they have to authenticate "you" somehow (do you really want me to be able to spoof you and get information about your mail to Yahoo customers?), and the right "you" to authenticate is the apparent source of allegedly objectionable mail. So it's going to be SPF or DomainKeys or something like that.
That's not what I understood it to say. I understand they need to authenticate me somehow as the person authorized to receive reports about my mail to yahoo.com recipients, but I thought it said that in order for me to participate in the feedback program at all, my mail to yahoo.com recipients had to be signed with DomainKeys.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Mark Sapiro writes:
That's not what I understood it to say. I understand they need to authenticate me somehow as the person authorized to receive reports about my mail to yahoo.com recipients, but I thought it said that in order for me to participate in the feedback program at all, my mail to yahoo.com recipients had to be signed with DomainKeys.
Right. The domainkey that you use to ask for the reports needs to be the same one that you use to send list posts to the Yahoo recips. That's how you identify yourself as the admin of those lists. Am I missing something?
Yes, I do hate spammers for doing this to us.
On 2/21/08, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
C'mon, Mark, you know that the only problem here is that there's no accepted standard; they have to authenticate "you" somehow (do you really want me to be able to spoof you and get information about your mail to Yahoo customers?), and the right "you" to authenticate is the apparent source of allegedly objectionable mail. So it's going to be SPF or DomainKeys or something like that.
But SPF (and similar technologies) and DomainKeys (and similar technologies) are both inherently broken in the general case. Sure, there are specific cases where sites like BankOfAmerica.com can use them (and to everyone's benefit), but they're too easy to set up incorrectly (on both sides), and they break too many other parts of how e-mail is supposed to work.
-- Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
ציטוט Mark Sapiro:
Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Are you getting the "deferral based on customer complaints"? If so, do you think they're lying about that, or something? (I'm not claiming that you or any of your clients are spamming, and I don't really care whether Yahoo customers are on average dumber than a fencepost; the question is about Yahoo procedures.)
Note: The following is an incoherent rant from a deranged and totally frusted person. You've been warned.
I'm getting the "deferral based on customer complaints" message. I looked it up on Yahoo's web site, and I followed a link to "Does Yahoo! Mail offer a feedback loop program to help senders minimize complaint rates?". I thought "good, I can sign up and find out who's reporting my mail as spam". Then I read further and found "To participate in the program, senders must sign their outbound emails with DomainKeys (DKIM is not currently supported)."
This is the second time in recent weeks that some large mail service has used it's 600 lb. gorilla status to try to coerce me into something, and I don't like it.
Actually, I don't care that much about Yahoo, because they do seem to accept my mail. My real complaint is with Microsoft and Hotmail. Several weeks ago, Hotmail started discarding some of my list mail, this quickly escalated from some to most to all. Note that they didn't reject it. Their MXs accepted it, but it never got delivered to any recipient, regardless of any whitelisting the recipients applied.
I eventually found my way to <https://support.msn.com/default.aspx> and submitted a report via the form linked as "Sender Information for Hotmail Delivery". I got a response to that (to their credit, they always responded) suggesting I add SPF records in DNS (more 600 lb.
SPF DNS records are now mandatory. Hotmail announced that they would not receive any mail from a source with no SPF record from the first day it became mandatory a couple of years ago, but did not actually carry out the threat at that time, however, it seems that they may now be implementing this. An SPF record supposedly reduces spammers ability to spoof your domain.
gorilla tactics), and giving me a hotmail.com address to send sample messages to, and requesting that I inform the responder of the subject header of any messages I send.
I tried to do this. I don't know what happened to the message I sent to the hotmail.com address, but my reply to the support rep bounced per
Action: failed Status: 5.1.0 Diagnostic-Code: smtp;554 5.1.0 Sender Denied
I took great pains to always use my postmaster address in reports and replies. I went through several iterations of submitting forms, receiving replies and being unable to respond to the follow-up questions in the replies (always with the same reject as above).
Also, at one point after putting SPF records in DNS, I tried to send an email per something I found on the support site to inform them of the domains (I can no longer find this instruction - I think it's been replaced by yet another web form). Here is the email I sent in it's entirety.
Return-path: <mark@msapiro.net> Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]) by msapiro.net with esmtp (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from <mark@msapiro.net>) id JW535E-00003K-OA for senderid@microsoft.com; Tue, 12 Feb 2008 10:53:38 -0800 Message-ID: <47B1EB32.80602@msapiro.net> Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2008 10:53:38 -0800 From: Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> Organization: Not Very Much User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 (Windows/20071031) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: senderid@microsoft.com Subject: SPF records updated X-Enigmail-Version: 0.95.6 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
grizz.org msapiro.net sbh16.songbird.com
And the ironic thing is here's what happened when my MTA tried to send it.
SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data: host mailb.microsoft.com [131.107.115.215]: 550 5.7.1 <Your e-mailwas rejected by an anti-spam content filter on gateway (131.107.115.215). Reasons for rejection may be: obscene language, graphics, or spam-like characteristics. Removing these may let the e-mail through the filter.>
Ultimately, I started submitting the web forms describing the problem as an inability to respond to follow-up information requests on outstanding tickets. This got someone's attention, and I am currently (temporarily) on a mitigation whitelist which is supposed to allow time for the filters to retrain.
We'll see.
If you read this far, thanks for listening. I don't expect any advice (but if you have some, I'm interested). I've just been so frustrated by this process that I had to vent a bit.
This mail was sent via Mail-SeCure System.
This footnote confirms that this email message has been scanned by PineApp Mail-SeCure for the presence of malicious code, vandals & computer viruses.
On 2/21/08, Dov Zamir wrote:
SPF DNS records are now mandatory. Hotmail announced that they would not receive any mail from a source with no SPF record from the first day it became mandatory a couple of years ago, but did not actually carry out the threat at that time, however, it seems that they may now be implementing this. An SPF record supposedly reduces spammers ability to spoof your domain.
SPF is fundamentally broken, in many ways. It was so in 2004, and it is still so today.
See <http://bradknowles.typepad.com/considered_harmful/2004/05/spf.html>.
Besides, Windows Live insists on SenderID, not SPF. You should do your homework.
Either way, if Windows Live Hotmail wants to isolate themselves from the rest of the world as a result of a technology like this, then they will get what they deserve.
-- Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:05:28 +0900 "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
Are you getting the "deferral based on customer complaints"? If so, do you think they're lying about that, or something? (I'm not claiming that you or any of your clients are spamming, and I don't really care whether Yahoo customers are on average dumber than a fencepost; the question is about Yahoo procedures.)
Yes, i'm sure that these user complaints are not true. The sever has only about two dozen mailinglists on it. The few users that are on the machine dont use it for mail. Not to mention that all mailinglist use some heavy spam filtering that catches over 99% of it.
Never the less, i asked yahoo about these user complaints but this question simply got ignored.
Attila Kinali-- Praised are the Fountains of Shelieth, the silver harp of the waters, But blest in my name forever this stream that stanched my thirst! -- Deed of Morred
On Wed, 20 Feb 2008 10:48:17 -0500 "Brian Carpenter" <brian@emwd.com> wrote:
I really think the best option is to get our mailman list subscribers to start using another e-mail provider. I think Yahoo should be sued for their interference of legitimate e-mail communications and the way they have wasted a large number of ISPs' time by the process that they make us go through to try to get white listed with them or to even be placed upon their feedback loop. In fact I haven't come across one ISP yet who has had their servers successfully white listed with yahoo.
ISP? What ISP? I manage only the mail server of an OSS project, nothing fancy (although we produce as many mails as a small ISP). And all that in my free time too. Yahoo is definitly not worth the time i invested sofar to resolve this issue.
And yes, no other free mailer made that much trouble. Even GMX which is known to be a pain is quite responsive if they see it comes from a fellow admin.
Well, we'll see what happens. I'm quite sure you'll hear about it if i "ban" yahoo.
Attila Kinali-- Praised are the Fountains of Shelieth, the silver harp of the waters, But blest in my name forever this stream that stanched my thirst! -- Deed of Morred
On 2/20/2008, Brian Carpenter (brian@emwd.com) wrote:
I think Yahoo should be sued for their interference of legitimate e-mail communications
Sorry, I just don;'t see this... they are providing a FREE service.
If you aren;t happy with it, go somewhere else.
What I would do if I were you is simply warn people about problematic email services, and let them know that their messages may be delayed, or even disappeared.
--
Best regards,
Charles
On 2/20/2008, Brian Carpenter (brian@emwd.com) wrote:
I think Yahoo should be sued for their interference of legitimate e-mail communications
Sorry, I just don;'t see this... they are providing a FREE service.
If you aren;t happy with it, go somewhere else.
What I would do if I were you is simply warn people about problematic email services, and let them know that their messages may be delayed, or even disappeared.
--
Best regards,
Charles
Since I am the ISP whose communications are being interfered with by yahoo, I am not sure where I could go. I am not sure where you got the idea I was using yahoo's services.
Regards, Brian
EMWD.com - 'Powered by Techies' Blog.emwd.com - "Curious comments from a web hosting techie"
On 2/20/2008, Brian Carpenter (brian@emwd.com) wrote:
I think Yahoo should be sued for their interference of legitimate e-mail communications
Sorry, I just don't see this... they are providing a FREE service.
If you aren't happy with it, go somewhere else.
What I would do if I were you is simply warn people about problematic email services, and let them know that their messages may be delayed, or even disappeared.
Since I am the ISP whose communications are being interfered with by yahoo, I am not sure where I could go. I am not sure where you got the idea I was using yahoo's services.
Right... badly worded, but my last paragraph is still the meaning I intended to convey...
Maybe better:
No one has a 'Right' to talk to anyone else's mail server.
If they aren't playing well, document it: let anyone who uses your services know that if THEY choose to use a problematic service, that is their choice and their risk (of lost messages).
--
Best regards,
Charles
Charles Marcus writes:
No one has a 'Right' to talk to anyone else's mail server.
Everybody here concedes that, I think.
If they aren't playing well, document it: let anyone who uses your services know that if THEY choose to use a problematic service, that is their choice and their risk (of lost messages).
But the problem is that *Brian* (as an example) is an ISP whose reliability comes into question not because *his* customers use Yahoo, but because *his customers'* customers (subscribers, whatever) use Yahoo. His customers are paying him money so that he takes care of the mail; they do not want to tell their customers to change their mail services.
Worst of all, if spam gets through, it's definitely Yahoo's fault (although shared with everybody else in the pipeline); they *could* have stopped it, for sure. But if mail delivery is poor, you get fingers pointing in every direction, and Yahoo is quite justified in claiming that even if they make their best effort, they can't deliver mail that got lost somewhere else. Yahoo's customers are going to be disposed to believe that the problem is indeed elsewhere (the alternative is accepting their own responsibility for choosing a broken service, you see).
So Brian (and other ISPs/hosting services like his) is caught in the middle. He can't guarantee reliability because that depends on the customers' customer base, but reliability is what he takes pride in.
Stephen you are my hero!
Regards, Brian
EMWD.com - 'Powered by Techies' Blog.emwd.com - "Curious comments from a web hosting techie"
-----Original Message----- From: mailman-users-bounces+brian=emwd.com@python.org [mailto:mailman- users-bounces+brian=emwd.com@python.org] On Behalf Of Stephen J. Turnbull Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 7:33 PM To: Charles Marcus Cc: mailman-users@python.org Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman postings deferred by Yahoo
Charles Marcus writes:
No one has a 'Right' to talk to anyone else's mail server.
Everybody here concedes that, I think.
If they aren't playing well, document it: let anyone who uses your services know that if THEY choose to use a problematic service, that is their choice and their risk (of lost messages).
But the problem is that *Brian* (as an example) is an ISP whose reliability comes into question not because *his* customers use Yahoo, but because *his customers'* customers (subscribers, whatever) use Yahoo. His customers are paying him money so that he takes care of the mail; they do not want to tell their customers to change their mail services.
Worst of all, if spam gets through, it's definitely Yahoo's fault (although shared with everybody else in the pipeline); they *could* have stopped it, for sure. But if mail delivery is poor, you get fingers pointing in every direction, and Yahoo is quite justified in claiming that even if they make their best effort, they can't deliver mail that got lost somewhere else. Yahoo's customers are going to be disposed to believe that the problem is indeed elsewhere (the alternative is accepting their own responsibility for choosing a broken service, you see).
So Brian (and other ISPs/hosting services like his) is caught in the middle. He can't guarantee reliability because that depends on the customers' customer base, but reliability is what he takes pride in.
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Stephen J. Turnbull, on 2/20/2008 7:32 PM, said the following:
But the problem is that *Brian* (as an example) is an ISP whose reliability comes into question not because *his* customers use Yahoo, but because *his customers'* customers (subscribers, whatever) use Yahoo. His customers are paying him money so that he takes care of the mail; they do not want to tell their customers to change their mail services.
I undertans, and believe me, I'm totally sympathetic... but I'm also realistic.
There is nothing you can do to change Yahoos behavior, so my philosophy is, just make my/your customers/clients aware of the problems when using certain services/providers.
Yahoo's customers are going to be disposed to believe that the problem is indeed elsewhere (the alternative is accepting their own responsibility for choosing a broken service, you see).
I do - but where I apparently differ with you is, I don't try to encourage their illusions - in fact, I will do everything I can to disabuse them of their illusions.
So Brian (and other ISPs/hosting services like his) is caught in the middle. He can't guarantee reliability because that depends on the customers' customer base, but reliability is what he takes pride in.
Again, I do understand the dilemma, I just choose not to make someone else's problem my own.
Here is a canned email I send to our users once every few months:
Subject: Fyi: EMail is not always 100% reliable...
Hello,
Hopefully you already know this, but in case you didn't:
Hopefully you already know this, but in case you didn't:
There are any number of reasons that email can be delayed in transit. It is even possible that a message will never arrive at its final destination, and although under most circumstances you will get a bounce notifying you of the problem, sometimes you will not. For this reason, if you have some time-sensitive material or information that you are sending to a client or vendor, send it to them, but FOLLOW-UP with a phone call or something to make sure they got it.
In general, yes, if you send an email to someone, they will get it - but it could be delayed in transit, it could get stopped by someone's anti-spam or anti-virusm s/w (either running on their mail system's server, or on their local machine), someone might accidentally delete it without realizing it (it happens) - and it is even possible that a mis-configured or otherwise malfunctioning server could lose your message without generating a bounce.
So, if you are sending someone something that is time-sensitive and money depends on it getting to its destination - FOLLOW-UP and make sure it got there.
This is just common sense to me, but maybe you weren't aware that email isn't always a 100% reliable communication medium.
--
Best regards,
Charles
Attila Kinali writes:
On Wed, 20 Feb 2008 05:15:58 -0600 "Rick Harris" <rick@learntime.com> wrote:
whateveraddress@yahoo.com R=lookuphost T=remote_smtp defer (0): SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection: host g.mx.mail.yahoo.com [206.190.53.191]: 421 4.7.0 [TS02] Messages from 216.104.33.122 temporarily deferred due to user complaints - 4.16.56.1; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts02.html
Same here, although i get a TS01 instead of a TS02. And 10'000 a day of those.
This is just selective greylisting, which lots of sites use as a blanket policy.
A look at
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/postmaster-15.htmlsuggests that Yahoo doesn't have a clue about discussion lists. They seem to think that all mailing lists are announcement lists (of course that's apparently the OP's case). Consider this list:
Other great resources:
* Help For Marketers by Scott Hazen Mueller
* Marketing on the Internet Without Getting Burned by John C. Mozena
* ESPC's best practices
* How to Advertise Responsibly Using E-Mail and Newsgroups (RFC 3098)
* MAAWG Sender BCP Version 1.1:-(
If you're in a hosted environment, you might think about asking your host to implement domain keys and/or PGP-signing your mail. (Mailman is (was?) not friendly to domain keys of non-owner posters, but in the case of an announcement list having the host sign the post should work fine.)
今晩は
On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 02:11:04 +0900 "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
Attila Kinali writes:
On Wed, 20 Feb 2008 05:15:58 -0600 "Rick Harris" <rick@learntime.com> wrote:
whateveraddress@yahoo.com R=lookuphost T=remote_smtp defer (0): SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection: host g.mx.mail.yahoo.com [206.190.53.191]: 421 4.7.0 [TS02] Messages from 216.104.33.122 temporarily deferred due to user complaints - 4.16.56.1; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts02.html
Same here, although i get a TS01 instead of a TS02. And 10'000 a day of those.
This is just selective greylisting, which lots of sites use as a blanket policy.
It's definitly not greylisting. Our server sends out a few dozen mails a day on the low traffic lists to a few hundred on the high traffic ones. Any greylisting that is half way sanely implemented should know after the second mail that the server is a legitimate sender.
I don't know what they actually use to base their decission on, but what ever it is, it's not one of the standard ways.
A look at
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/postmaster-15.html
I've read that already and i comply with all but the Can-spam thingy (no idea what that is) and the Domain-Keys (too lazy to set them up). Heck, even all HTML is removed from the mails going over the lists.
suggests that Yahoo doesn't have a clue about discussion lists. They seem to think that all mailing lists are announcement lists (of course that's apparently the OP's case). Consider this list:
From a mail i got from them, after i send them 6 times in a row
I'd rather say they have no clue at all. the logs they requested as attachment _and_ said that i'm attaching it in the mail itself:
From: Yahoo! Mail <abuse-admin(AT)cc.yahoo-inc.com> [...] Unfortunately, your message was sent to us as an attachment or html document.
Due to security purposes, our custom messaging system is unable to access attachments or webpages and we will need you to cut and paste plain text information, as opposed to html format or sending it as an attachment. We apologize for the inconvenience.
I really wonder if anyone is reading the mails at yahoo or whether they just use a bot that sends back an canned answer based on some key words. Otherwise someone would have noticed that the logs i mentioned as being attached are missing.
Oh yes, since i send the log inline, i haven't heard back at all.
If you're in a hosted environment, you might think about asking your host to implement domain keys and/or PGP-signing your mail. (Mailman is (was?) not friendly to domain keys of non-owner posters, but in the case of an announcement list having the host sign the post should work fine.)
I don't know whether i should do domain keys. Sofar it was never a problem that we got tagged as spamers, it might be worth it if more ISPs start to filter based on these. PGP is definitly not an option. We send out way over 100k mails per day over mailinglists (at some days it reaches even 200k mails/d). Signing all of them on the server would produce too much load.
Attila Kinali-- Praised are the Fountains of Shelieth, the silver harp of the waters, But blest in my name forever this stream that stanched my thirst! -- Deed of Morred
Attila Kinali writes:
This is just selective greylisting, which lots of sites use as a blanket policy.
It's definitly not greylisting. Our server sends out a few dozen mails a day on the low traffic lists to a few hundred on the high traffic ones. Any greylisting that is half way sanely implemented should know after the second mail that the server is a legitimate sender.
Well, maybe. That is harder than it sounds to scale, though. The problem is that Yahoo has a lot of MXes, each handling hundreds of thousands or millions of messages per day, and they're going to need to propagate the greylist database to all of them somehow. It's a solvable problem, but nontrivial.
If you're using exim -qff, you also may be running into a problem of hammering on their MXes too frequently; many greylisting algorithms don't like that.
BTW, do you think they're lying about the user complaints?
I'd rather say [Yahoo] have no clue at all.
The problem that Yahoo faces is that not only is their hardware distributed, so is their wetware. It's a lot easier for one person to handle a few clues about the easy problems that one person can handle than for an organization to deal with many clues about the much harder problems of scaling to Yahoo size.
I don't know whether i should do domain keys. Sofar it was never a problem that we got tagged as spamers, it might be worth it if more ISPs start to filter based on these. PGP is definitly not an option. We send out way over 100k mails per day over mailinglists (at some days it reaches even 200k mails/d). Signing all of them on the server would produce too much load.
Domain keys are per-message cryptographic signatures, too. And as for 200K mails per day, is that 200K *posts* per day, or more like 2000 posts per day going to 100 recipients each, or even better yet, 200 posts/day going to 1000 recipients each? And which would you rather do: save a few CPU cycles, or reliably get your mail through? Maybe the usual variants on PGP are too expensive, but something weaker will do until the spammers catch on, by which time you can hope that everybody has enough CPU, and so on.
I know that the conventional wisdom that signing mail is very expensive is well-justified, but on the other hand you have to remember that there's a difference between "very" and "too" expensive.
BTW, of course it turns out that Yahoo doesn't implement the standard that it sponsored (DKIM), but rather its own legacy variant. Why am I not surprised? :-(I don't know how compatible they are, either. :-( :-(
Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Attila Kinali writes:
This is just selective greylisting, which lots of sites use as a blanket policy.
It's definitly not greylisting. Our server sends out a few dozen mails a day on the low traffic lists to a few hundred on the high traffic ones. Any greylisting that is half way sanely implemented should know after the second mail that the server is a legitimate sender.
Well, maybe. That is harder than it sounds to scale, though. The problem is that Yahoo has a lot of MXes, each handling hundreds of thousands or millions of messages per day, and they're going to need to propagate the greylist database to all of them somehow. It's a solvable problem, but nontrivial.
It may not be greylisting per se, but it actually doesn't seem to be a problem for my MTA. In response to this thread, I looked in my maillog and I see about 2500 of the "421 4.7.0 [TS01]" messages in the last month. I don't see any "421 4.7.0 [TS02]" messages. As far as I can tell, every one of these was eventually delivered, some almost immediately to a different MX, some a few hours later after several retries and some in between.
I wonder if Rick actually has a problem with undelivered (as opposed to delayed) mail, or if his hosting company is just concerned about the log messages and retries.
Also, the messages I see, and the message Rick posted all seem to come in response to the initial connect. Thus, Rick's hosting company should be looking at themselve rather than Rick's list since it is apparently the connect from the IP that is being delayed, not list mail.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 6:12 PM, Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> wrote:
Also, the messages I see, and the message Rick posted all seem to come in response to the initial connect. Thus, Rick's hosting company should be looking at themselve rather than Rick's list since it is apparently the connect from the IP that is being delayed, not list mail.
Well the OP said the messages were deferred, the link the log gives (which everyone is aware of) seems to describe greylisting. In my experience the greylisting is sort of weak in that its not *.yahoo.com but just server by server for quite a while. Likely this is by design.
I dont see a problem if the messages are deferred, but if he says they are all disappearing (though I would assume this means his upstream is just killing them off out of the queue) then there is a problem. But then he would get bounces from yahoo killing them, not nice legal defer messages.
-- Gabriel Millerd
On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 08:48:38 +0900 "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
Attila Kinali writes:
This is just selective greylisting, which lots of sites use as a blanket policy.
It's definitly not greylisting. Our server sends out a few dozen mails a day on the low traffic lists to a few hundred on the high traffic ones. Any greylisting that is half way sanely implemented should know after the second mail that the server is a legitimate sender.
Well, maybe. That is harder than it sounds to scale, though. The problem is that Yahoo has a lot of MXes, each handling hundreds of thousands or millions of messages per day, and they're going to need to propagate the greylist database to all of them somehow. It's a solvable problem, but nontrivial.
It's still not graylisting. For one thing, i get the follwoing error message:
Feb 19 06:51:52 natsuki postfix/smtp[5564]: 205153B3B3: host g.mx.mail.yahoo.com [209.191.88.239] refused to talk to me: 421 4.7.0 [TS01] Messages from 213.144.138.186 temporarily deferred due to user complaints - 4.16.55.1; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts01.html
The "refused to talk to me" makes it clear that my server didn't even get a greeting, but above error message instead. So, yahoo doesn't even know who the sender or recipient is. Ie, the whole thing is IP based.
For another thing, we send so many mails out, per day, that the probability that we hit a server with the same envelope from/to twice in a day is nearly 1.
If you're using exim -qff, you also may be running into a problem of hammering on their MXes too frequently; many greylisting algorithms don't like that.
And it isn't nice for all the other mail servers. There is a reason why MTAs usualy implement an exponential back off if mail cannot be delivered.
So, no, i'm not doing that and never will.
BTW, do you think they're lying about the user complaints?
Yes. See my other mail about that.
I'd rather say [Yahoo] have no clue at all.
The problem that Yahoo faces is that not only is their hardware distributed, so is their wetware. It's a lot easier for one person to handle a few clues about the easy problems that one person can handle than for an organization to deal with many clues about the much harder problems of scaling to Yahoo size.
I know it's not easy. I see what kind of problems i have with only one domain. But yahoo could at least talk to me in a proper way so that we could find a solution together.
Domain keys are per-message cryptographic signatures, too. And as for 200K mails per day, is that 200K *posts* per day, or more like 2000 posts per day going to 100 recipients each, or even better yet, 200 posts/day going to 1000 recipients each? And which would you rather do: save a few CPU cycles, or reliably get your mail through? Maybe the usual variants on PGP are too expensive, but something weaker will do until the spammers catch on, by which time you can hope that everybody has enough CPU, and so on.
It's 1-400 mails/day on mailinglists ranging between 10 and 1500 subscribers. And be carefull with such callculations. A lot of things do not scale as good as we might think. The server in question has one year average load of 0.40, with about 40-50% of the CPU usage being spend on mailman (yes, mailman, not spamassasin or anything else). And it's not a small machine either.
I know that the conventional wisdom that signing mail is very expensive is well-justified, but on the other hand you have to remember that there's a difference between "very" and "too" expensive.
Too expensive for us.
Attila Kinali-- Praised are the Fountains of Shelieth, the silver harp of the waters, But blest in my name forever this stream that stanched my thirst! -- Deed of Morred
Attila Kinali writes:
It's still not graylisting. [...] The "refused to talk to me" makes it clear that my server didn't even get a greeting, but above error message instead. So, yahoo doesn't even know who the sender or recipient is. Ie, the whole thing is IP based.
OK, that's a lot more punitive than they make it sound.
The problem that Yahoo faces is that not only is their hardware distributed, so is their wetware. It's a lot easier for one person to handle a few clues about the easy problems that one person can handle than for an organization to deal with many clues about the much harder problems of scaling to Yahoo size.
I know it's not easy. I see what kind of problems i have with only one domain. But yahoo could at least talk to me in a proper way so that we could find a solution together.
You're anthropomorphizing. There *is no Yahoo* that can talk to you in a proper way. Only employees. Look at it this way: a bureaucracy *is* like a machine, so designing an organization in which the employees behave like human beings toward non-paying-customers is very similar to writing a good UI for a large program --- but orders of magnitude harder. And you know how hard UI is.
I dunno, it sounds like all we can really do is boycott Yahoo, as you suggested in the first place. Whether they'll care, I don't know.
On 2/20/08, Attila Kinali wrote:
This is just selective greylisting, which lots of sites use as a blanket policy.
It's definitly not greylisting. Our server sends out a few dozen mails a day on the low traffic lists to a few hundred on the high traffic ones. Any greylisting that is half way sanely implemented should know after the second mail that the server is a legitimate sender.
Yahoo! has demonstrated that they don't understand the greylisting concept anyway, so this is unlikely. They use a shared pool of outbound messages through all of their outbound mail servers, so you're pretty much guaranteed that the same message will never be touched by the same machine twice.
This ensures that their outbound mail will never be received by a site that implements a strict per-machine greylisting policy. Only a looser network-level greylisting policy, will have any chance of working with Yahoo, and even then it won't work very well -- they just have too many outbound machines on too many different networks.
I don't know whether i should do domain keys. Sofar it was never a problem that we got tagged as spamers, it might be worth it if more ISPs start to filter based on these. PGP is definitly not an option. We send out way over 100k mails per day over mailinglists (at some days it reaches even 200k mails/d). Signing all of them on the server would produce too much load.
This is the fundamental problem with creating or verifying all crypto signatures of all mail passing through a server. You've got a really nice self-DDoS attack there, created for us by the nice authors of the DomainKeys and DKIM proposals.
This has been tried before, and failed, for the same reason. Do some Googling on the term "pgpsendmail".
-- Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
On 2/21/08, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
If you're in a hosted environment, you might think about asking your host to implement domain keys and/or PGP-signing your mail. (Mailman is (was?) not friendly to domain keys of non-owner posters, but in the case of an announcement list having the host sign the post should work fine.)
Using PGP is not going to help, but DomainKeys may. The administrator of the mail server in question could also sign up for the Yahoo! "feedback loop" mechanism (see <http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/postmaster-30.html>).
I've recently started working at the University of Texas at Austin, and it looks like I'm going to be doing some of their postmaster work. I've been trying to get our mail servers signed up for various feedback loop mechanisms at major providers around the world, as well as subscribed to at least one or two "bonded sender" type programs. We're one of the largest public research Universities in the world with ~50,000 students and ~20,000 faculty and staff, and I can tell you from first hand experience that this is a painful process.
I filed our request with Yahoo!, but have not yet heard anything back. We're on the AOL feedback loop, and getting quite a lot of reports about our users, many of which are hitting the "report as spam" button for messages that were forwarded to them from their mail.utexas.edu account, which means that AOL thinks we're sending them spam, when in fact we're just forwarding mail for a given user, which just happens to be spam.
We're also on the feedback loop for TimeWarner/RoadRunner, discovered that Gmail doesn't have any such service, and the people at NetZero/UnitedOnline really have no clue -- they don't get the fact that UT actually is their own ISP, we are our own phone company, we are our own power company, we are basically our own city and we provide all of our own various services, for a mid-size city community of about 70,000 people.
Oh, and Windows Live (you can't call it Hotmail anymore) requires that you have a registered Windows Live ID before you can sign up for their equivalent "Smart Network Data Services" program.
One problem with trying to get on all the various feedback loop processes, and obtaining service from a bonded sender program, is that they all have different requirements. Some require SPF, some require Sender ID, some require DomainKeys, some require DKIM, some require that you sign up for service with ReturnPath/SenderScoreCertified, some require Habeas, some require GoodMail, and some require service with any of several other such services.
No one can do all of these things, and many people find it difficult enough to do just one or two. This is turning into a situation worse than TMDA, where the recipient site can't be bothered to do any real work themselves, so they force everyone else to do their work for them.
-- Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
Brad Knowles wrote:
Oh, and Windows Live (you can't call it Hotmail anymore) requires that you have a registered Windows Live ID before you can sign up for their equivalent "Smart Network Data Services" program.
Yes, they do require you to register for an ID, but once that is done, the only requirement for signing up for SNDS is that you can receive mail or be authorized by someone who can receive mail at the postmaster or abuse address of the domain that 'owns' that IP.
Also, while SNDS is not their Junk Mail Reporting Partner program, I discovered yesterday that if the 'complaint rate' in the report exceeds the '< 0.1%' rate, it is a link to the message that was complained about. Since my messages are VERP'd, I know who complained.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Here I am congratulating myself for not having any of these problems and United Online (Juno) has blocked mail access for an entire range xxx.yyy.zzz.abc/24 at my webhost.
Fortunately they are very responsive and have routed my mail through a different part of their network that is not blocked...
Yay for somebody with brains. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
iQEVAwUBR73DQtN2DJl/zagkAQKvwwf9EObawnOq26Wek2jt3etHCU2KzQt1xgn1 YNFgdNUSniSM5zve3qBjG2wWH1CEUrcmD2P3LlgmPskPXQYjzYV4BiwRcdTUNTG2 CGuryIaEn1NOPrglGUnBpVevToKoZnGqFNG2kMYYRJ+expzElrdv/XtN4+qirlGp O7sO5n9t9Rjpqz2ULsp22xgiBwgcRDIEnFaLl5nYF5/TZ14SwESHrStpspGERa6V saJv/cfQwc1agS3K2+pqLEDlvEujSI1fqC4+s37v2I7/vmzZkhnkjRPstgFvuNTr BJryPW9fjezBMPhZaZH1CjGPOmtLZ/gV072WxXK4VzGYfCuyeyR0Pw== =ejnX -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
From: "Rick Harris" <rick@learntime.com> Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2008 05:15:58 -0600
whateveraddress@yahoo.com R=lookuphost T=remote_smtp defer (0): SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection: host g.mx.mail.yahoo.com [206.190.53.191]: 421 4.7.0 [TS02] Messages from 216.104.33.122 temporarily deferred due to user complaints - 4.16.56.1; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts02.html
I've gotten this too with some incoming mail, but I don't have yahoo. My ISP participates in this.
While most of what they reject is probably spam (based on what a friend says who provides DNS for a domain name of mine and forwards the email to me; many are "caught" by my ISP), I've had a couple completely legit private emails (not list mail) from friends get rejected too.
They tell me it isn't about user complaints about me. It's that they are matching the emails to a larger spam database. But it makes no sense to me since the legit emails that got rejected had no spam keywords and came from normal domains (one from yahoo).
Does anyone else have any experience with this, and is there something that I can do on my end that would help?
I can tell you it has nothing to do with Mailman.
Cyndi
participants (19)
-
Adam Gabriel -
Attila Kinali -
Brad Knowles -
Brandon Sussman -
Brian Carpenter -
Charles Marcus -
Cyndi Norwitz -
Dave Dewey -
Dennis Black -
Dov Zamir -
Gabriel Millerd -
JB＠comcast -
Larry Stone -
Mark Sapiro -
Michael Welch -
Rick Harris -
Stephen J. Turnbull -
Stephen J. Turnbull -
Zbigniew Szalbot