[Mailman-Users] Ongoing delivery issues - First Yahoo, now AOL

[Brad Knowles]

On 3/7/08, Rick Harris wrote:

>  I posted a couple of weeks ago regarding mail not being delivered to Yahoo
>  addresses.  I've all but written that off as an Internet black hole.
>  Messages from my list almost never make it to Yahoo recipients.  If I post
>  to the list, and cc a Yahoo address, then that works fine.  Background noise
>  only, none of this matters today.

If you think that your messages are being thrown away by Yahoo, then 
you have two options for solving that problem:

	1.  Sign up for their feedback loop system and make sure that you
		properly handle all the complaints, so that you keep
		your reputation in good shape and Yahoo doesn't just
		throw your mail away.

	2.  Sign up for service with Habeas or ReturnPath
		SenderScoreCertified, and make sure that you implement
		all their "best practices" for all your outgoing mail.
		This will include your procedures for handling spam
		complaints, unsubscribe complaints, signing your outgoing
		mail cryptographically with DomainKeys or DKIM, using SPF
		records to designate which machines are allowed to send
		e-mail for your domain, etc....

If you're a small non-profit organization, both Habeas and ReturnPath 
have one-time processing fees that they will charge you in order to 
get into their program.  After that, once you're on the Habeas 
SafeList or on the ReturnPath SenderScoreCertified list, you should 
be much more successful in getting your mail through various filters 
at places like Yahoo.


One thing to keep in mind that that the Yahoo feedback loop mechanism 
is new, ad does not have a good track record yet.

On the other side, I help run the mail servers for the University of 
Texas at Austin (one of the largest public research Universities in 
the world, with ~50,000 students and ~20,000 faculty and staff), and 
we've had problems with RoadRunner, Yahoo, and various other 
providers.  We use IronPort e-mail security appliances to process all 
inbound and outbound mail from our main mail servers, and they use 
the SenderBase reputation system for determining the likelihood that 
an incoming connection is going to be spam -- and just this last 
week, Yahoo seems to have tripped some sort of alarm somewhere that 
caused their SenderBase scores to go through the floor, so our 
appliances started automatically seriously throttling their 
connections.

We're in the process of talking to the people at Habeas about getting 
our mail systems certified, so that we are much less likely to have 
our mail blocked at major providers, but we're also going to talk to 
the ReturnPath folks as well.  As it happens, because of my previous 
experience as the Sr. Internet Mail Administrator for AOL, I happen 
to know key people at both companies.

Meanwhile, we have already signed up for the feedback loop with AOL, 
United Online (which includes Juno and some other sites), RoadRunner 
(where I happen to know the Chief Postmaster, also a former co-worker 
from AOL), and various other sites.  But we're hoping that services 
like Habeas and ReturnPath will allow us to avoid having to continue 
to do that sort of thing.

>  Today my question is about AOL.  Since I had the issues with Yahoo, I
>  created my own email accounts on Yahoo, Gmail and AOL for testing and
>  monitoring purposes.

Setting up your own testing accounts is a very good idea.

>                        This week, none of the list postings (4 or 5) arrived
>  at either my Yahoo or AOL.  Yahoo is no surprise, but AOL was a surprise, as
>  it has been perfect in the past.  As I said earlier, this list is small and
>  has only one other AOL address, who also received no mail this week.  So, I
>  went into test mode.  I turned off everyone on the list except my test
>  account for AOL and sent another message to the list.  Came through just
>  fine.  Personalization on or off makes no difference.  It works fine.  I'm
>  very confused and open to ideas.  It shouldn't be so difficult to get
>  routine messages through to a list of 25 people.

Again, you can sign up for the AOL feedback loop.  Of all the FBLs 
we've signed up for, the AOL FBL is the most active and reports the 
most useful information.

Or, you can sign up for service with Habeas and/or ReturnPath.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>