The From Line

Spamhaus (A nonprofit organization that maintains Real-time Anti-spam Protection) has announced on their website, that their new DBL (Domain Block List) will be launched on March 1st, 2010. The below is taken from Spamhaus's FAQ regarding the DBL:

"What is the DBL? - The Spamhaus Domain Block List (DBL) is a realtime database of domains of spam landing pages and spam-sources, including known spammers, spam gangs, phishers, spam operations and virus/malware related services. DBL listings are made according to policies outlined in DBL Policy & Listing Criteria.

The database is maintained 24/7 by both an automated system and by Spamhaus Project team members around the world.

We expect the DBL to soon be enabled by default in the popular open source SpamAssassin software and several other commercial offerings."

The DBL will also be included within the SpamAssassin tool in the 3.3.1 release "which will have new code for dealing specifically with domain-only URI BLs such as the DBL, and which prevents querying IP addresses which the DBL does not support."

Gold Lasso uses SpamAssassin within our eLoop Application to assign a SPAM score to clients messages.  As soon as the update is available the DBL checking will be available to all of our clients.  Spamhaus's DBL addition will be a powerful new tool in identifying potential SPAM issues before an email campaign is launched.

You can read the official announcement here.

There has been a small buzz growing about Yahoo!’s recent connectivity issues. Because sending to Yahoo! is so important to email marketers, I want to clarify some of the key points. For those of you who are reading this blog for the first time in a while, you may be unaware of any connectivity issues at all. So let me provide a brief recap to get everyone up to speed.

Yahoo! has been experiencing intermittent connectivity issues since January 26th, 2010. Therefore, when you send a message to a Yahoo! account (i.e. people with @yahoo.com, @ymail.com, @rocketmail.com @att.net, @sbcglobal.net email addresses) your message could take longer than normal to reach the inbox. It also means that the problem is sporadic, so connectivity might be fine this morning and difficult tonight. This is commonly referred to as the message being “deferred” by the Yahoo! mail servers.  Besides the small list from above, Yahoo! hosts mail servers for many more organizations worldwide.

Once we were alerted of the issue on January 26th,  we communicated as much information to our clients as possible. Our clients send email to Yahoo!’s servers all the time, so we knew the issue would be important to almost everybody. While we didn’t have much information to share, we still thought it was important to notify everyone immediately despite the potential confusion it might cause.

Internally, we speculated this might cause some confusion among users who rely on us as their Email Service Provider to distribute their campaigns. The biggest challenge with this type of alert is that it often makes it appear it was our fault they were having connectivity issues to Yahoo!. Questions immediately began coming in asking, “When is Gold Lasso going to solve this?”

So to clarify: This in no way was a result of anything any Email Service Providers have done. All ESPs are sharing the industry-wide challenge of delivering email to Yahoo! during their intermittent connectivity issues, and no ESPs are to blame. This is purely an issue on Yahoo!’s side. It’s very unfortunate that they have been struggling for almost two weeks to remedy the situation, and we hope they are able to bring it to a close very soon. The only thing we can do to help is continue to keep the public informed, communicate any updates provided to us by Yahoo!, and educate on who and what is affected.

Here is the background to outline the ongoing issue and then I will chime in my two cents on the situation.

Back on January 26th, Yahoo! began reporting connectivity issues through their YmailAdmin group with this message:

“If you're seeing some queuing in your outbounds today when sending to Y! users,
we're currently experiencing low connectivity across our MTAs, which started
this morning. We're working to get things back to normal.

The SMTP error message being generated by the issue should be:

"420 Resources unavailable temporarily. Please try later
hostname>"

Our apologies for the inconvenience..

This mostly went unnoticed unless you were a member of the YmailAdmin group (or an email administrator watching log files or monitoring their MTA’s).  It was speculated that Goodmail was the cause of the connectivity issues however Goodmail reported that the Yahoo! issues had nothing to do with them.  These rumors may have been because of Yahoo! and Goodmail’s recent public divorce and people were just looking for a scapegoat.  A few hours after it was reported through the ymail group, this message was posted:

Our MTAs' connectivity levels are stable and back to normal, folks. Thanks for
hanging in there.

Even though it was reported late that night that the issue was resolved, a few hours later (early the next morning on January 27th) the issues began again. This time it took a while (mid evening on the 27th) for Yahoo! to confirm the ongoing issue with the below message:

Sorry for the late update, but as I'm sure most of the senders have noticed,
we're again experiencing low connectivity on our MTAs, starting very early this
morning.

We're working hard to restore the connectivity to normal levels, and I'll post
an update as soon as I have some good news.

These types of messages have continued off and on up until February 5th when they reported the below message. This was the last message since the 5th that they have posted:

Our connectivity levels have been stable since Wednesday noon (PST). That said,
we are still investigating reports of timeouts when trying to open a connection,
as well as dropped connections during the DATA portion of the SMTP transaction.

Updates to follow as developments arise. Thanks.

I feel that Yahoo! did a fair job of keeping the community up to date with their progress. What concerns me is that there has been no update since February 5th regarding timeouts and dropped connections which leads me to believe that they are still experiencing at the least intermittent issues.  Yahoo! has always been one of the toughest ISP’s to deliver to and these recent issues haven’t made that task any easier for marketers. With the amount of yahoo addresses (as well as the many companies using Yahoo!’s MTA’s to host their mail) Yahoo! has a lot to shoulder in terms of users counting on them for sending and delivering mail day in and day out and we wish them the best of luck putting this behind them.

We will continue to update our clients as well as post publicly as we receive information on the issue. Meanwhile, please let a Gold Lasso Representative know if you have any comments, questions or suggestions.

It looks as though Goodmail has inked a deal with Microsoft that will go in to effect on or around the 17th of February.  This is exciting news not only for the two companies involved but email marketers (who qualify) who have had deliverability issues with Microsoft in the past.  I look forward to hearing more about this as it completely develops.

Thanks @LenShneyder from Pivotal Veracity for reporting it here:

Click here For more information about becoming Goodmail certified

AOL is currently experiencing issues which are causing incorrect error codes to be issued.  This is an issue on AOL's side and they are currently working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.  We will keep you updated as soon as they have a resolution.  Here is what the AOL Postmaster Blog is reporting...

"We are at present issuing a "451 4.3.0

This is not replacing the existing two codes:

500, text= 5.1.1 : Recipient address rejected: aol.com

and

550 Mailbox not found

Senders using scripts to remove unknown users automatically should be looking for all three codes for the moment.

AOL AntiSpam"

Guess who's back, back again?  Yahoo connectivity issues are back, tell a friend...

It looks as though the connectivity issue has once again reared it's ugly head for Yahoo.  At least this time the SMTP error message is different (if that helps.)  Our clients can follow this developing story in the Gold Lasso Client Portal.  Good luck to Yahoo on getting this resolved permanently and putting this all behind them.

Below is the message that I received from the Yahoo Postmaster Team...

##########################

At around 6am PST, we again started experiencing low connectivity on our MXes, and we have since been working incessantly to improve the situation. As before, the SMTP error message being generated by the issue will generally be the following:

"420 Resources unavailable temporarily. Please try later

However, some senders may see our other "421" SMTP error messages as well, as listed here:

http://postmaster.yahoo.com/errors/

Ensuring that email is delivered in a timely manner is of the utmost importance and priority for us, so we appreciate your patience while we work on the issue.

Best regards,

Yahoo! Mail