North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Problems sending mail to yahoo?

  • From: Kevin Day
  • Date: Sun Apr 13 21:15:20 2008


On Apr 13, 2008, at 2:24 PM, Joe Greco wrote:
For example, I feel very strongly that if a user signs up for a list, and
then doesn't like it, it isn't the sender's fault, and the mail isn't spam.
Now, if the user revokes permission to mail, and the sender keeps sending,
that's covered as spam under most reasonable definitions, but that's not
what we're talking about here.

To expect senders to have psychic knowledge of what any individual recipient
is or is not going to like is insane. Yet that's what current expectations
appear to boil down to.


This is actually becoming a method some groups are using to attempt to censor others. This happened to one of our customers a while back:

Site A publishes some things that Group B finds objectionable. Group B wants to get it removed, but it's not illegal, against the hosting company's TOS or copyright infringement.
Group B tells all of it's members to go to Site A and sign up for A's discussion forum, using as many email addresses as they own.
A user registers for an account (one email sent to the user to confirm their email address). The user clicks the confirmation link, then gets an introductory email.
The user then does everything possible on the site that could generate emails. Password changes. "Notify me by email when the forum has a new post" activated. Sending private messages to each other. Etc.
When they've got thousands of users signed up, each with between 6 and 20 emails from Site A, Group B tells all of its users to go through all the emails and click "Report as Spam" on every one of them.
Every mail provider out there suddenly sees tens of thousands of reported spams coming from Site A from a wide range of people, and can independently verify that other sources are seeing elevated levels of spam from Site A's mail server.
Everyone blocks mail from Site A, thinking it's a spam source.

This took an insane amount of time to sort out. If the organizer of "Group B" hadn't emailed me personally confirming (and bragging) about what they had done, I still probably wouldn't have believed it. Our AOL feedback loop took days to go through, and contacting every blacklist we had our mail server entered on and convincing them of our story was difficult to put it mildly. And to make this mildly on- topic, we resolved this somewhat quickly with every provider except Yahoo - which never responded to any of our emails or form submissions.


Then there are the users who apparently think the "Report as Spam" button is like a spare for the "Delete" button, and use them interchangeably... We regularly have users who sign up for a mailing list, click the opt-in confirmation link, then report the confirmation email as spam. We remove them from the mailing list, then they complain they aren't getting their list anymore. We reply back explaining why they were removed, and they report our reply as spam.

-- Kevin