Deliverability
Yahoo! confirm withdrawal from Goodmail Certified mail.
Mar 5th
Today Yahoo! confirmed that as of this month they no longer participate in Goodmail certified mail. It has not be confirmed as to why Yahoo! have withdrawn from the scheme but it is well known amongst the industry that Yahoo! have had continued infrastructure issues with their inbound mail and this may be related.
Its not all bad news for Goodmail customers however, last month we reported on a rumour that hotmail were due to start supporting the certified mail scheme. We still believe this is likely to happen.
Yahoo! today announced to the industry today that…
On March 24th, we will decommission the MX record for ‘gms.mail.yahoo.com’, the dedicated domain to which senders have been routing CertifiedEmail for Yahoo! Mail recipients. To ensure no disruption of email delivery to Yahoo!, we recommend clients consult with Goodmail and make any necessary changes to their email systems in advance of this date.
Email Manuals advise is that you should imediately stop sending goodmail certified messages to Yahoo! domains including rocketmail.com and ymail.com as you will not be receiving the benefits which come from doing so. Instead you should deliver mail, uncertified, to Yahoo!’s mainsteam MX records which are published in the normal manor.
Microsoft/Hotmail to support Goodmail Certified Mail?
Feb 10th
Whilst browsing the web for email deliverability related stories that may have broken in the time it took me to drive from work to home I came across an article published only a few minutes ago. The article published on the deliverability.com site claims that today goodmail have announced that Microsoft mailboxes would soon support the goodmail certified mail programme run by Goodmail systems.
If this is true then Goodmail have just added the worlds largest consumer mailbox provider to their list of ISP partners which already boasts Yahoo!, AOL, MySpace and large US ISPs such as Comcast and Cox.net.
Email Manual have been unable to verify the rumour and has not seen any communication from either goodmail nor Microsoft to be able to confirm the claim and at time of writing this there is no mention of it on the Goodmail systems press release page.
That being said, Hotmail/live/Microsoft mailboxes which are rumoured to be around 270 million in volume would be a huge boost for the company which operates a certified mail scheme which can be optionally subscribed to through ESP’s who are partnered with goodmail.
The scheme which charges ESPs an additional CPM rate for mail destined for goodmail supported inboxes to allow their customers to particpiate claims to have delivered 30-40% better ROI and clickthrough rates for some customers. A customer must be able to demonstrate an existing good deliverability and low spam complaint rate to participate.
The goodmail scheme works slightly differently with different ISPs but can offer some or all of the following benefits:
- Guaranteed to hit the inbox rather than the junk folder
- Images and links turned on by default within the email client.
- A blue certified mail envelope next to the email in the inbox to assure recipients the email is genuine.
For more information contact your email service provider.
Yahoo.co.uk mail servers offline.
Dec 21st
Yahoo’s mail servers which handle email for yahoo.co.uk (and possibly other EU domain suffixes) appear to have gone offline a couple of hours ago.
There is no word from yahoo! on the cause or whether the outage is planned or not but ESP’s and bulk mailers should be aware that you will likely build up large queues on your MTA’s and these should be monitored. This is not an issue with your deliverability but instead an outage.
The following servers are affected:
yahoo.co.uk. 449 IN MX 10 mx2.mail.eu.yahoo.com. – 77.238.177.142
yahoo.co.uk. 449 IN MX 10 mx1.mail.eu.yahoo.com. – 217.12.11.35
We will update this post again when the servers return.
AOL’s new IP based reputation monitor
Dec 10th
AOL has today launched a new postmaster site. The new site along with its design revamp contains information on best practice guidelines, its whitelisting policy including the three different types of whitelist available, one of which allows guaranteed delivery (goodmail certified mail) and how to join their feedback loop.
For more information on why you should join their feedback loop click here for our previous article on the subject.
In addition to the normal postmaster information listed above AOL has created an IP reputation check tool.
The tool allows anyone to check on their IP reputation as it is measured by AOL. This is a great feature for bulk mailers.
This reputation check allows mailers to see if their RDNS (reverse DNS) has propagated to the AOL servers, one of the basic requirements to send mail to AOL is to have a valid and resolvable rDNS entry, and a 3 color traffic light indicating the status of the IP:
- Green is good
- Yellow is neutral
- Red is poor
- Grey is unknown (AOL have no data)
AOL say that “Mailers should take time to familiarize themselves with this new site, the valuable information contained therein and update their existing bounce codes/classifications with the published ones. AOL’s quote on their new website.” Sound advice.
You can familarize yourself with the new AOL postermaster site here.
Industry Alert: Cox.net launches new postmaster page.
Nov 11th
COX.net have launched a new postmaster site.
Lots of ISPs have postmaster pages, but we particually like this one. It’s comprehensive and one of the few that is actually useful to system administrators trouble shooting blocked messages without looking dated on the day it launches like some other major ISP’s postmaster sites.
The Cox postmaster pages provide error code definitions, preferred connection configurations, instructions on how to sign up for Cox’s feedback loop which operates like many others through returnpath. The pages probably won’t give enough information to solve all delivery issues, but they are helpful in getting started and troubleshooting the issues yourself.
Remember, always use the ISP’s postmaster site before sending an email to the ISP’s abuse team, your likely to get a lot better response if you have checked the FAQ’s yourself.
Let us know what you think, post a comment below.
New feedback loop (FBL) from Tucows by returnpath.
Sep 10th
Today return path and tucows wholesale division OpenSRS have announced a new feedback loop.
For more information on feedback loops see ‘What are feedback loops (fbl’s) and how can they help my deliverability?‘
Tucows is the third-largest wholesale domain registrar, providing Internet services, through its wholesale division known as OpenSRS, for more than 8 million domains. Tucows hosts millions of email inboxes on its OpenSRS Email Service. This feedback loop will cover all of those inboxes.
For a while now OpenSRS and Returnpath have been offering the feedback loop to limited returnpath customers as a private beta process. Now that the kinks and issues have been ironed out this has been made publically available free of charge to parties sending large amounts of mail to OpenSRS members. The feedback loop (FBL) will forward any mail reported as spam originating from the associated IP addresses back to the listed email address given within the application.
The new feedback loop application is available on the following website. http://fbl.hostedemail.com/
For a full list of feedback loops and information on how to sign up, click here.
No more report cards/reputation alerts from AOL.
Aug 24th
AOL have today announced that they will no longer be sending report cards to organisations who have a feedback loop with them and that instead these organisations will have to monitor their own reputation.
The report cards used to report to feedback loop owners when any of their IP addresses have exceeded the AOL threshold for the acceptable level of complaints.
This change is effective immediately and the full announcement can be viewed on the AOL postmaster site here:
http://postmaster-blog.aol.com/2009/08/24/announcement-no-more-report-cards/
AOL feed back loop and whitelist applications offline
Jun 5th
Aol have today announced that their feedback loop and whitelist applications are offline whilst they resolve technical issues with them.
AOL said: -
We are currently experiencing technical issues with our feedback loop system. You will be unable to submit WL and FBL requests while we resolve these issues. Thank you for your patience.
Email Manual will post again when applications are available again.
Update: Now Resolved, see http://www.emailmanual.co.uk/?p=130
Yahoo! Spamhaus PBL issue resolved.
Jun 5th
With regard to our last post on delivery issues to yahoo, yahoo have today announced they have resolved the issue with delivery that was effecting some bulk senders.
Yahoo today released the following statement: -
We have rolled out a patch this morning that addresses the spurious Spamhaus blocks described in our prior post. We are confident that this latest push resolves the problem. We are still in the process of making sure all our MTAs received the update, but for the most part, the issue should no longer be prevalent (as of 10am PDT).
We certainly appreciate your patience during the past few days. If you encounter further issues, please free to let us know us via http://postmaster.yahoo.com (click on the “Contact Us” tab).
Regards,The Yahoo! Mail Postmaster Team
Click here To see our Original post on the Yahoo delivery issues
Delivery to Yahoo! over the past few days.
May 29th
Over the past few days Email Manual has received a couple of reports that delivery attempts to yahoo email accounts have resulted in bounce messages being returned by Yahoo quoting that the recipient was on the spamhaus PBL blocklist.
Upon investigation, Email Manual has found a post on the yahoo postmaster site with the following information:-
some senders are seeing intermittent IP blocks when sending to Yahoo! Mail, with the SMTP error message from us citing that the block was due to a Spamhaus listing — e.g., “553 5.7.1 [BL21] Connections not accepted from IP addresses on Spamhaus PBL.” (See our full list of SMTP error messages at http://postmaster.yahoo.com/errors/ .)
If your IPs are currently not listed on any Spamhaus blocklist but you are seeing this error, please be assured that we are looking into the matter.
Whilst this doesn’t appear to affect all senders or even the affected senders all of the time Yahoo are working on this error. This may result in higher than usual bounce rates on campaigns going to yahoo based addresses and this should be taken into consideration when reflecting on your campaign reports.
Email Manual will post again when the issue has been resolved and confirmed by Yahoo.
Update 05/06/09 – Yahoo claim pbl issue resolved.
