Your Email Resource.
Deliverability
Articles and guides relating in delivering emails to ISP’s and bypassing spam filters.
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/
