Yahoo’s email filters kick out a lot of valid emails. From what I have been reading this is been going on for over a year, but it seems to have gotten worse in the past week.
My server sends out alerts each morning to those who have signed up letting them know about new rentals in their area.
But lately those emails come back to me 3 hours later first with a 451 (temp deferred) and then 421 on the last attempt telling me that my email server has given up.
I have been trying many changes to my alert email and sometimes it will go through and sometimes not.
In my latest test tonight it appears that Yahoo does not like links within the plain text emails. This kind of sucks because I want to link to the new rentals. It also appears that Yahoo does not like HTML email.
I have done all the that Yahoo requests, such as DomainKeys, DKIM, SPF - I filled out their questionnaire to get on their white list. I have not heard from them and it sounds like most people never do.
Yahoo is the only one that does this, all the others work fine.
If you have a Yahoo email account you might not be getting all your emails. But I have not given up - I am still trying.
Update: I am pretty sure I have it fixed now (bad domainKey and DKIM). I will have to wait until tomorrow morning to see if it really works when the mass email goes out. I would like to thank Chris Lang for helping me out with my email delivery issues. Now if I can just figure out how to get on Yahoo’s whitelist email list.
Update 2: Yahoo loves me again! See below comments.
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22 users responded in this post
Found your post thru google alerts.
First of all are you sending from a shared server?
It takes a dedicated email server IP address to get whitelisted at any ISP. If you get rejected it takes 6 months before they let you reapply.
Do you have domain keys authentication in dns?
Is your url you are using banned as a spam link?
Are you listed in SpamHaus? That will get you bounce fast from Yahoo.
If you are doing any / all of these things wrong you can get more information at my site.
http://www.keywebdata.com
Hope this help! - Chris Lang
I am not sending on a shared server - it is a new box.
Yes, I have domainkeys. Everywhere I have tested them they pass, but on Yahoo they fail.
How do I test if my URL is banned as a spam link?
I am not listed on SpamHaus.
How new is the email server IP address?
This is a dedicated box on a pipe right, not running from a cable connection in your office?
What is your email server IP address?
You get sandboxed for a period of time with a new email server IP and that could be the case here. Hotmail definitely bounces all new IPs for 6 months.
Also do you use a set of whitelist instructions so your users can whitelist your email address.
This enables HTML and clickable links ect.
I have a free utility that does this for you.
http://www.keywebdata.com/?page_id=28
The problem I see here is that DomainKeys is not passing Yahoo.
If your erver is set up right then there is only one problem.
Yahoo has stated that without DomainKeys you will face full filtering, with it you bypass the filtering process.
Also if it is not properly configured then you are going to get bounced. It is better to have no authentication (SPF, Sender ID, DomainKeys) in place than improperly configured email authentication.
Sounds like your number one goal is to get whoever set up DomainKeys for you to fix it.
Chris,
The new box is about 2 weeks old.
Hotmail is passing my emails just fine.
What is frustrating is everywhere I test the domainkey it works great, but on Yahoo it fails - so it makes it hard to test.
If you read down a few comments on this post it sounds like Yahoo is the one screwing up:
http://www.ahfx.net/weblog.php?article=107
Where is to hosted? A pipe? A Host? Your office?
Is it this domain?
It is hosted on http://www.crystaltech.com/. They host shared/dedicated boxes and manage them. It used to work fine on their shared box I was on.
Not in my office.
I not sure I follow the last question.
You look good from my own DNS tests where I am too.
If you are at Crystal Tech have someone there fix your DomainKeys.
Refer to the first or second post, “it is worse to me misconfigured than to have no DK at all”
I also assume you have run your server past test like this:
http://senderid.espcoalition.org/
I don’t want to use this test on your server myself since I am not sure how your MTA is set up and I am guessing this is the test that said your DomianKeys was working.
What kind of error message are you getting from Yahoo? If you do not want to post it you can email it to me.
Hope this helps.
Chris Lang http://www.keywebdata.com
I am assuming you are using a test like this:
http://senderid.espcoalition.org/
All my comments are here you haven’t missed any and I looked at the report you sent me.
I have a lot of questions like why are you using outlook express to send the test email?
Does Outlook Express allow entry of the private key portion of your DomainKeys key?
Try sending it through your MTA or enter it into your web form if you have one on your site.
Also why are you worried about DomainKeys when your DKIM seems to be accepted by Yahoo?
The report you sent me says DK was not accepted not DKIM.
DKIM is backwards compatable why are you using both?
AOL, Gmail and Yahoo all now use DKIM so why not remove DK and see what happens. You can always add it back in.
What MTA are you using to send your email from your server?
I look forward to see your repsonses.
Also here is an article about Yahoo not accepting some emails.
http://www.strongmail.com/resources/blogs/maximizing_deliverability/2008/02/yahoo-deferrals.php
I am actually not using Outlook Express. The reason it says that is one of the tests I ran was to spoof the X-Mailer to test if it didn’t like my Coldfusion 8 CFmail mailer. As you can imagine that test didn’t work (I have tried many different things to get Yahoo to love me again).
I am worried about DomainKeys because of this article:
http://www.smartertools.com/forums/p/13531/30700.aspx
MTA Coldfusion 8 CFmail.
As for the DKIM and DK, I have no idea, I added everything I could to signal to Yahoo that I can be trusted. I will try to remove the DK.
Update: after a new domainkey test I found, I see that the domainkey is failing there too.
So I have uninstalled the domainkey and DKIM from my MTA.
Now my emails are finally getting to Yahoo! They end up in the bulk email but for me that is much better than not getting there at all!
I am happy now.
A lot of us end up in the bulk mail folder, that is one thing whitelisting will cure.
Contact the postmaster at Yahoo and explain what has happened and see if you can still get whitelisted.
Use my email delivery instructions whitelist generator and create a landing page with instructions to add your from address to the address book.
http://www.keywebdata.com/?page_id=28
After your subscribers do this the emails they receive will land in the inbox.
This will also enable HTML and clickable links at AOL, and Hotmail.
Glad I could help! - Chris
Also you may have problems getting whitelisted if your IP address is less than 3 to 6 months old.
[...] helping a fellow blogger get his Yahoo / DKIM / DomainKeys problems somewhat straightend out I went on to look a little deeper into what has been an ongoing problem at [...]
It appears that my Yahoo test email is giving me false positives.
It appears that I am still having issues getting any mail to Yahoo.
If you removed the private key from the MTA did you also remove the public from DNS?
If you left either in DNS then you are coming up as misconfigured and will never pass.
Try just using DK in a test mail and try just DKIM.
Also they will not whitelist you without DomainKeys in place in some form.
I only asked you to remove them to see if the two conflict.
You need to have one in place.
Try one, then the other. Be sure to remove the public key from DNS. If you leave the key in DNS but do not send the private key in the email header you will fail authentication.
You probably know this but I want to check on it first. Also call Crystal Tech, their DNS guys know more about this than both of us.
Chris,
I found out the SmarterMail rel. 5 has domain keys and DKIM built in to it, so I am seeing if I can get that installed first.
Thanks for the help.
No word yet from the SmarterMail people if they will give me the SM5 release.
It appears that about 75% of my emails do make it to Yahoo. Still frustrating knowing that 25% of the Yahoo folks can’t receive email from me.
In the past day or so I am now seeing a new error message:
“temporarily deferred due to user complaints - 4.16.56.1″
I sent Yahoo another email about this issue but I have not heard back.
Update: Just got an email from Yahoo:
Cross my fingers that the spool doesn’t fill up tomorrow with Yahoo addresses.
Yes, Yahoo loves me again! No Yahoo emails caught in the spool this morning!
What did you do? I am still getting alot of questions about why Yahoo is blocking them.
It seems more that anything that DomainKeys was or is still broken and returning false “fail” results.
All I did was answer all their questions they had me answer in an email they sent me and waited a few weeks and then they sent me the quote I have above.
No domainkeys at all!
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