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Yahoo delays, part 3: Yahoo speaks

Yahoo is aware of the recent problems and have been working feverishly to fix them. A Yahoo employee posted to a mailing list earlier today, explaining some of the recent issues. The summary is:
1) The Yahoo delays are a result of a tighter spam filtering policy. The delays are the result of the system erroneously recognizing email as spam and deferring delivery. They do believe that retrying long enough will result in all mail being delivered to Yahoo recipients.
2) They have been continually making fixes to the system over the last few days and senders should see queues start to empty over the next few hours.
3) They believe the adjustments made will resolve the deferral problems. If you continue to see problems, you can contact them through the form at http://postmaster.yahoo.com/.
4) They are working to provide more self-serve information at http://postmaster.yahoo.com/ as well as timely service updates.
Loose ends from my previous Yahoo posts:

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Bad Idea

My mailbox and IM windows have been swamped with messages about an ISP sending out mail to participants in their FBL program. It seems this particular ISP could use some delivery consulting.
See, this ISP sent out emails with blocks of 50 – 75 email addresses in the To: line. Bad idea. Delivery wise, I do not expect that they had many delivery problems. In the copy I saw, most of the addresses started with “support” and those addresses often have fewer blocks on them than other addresses. I also do not think this ISP will see subscriber emails blocked because of this.
However, it is very, very bad practice to do what they did. And the fact that the ISP can get away with it does not mean that any other mailer can get away with it.

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Yahoo update

It has been quite a while since I have had the opportunity to share information about Yahoo here on the blog, but there is new information to share.
Yesterday, Mark Risher from Yahoo spent some time talking with people about all things spam over at Yahoo. Matt from EmailKarma posted the transcripts as well as some excerpts from the talk. The really interesting bit, for me, was confirmation that Yahoo will be bringing back their FBL in the next few weeks. I have been hearing rumors about the return of the FBL for a while now, and it seems the general timeline (fall-ish) is accurate.
Speaking of the feedback loop, there have also been rumors that Yahoo is not accepting any changes to existing feedback loops. This does not seem to be the case. According to an internal person, companies who are currently in the beta FBL program can make changes to the program by contacting the postmaster team.

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