According to stipulations filed yesterday Penkava and Yahoo! have agreed to go to private arbitration. This will happen before September 1, 2013. Also filed yesterday was an agreement that Yahoo! has until September 7, 2012 to respond to the complaint.
This morning (9 or 10 am Pacific) my various mailing lists were lighting up with questions about Yahoo delays. A lot of people reported they were seeing Yahoo respond “420 Resources Unavailable, try again later” on connect.
What everyone wanted to know was is if other senders were seeing this.
The answer was a resounding YES.
And, in fact, Yahoo commented on Facebook around 2pm Pacific that they had a mail outage and were trying to bring services back up before close of business today.
As with many things, the Internet rumor mill is one of the fastest and astonishingly accurate sources of information about mail servers falling over.
I started hearing reports that queues were clearing mid-afternoon pacific, but not everyone is seeing that.
So, yes, Yahoo is having a bad day. And it’s not you, it’s not spam, it’s just that some of their mail servers fell over and they’re struggling to accept all the mail headed their way.
It happens.
If you’re interested in hearing more timely updates, I will often announce things like this on twitter when I hear about them.
This is pretty awesome.
Visualize Yahoo! Mail
Make sure you click on the “Trending Keywords” on the left hand side of the image.
The Yahoo visualization tool has been a lot of fun to watch. You can see how mail changes, see how subject line changes and even see when commercial mailers do major blasts.
One marketer described it to me as “Total marketing porn.”
I even took a screen shot of someone doing a drop of their “September Account Statement” to customers.