Cyber Monday volumes

Wow! Congrats to all the senders out there for sending So Much Volume that mail servers are full. I’ve even seen reports that STARTTLS connections are taking multiple seconds to establish at Gmail. The volume of mail that it takes to make Google slow down is impressive.

Of course, Gmail isn’t the only system exhibiting slow downs.  Other major consumer webmail providers are also showing signs their servers are under heavy load. I’m seeing reports about both AOL and Microsoft accepting mail slowly. Oddly enough, I’ve not seen anything about Yahoo having issues. Maybe folks just never use yahoo.com addresses any more.
There may not be a fix for this. It is very possible receiving systems just do not have the capacity to handle the volume of mail folks want to send today. If senders have, collectively, decided to send more mail than max capacity there isn’t much that can be done. Maybe some very forward thinking ISPs have spare servers they can deploy, but it’s unlikely.
No major advice here, just a warning that receivers may not be able to access all the mail that’s currently being shoved at them. Nothing to do except retry, and perhaps hold off some “less urgent” sends until after normal business hours. Those of you who are sending Cyber Monday sales emails may just have to extend them to Tuesday in some cases.
EDIT: After I posted this, I saw problems with Yahoo (mail accepted but not making it to the inbox) and Earthlink as well.

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Senders: You’re blocking our mail, why?
Receivers: Because you’re spamming, stop spamming and we won’t block you.
Senders: But we’re not spamming. What do you mean we’re spamming! How could we be spamming, we’re not sending spam!
Receivers: You’re doing all these things (generating complaints, sending to dead accounts, hitting spam traps, not bounce handling, etc) that makes your mail indistinguishable from spam.
Senders: But we can’t tell what we’re doing wrong unless you give us more data!
Receivers: OK, fine. Here are FBLs, postmaster pages, sender access to support people. Now, stop spamming.
time passes
Receivers: It’s costing us how much to provide support to senders?!?! And after years of giving them lots of data it’s still the same problems over and over again? We’re not a charity, we’re going to control our costs and stop providing so much personal support.
And that, readers, is why receivers are pulling back from providing the data they used to.

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