OATH and Microsoft updates

I’ve seen multiple people asking questions about what’s going to happen with the Yahoo and AOL FBLs after the transition to the new Oath infrastructure. The most current information we have says that the AOL FBL (IP based) is going away. This FBL is handled by the AOL infrastructure. As AOL users are moved to the new infrastructure any complaints based on their actions will come through the Yahoo complaint feedback loop (CFL). The Yahoo CFL is domain based. Anyone who has not signed up for the Yahoo CFL should do so.
When registering you will need each domain and the selectors you’re planning on using. Yahoo will send an email with a confirmation link that needs to be clicked on within a short period of time in order to activate the FBL.
Microsoft’s SNDS program had an outage at the end of last week. That’s been fixed, but the missing data will not be back populated into the system. This has happened a couple times in the past. It seems the system gets a live feed of data. If, for some reason, the data is interrupted, then it’s gone and doesn’t get populated.

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SNDS issues and new Gmail

A bunch of folks reported problems with Microsoft’s SNDS page earlier today. This afternoon, our friendly Microsoft rep told the mailop mailing list that it should be fixed. If you see problems again, you can report it to mailop or your ESP and the message will get shared to the folks who can fix it.
The other big thing that happened today was Gmail rolled out their new inbox layout.
It’s… nice. I’ll be honest, I am not a big gmail user and have never been a huge fan. I got my first account way-back-during-the-beta. I used it to handle some of my mailing list mail. I could never work out how to get it to stop breaking threads by deciding to put some mail into the junk folder. I just gave up and went back to my shell with procmail (now sieve) scripts. I still have a couple lists routed to my gmail account, and the filtering is much improved – I can at least tell it to never bulk folder certain email.
The feature I’m really interested in is the confidential, expiring email. I’m interested in how that’s going to work with non-Gmail accounts. Within Gmail makes perfect sense, but I don’t think Gmail can control mail once it’s off their system.

My best guess is that Gmail will end up sending some type of secure link to recipients using non-Gmail mail servers. The message itself will stay inside Google and recipients will only be able to view mail through the web. That’s how the vast majority of secure mail systems work.
If anyone has the secure message already, feel free to send me a secure message. I’ll report back as to how it works.

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AOL Changes

We’ve known for a while that AOL email infrastructure is going to be merging with Yahoo’s, but apparently it’s happening sooner than anyone expected.
The MXes for aol.com will be migrated to Yahoo infrastructure around February 1st. Reading between the lines I expect that this isn’t a flag day, and much of the rest of the AOL email infrastructure will be in use for a while yet, but primary delivery decisions will be made on Yahoo infrastructure.
The AOL and Yahoo postmaster teams are pretty smart so I assume they’ll have made sure that their reputation data is consistent, and be doing everything else they can do to make the migration as painless as possible. But it’s a major change affecting a lot of email, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some bumpiness.
If you’ve done anything … unwise … with delivery to AOL addresses, such as hard-wiring MXes for delivery to aol.com, you should probably look at undoing that in the next week or so. I’m guessing the changeover will happen at the DNS level, so if you’ve nailed down delivery IPs for aol.com you might end up trying – and probably failing – to deliver to the old AOL infrastructure.
 

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AOL Postmaster page changes

AOL has disabled the IP reputation check and the rDNS lookup on their postmaster pages. Given AOL isn’t handling the first mail hop any longer, this makes perfect sense. They simply don’t have the kind of data they did when they were handling mail directly from the sender MTA.
There’s no information, yet, on whether or not that functionality will be added / replicated over at Yahoo.

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