Yahoo having problems

Yahoo seems to be having some massive system issues the last 24 hours or so. DNS has been down, mail was down. I’m seeing reports things are coming back now, but there’s a lot of backed up mail traffic and the congestion may take a few hours to resolve.

If you have the ability to do traffic shaping on the sending end, now would be a good time to be extra conservative in your sending to Yahoo. After 7 hours, there’s a lot of volume that will be trying to hit their servers all at once. Ratcheting down connections to single digits will free up resources for the other emailers that are trying to get in. Globally, backups are likely to clear faster if folks send slower for the first couple hours.

According to CNN the problem started in Europe. There’s probably a Brexit joke in here somewhere…. but I don’t think I can compete with the real pundits.

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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.
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A decade or so ago I was offering whitelisting services to clients. It was pretty simple. I’d collect a bunch of information and do an audit on the customer’s sending. They’d get a report back identifying any issues that would limit their chances at acceptance. Then I’d go and fill in the forms on behalf of the client. Simple enough work, and it made clients feel better knowing their mail was whitelisted at the various ISPs.
When email filters were less complex and more binary, whitelists were a great way for receivers to identify which senders were willing to stand up and be held accountable for their mail. Over time, whitelists became much less useful. Filtering technology progressed. Manual whitelisting wasn’t necessary for ISPs to sort out good mail from bad.
The era of whitelisting is over.
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Whitelisting is dead.
Even the various certification and whitelisting services have mostly gone away. Both Habeas and Goodmail failed to achieve a profitable exit event. Of course, Return Path is still around, but they have built a platform of tools and services unrelated to whitelisting or certification.
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The AOL postmaster team posted some information about the upcoming MX transition on their blog.

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