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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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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Ironport have rolled out an update to their rule engine which has a bug causing mail problems. According to discussion on the mailop list, the new rule engine is folding the header with a line feed (LF) rather than a carriage return (CRLF). This is breaking things, including DKIM signatures. Ironport is aware of the issue. I expect an updated rollout shortly.

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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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