False 550 responses from Verizon

This week there was a reported uptick in user unknown responses for verizon email addresses. The specific response folks were seeing was:

554 delivery error: dd xx@verizon.net is no longer valid. [-20] -mta4047.aol.mail.bf1.yahoo.com

This appears to be a problem with their require-recipient-valid-since header checking. They are aware and are working on a fix.

What this means for senders is if you’re seeing Verizon addresses hard bounce, then you shouldn’t necessarily drop them from your list. They are likely still valid. You can continue to retry mail to those addresses. This does seem to have just affected the verizon.net addresses, not other addresses across the properties.

Related Posts

Verizon changes but no time line

Yesterday there was a lot of talk about Verizon moving out of email and transitioning all their customers over to the AOL backend.  The source was a page in the Verizon help center about transitioning an email address. There is no date on the page, so it’s unclear when this is going to happen or when it started.
I posted about Verizon beginning this transition back in May of 2016: Changes coming to Verizon email. The wording on the AOL page I link to is very similar to the wording on the page that was passed around yesterday.
Without a date it’s hard to really provide any advice, other than to maintain your list hygiene (you do have list hygiene programs, right?) and remove addresses that hard bounce. Quite honestly, I don’t think this will really have any effect on delivery. It doesn’t appear these changes are happening all at once, and Verizon customers have the option to keep their verizon.net address. They’re just going to have to access it differently.
For companies that use an email address as a primary key for logins or accounts, it’s probably a good time to contact customers with a verizon.net address and ask them to update their address. That’s a good idea most of the time, but when we know changes are happening at a domain level, it’s a requirement.

Read More

Congestion at Verizon

Yahoo! finally found their broken cable (I had no idea Yahoo had fiber) and fixed it. Now, I’m seeing a lot of reports that Verizon is accepting mail very, very slowly. Some folks are reporting no more than 20 messages a minute. This could be due to congestion, and just an underpowered system, or it could be some purposeful throttling on Verizon’s end.
In any case, this is affecting a lot of senders and not just the marketing end of things.
Updates as I get them.

Read More

Email news today

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.

Read More