Over the last week there has been a lot of news around some clients have seen an increase in the 4xx errors coming from Yahoo!. There have been reports that Yahoo! was under some type of attack from various spamming organizations and that they were using this method to fight off those attacks. Others believed that Yahoo! had officially put in a grey-listing methodology as part of their anti-spam efforts. Neither of these beliefs are correct.

Yahoo! has verified that they have recently put in new, more aggressive measures to fight illegitimate mail coming into their servers. While they have acknowledged that this may be have some affect legitimate mailers they are working on fine-tuning these systems. Their goal as always is to make sure that the legitimate mail that people want to receive gets to their end users, and that which they don’t is blocked. According to Yahoo!, any legitimate mail that has been received but not yet have been delivered will eventually reach the intended recipient as their inbound mail queues drain. They have asked for everyone’s understanding during this time and hope to have the issue resolved soon.
If you're seeing 451 4.70 [TS01] or [TS02] errors you should wait at least 4 hours before trying to redeliver the mail.

As always if you have any questions please feel free to reach out to our support group or for this particular issue you can go to http://postmaster.yahoo.com.

During last week and over the weekend, some of you might have noticed that more messages than usual were not getting through to Yahoo. The simple reason for this is that they seem to have some issues on their side that were reducing the number of messages that they could accept at any given time.

According to Yahoo's official blog site, they were experiencing issues with their POP accounts that were being sent to Outlook, Outlook Express and others. As stated on their blog "As a result we spent the last several days not only upgrading hardware resources for our SMTP servers, but also restructuring the way the bandwidth of these servers is allocated. We are confident that this solution will not only resolve the immediate problems, but also ensure that the systems are even more reliable in the future."

Hopefully all is fixed, but one thing we have to remember as senders, the ISPs aren't perfect either--they all do their best to keep their systems up and running, but some times they run into issues as well.

So a lot has happened since my last post with Yahoo. Not only have they decided not to accept Microsoft's offer, but apparently they are looking for other ways to compete with them. I have seen a couple of stories that have stated that they are in talks with AOL. So how would this, or even a Google agreement effect your email marketing plans? Well if they were to partner up with AOL, it would probably be the best scenario possible from an email marketing standpoint. AOL and Yahoo have always been the most open with that they expect from senders and give you as much information as possible to implement best practices. Not all ISPs are as open with that they expect as these two, so if they were to partner up, one would assume that this openness would only continue. I will keep watching to see what happens but as I said last time - there are a lot of things to figure out first before it is time to start worrying.

As most of you have probably heard by now, Microsoft has offered to purchase Yahoo!. As I was watching the news this morning while getting ready for work and heard this for the first time, my first thought was--wow what does this mean for email? Well I am sure a lot of you have already pondered that same question, but I thought I would share my thoughts with you as well.

First, the deal is not done yet, and for those of us that watch this industry as much as I do, it isn't a big surprise. Microsoft has to do something to keep up with Google, so by purchasing Yahoo! they are in a better position to do so. Secondly, if they do close this deal (which personally I would be surprised if they didn't), I don't think changing their email systems will be their top priority. To me, this deal is all about advertising, not email. That being said, I can't imagine that this merger would have any great effect on the email space for at least 2-3 years. Let's think about it for a minute.

1. Yahoo! and Microsoft/Hotmail use two different authentication methods, which one will they choose, or will they use both Sender ID and DKIM together?

2. Yahoo! manages a number of other domains through their partnership agreements such as SBC/Yahoo and others, what will they do with those streams of mail?

3. Will they simply get rid of one system and make everyone migrate to the other?

While these are all great questions that my team and I have already begun to ask, the great news is that we will have plenty of notice before any major changes occur. Through our relationships with both organizations, we will be able to prepare our customers and pro-actively manage any changes that might occur due to this proposed merger. Stay tuned for more on this as the saga continues.