new thread
In the last two weeks or so, Yahoo has been bouncing LOTS of mail sent to people who get their e-mail there. The people who write are told in a bounce message that delivery of their mail will be retried, but reports are that this seldom happens.
Two groups for whom I handle mail have had problems achieving delivery at Yahoo, and I'd presume the Hyperboard remailer will experience similar problems. One of my groups encountered a 50% kill rate on a mailing this morning, but some other groups' administrators have found for them the loss of mail to Yahoo users has approached 80%.
It appears that when individuals write a friend at Yahoo they encounter the same difficulties, but when you write just one guy you are apt to dismiss it as an Internet fluke. When you write a few dozen people and half of the mail comes back from the same ISP, you realize something weird is actually going on. A trip to Google confirmed that LOTS of people are having the problem with Yahoo and that there is no solution.
The presumption is that the bouncing is part of some scheme for Yahoo to be able to brag that their users get less spam, but they are killing lots of wanted mail with the unwanted to achieve that result.
This problem popped up for awhile mid-summer and it's been sporadically seen since then. Now, recently, it's become a major problem for Yahoo's users again. I'd characterize its occurrence as "likely to be ongoing".
If you are using a Yahoo address in the Directory of Users (to trigger your avatar portrait), mail from other users will get sent there, and chances appear to be greater than 50-50 that mail for you will not get delivered. Also, at the same time, Yahoo's bounce will tell those writing you what your e-mail address is, despite our wish and yours to keep it confidential.
let Oren know your new address
Bill
Tech Crew Chief
Hey Bill
thanks for the heads-up,fortunately for me I'm using my university-account email :)
Bummers. I really don't want to give up my Yahoo mail--it's become the central repository. I think I'll just ride out the storm. Their spam filter worked well until about a month ago. Now I get one or two spams a day in my inbox. It seems like a whitelist feature would solve this problem--we could all just whitelist the remailer in our accounts. I'll send a request to them asking for that. I'm just one guy of course, but if they get lots of requests for that feature, they might listen.
Yes, setting your whitelist would. Mail from the MLHH remailer comes from a variety of e-mail addresses which you don't know. (This is true of any mail lists you belong to, so it's not an unusual situation.) So you have to whitelist something besides the sender's e-mail address. Sending yourself an e-mail from a message you've posted and sending yourself a second e-mail from the users' directory will net you two e-mails - viewing their full headers will give you ideas on what to whitelist. Most commonly, for mail lists some word or phrase in the "subject" is the same for every e-mail, and you can whitelist that.
The question you'll face is whether Yahoo will let you whitelist material in the "subject". Any complete permission-based filter will, but you will be stuck with whatever Yahoo's offers.
If they don't offer user-settable whitelisting of "subject" content, advocate for their adding that. It is simple programming for them to check anything in the "header", and the "subject" is located there. Yahoo runs a very large group of mail lists (called "Yahoo Groups") and you can bet they don't filter out mail from those! As with the MLHH remailer, your Yahoo Group mail will come from a variety of unknown e-mail addresses, so they are approving it based on other material in the header.
Also, advocate for a very large limit on how many e-mail addresses and subject phrases you can set. Over the years the whitelist of e-mail addresses for mail coming into our household has grown to 4725 entries, and mail still zips through the mail server's filter in less than the blink of an eye, while our getting even one spam, despite that large number of okayed senders, is a very rare event. Mail servers are up to the task; if they set a low limit but will sell you a larger one, they are just using your whitelist as a way to suck money out of your wallet.
Good luck!
Bill