King of the Lab!
As those of you who have to deal with the world of emils know BT Yahoo have recently upped their fight against Spam in a rather Draconian Manner. and SysAdmins round the world have learnt to dread the influx of the following in their logs :-
2009-04-23 07:34:28 1LwsVq-00055A-NE SMTP error from remote mail server
after initial connection: host xxx.xxxl.yahoo.com
[195.50.106.135]: 421 4.7.0 [TS01] Messages from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx temporarily
deferred due to user complaints – 4.16.55.1; see
http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts01.html
For those of you Un-Email Tech Savvy I’ll explain in simple terms their new greylistsing email policy, I will explain in the form of a conversation between Bill “a poor yahoo sysad” and Ben “a Manager aka a suit” .
Ben: “We have a problem with our servers, I keep having emails trying to sell me Viagra, and telling me A great uncle is dead and left me some money!”
Bill: “Yes, everyone gets them, its called SPAM!… Err you didn’t give out your bank account details again did you?”
Ben: “Yes, but its Ok this time Mr. Yakamatza has heard of me, and trusts me to look after his 50million Yen while he’s audited, He said I could keep all the interest I make, and he’ll pay me 1 million”
Bill: *sigh*
Ben: “Anyway I’ve come up with a way to stop it! What we do is refuse to accept any emails, we’ll send it back saying its blocked due to user complaints”
Bill: “But no one will get their emails then?”
Ben: “No, here’s the clever bit, we’ll refuse the first half dozen times they send the email, then let the 7th attempt in. Spammers will get bored and give up before sending the same email 7 times?”
Bill: “Great, thats not going to annoy most the world. Where the Computer Weekly with the job adverts!”
I’m sure it went something like that. And because of that we at the Insane Asylum have been fighting rising mail queues and upset customers for the last few months. Our team tried everything to relieve the bottleneck, different IP’s, Domain Keys, filling in the webforms, the works…Nothing……
So at the start of this week I got annoyed that the inmates here were getting hassle again over customers not being able to evil people with BT email addresses. So I filled in the online help form (which so far had resulted in nothing). I filled it in using the style of a very annoyed person, used my name with all its letters at the end to impress whoever read it. And by the next day there was an email from them asking for more details. Send off giving them all the emails they asked for and viola! a nice email back saying our servers have been added into their database and that should sort out the problems. And it has, no bounce backs or failed emails today.
CN
