Re: : Thanks for the feedback on Yahoo in Canada right now...

On 04/17/2014 12:20 PM, Christopher Browne wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 11:56 AM, CLIFFORD ILKAY
> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
>     On 04/17/2014 10:01 AM, David Collier-Brown wrote:
>     > ... The next step is to figure out what to do about it.
>
>     How about ditching Yahoo? Both Yahoo and Hotmail/MSN/Live and any ISP
>     that uses them in the background are huge pains for e-commerce systems
>     that rely on sending confirmation links to users. More often than not,
>     those emails will either get misclassified as junk or never get
>     delivered at all. Recently, I was speaking with someone who hadn't
>     received an email I'd sent to his Sympatico (Microsoft backed). He
>     asked
>     me to send it again and he didn't receive it. He said he has a Gmail
>     address so I sent the same email to both his Sympatico and his Gmail
>     account. He got it immediately at his Gmail account. It never reached
>     his Sympatico account. It's nowhere to be found and it's not in
>     his junk
>     or inbox folders. He realized then that he's probably been missing
>     important emails from people for years and he switched to Gmail.
>     I'm not
>     advocating for Gmail, though it's a perfectly capable mail system. I'm
>     just saying that in the universe of possibilities, Yahoo and
>     Microsoft's
>     various free email offerings are the worst possible choices.
>
>
> Agreed.
>
> One way to regard this is to consider the change to be "censorship",
> and, to some degree, a matter of "human rights" warranting protest.  I
> don't think that is well-representative of what's up at Yahoo!, since
> censorship is usually expected to involve the suppression of speech by
> a governmental organization.  Yahoo! is a company operating in a
> foreign country, not a governing organization.
>
> Another view (less than "censorship") might be to consider this to be
> a form of "editorial selection", though I think that overstates the
> amount of intentionality involved.
>
> I'll quote from Jan Wieck on this from another list which has been
> discussing this from a more purely practical perspective.
>
> "One aspect of the whole thing is that the DMARC proposal is two years
> old and it was well known that this (breaking mailing lists) would be a
> side effect of it. The powers that be at Yahoo! went ahead with it
> anyways. This can mean only one thing. That Yahoo! does not want users
> with a @yahoo.com <http://yahoo.com/> address to participate in third
> party mailing lists.
> If that is what they want, then that is what they should get."
>
> A consequence of this is that Yahoo! will lose some paying users. 
> (Jan was, until quite recently, one such.)
>
> For those that have been paying users, this is providing a compelling
> reason to shift to some more satisfactory service provider.  For those
> that haven't been paying, well, your service exists at the sufferance
> of a company whose finances I can't properly comprehend.  Doesn't seem
> like something worth depending on to me.  (In contrast, I understand
> how Google can get value from its free service offerings.)
>
> FYI, there is a relevant GTALUG practicality; we probably need to
> block subscribers "@yahoo.com <http://yahoo.com>" from posting to this
> list, as the DMARC configuration will mean that mail from those
> subscribers is liable to cause us problems by virtue of bouncing
> around with the risk of encouraging mail routers to block US, which is
> distinctly undesirable.
> -- 
> When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
> question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"

Rogers subcontracts with Yahoo, which means a subset of my mail ends up
going there, and occasionally disappearing utterly.  Oddly, spamcop
doesn't have an outgoing-mail service (I use their incoming), or I'd
personally have been far away for years.

Just FYI, I got another failure at Thu Apr 17 12:06:15 EDT 2014 wit the
message

    An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded: 
    Transaction failed :  Cannot send message due to possible abuse;
    please visit http://postmaster.yahoo.com/abuse_smtp.html for more
    information. Please check the message and try again.

There is no such address, of course, and since I use TLS, I can't snoop
and see what happened.  strace next. I do know even a reasonable mailer
(Thunderbird) failed pretty silently, filing the message in "sent" but
not sending.  Who knows what a bad mailer would do?

--dave
[GCOS Internet mail would mail you the SMTP session log on any failure.
Why? Because I wrote it to follow Postel's instructions!]

-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
[email protected]           |                      -- Mark Twain