I disagree. I've had Yahoo reject my emails completely silently (didn't arrive in inbox OR 'spam' folder, even though Yahoo's MX said the message was accepted). Yahoo was entirely unresponsive about this issue. We didn't have the same problem with any other provider and it was resolved immediately upon switching to a third-party email delivery service.
Additionally, Yahoo has a huge amount of abuse and doesn't seem to have an abuse handle either; you have to fill out some form buried deep on their site. On the other hand, I've reported abuse incidents to Hotmail before and have gotten an actual reply from a human (a rarity when submitting abuse reports; most places act on them but don't bother responding).
Off the top of my head and as anecdote, I've probably received the most spam and/or malicious emails from friends compromised email accounts where those accounts are Yahoo accounts. Hotmail would probably be second.
I usually go to the effort to call them up as soon as I can to inform them of the compromise. I've started gently describing the problems with these particular hosts; unfortunately, however, most don't go to the effort to make a change. And several have been compromised multiple times.
Right, it doesn't make the hotmail situation look better, it just reinforces how bad they both are.
What's also horrible about the yahoo policy is that there is that you can reactive the account (at least for some period of time), but the email archives are deleted. This happened to one of my accounts.
I'm serious. Hotmail was willing to work with us to help us get things working. If you've already jumped through all the silly technical hoops, have a legitimate case for sending the emails, and comply with their terms, try to get through to someone at Yahoo. They have no vested interest in keeping legitimate emails from their users' inboxes.
Here's the trick to getting Yahoo abuse to listen to you--go through your advertising rep. We had a problem where our mails to Yahoo email addresses were being bounced for "policy reasons". All the abuse people would tell us is that it means a link in the email is bad. This was stopping Yahoo customers who purchased our products from receiving their receipts, software activation instructions, or email tech support.
We were making no headway getting this cleared up.
This was particularly galling because many of those customers came to us through our search advertising at Yahoo. We pay them a ton of money to send is leads, and then they are blocking us dealing with those customers!
So our search guy called up his Yahoo rep and explained the situation. The Yahoo rep conferenced in the abuse or IT guys (not sure which) and told them this was not acceptable and our sites need to be taken out of the blacklist or whitelisted or otherwise made to not be blocked.
The problem was fixed within 5 minutes, before we were even off the phone with the ad rep.
Same thing happened at Microsoft, and Facebook. I'm sure it's happened anywhere with large email lists. Servers should probably just reject replies to lists large lists.
I can second this. If I get a support email from a hotmail user the first thing I do is to refund them their upgrade payment, because most of the time it is completely hopeless. Another pita with hotmail users is when they click the "Report spam" button on email address confirmation emails ...
They could always reply something like what Microsoft did.
“We have never engaged in the secret scanning of email traffic like what has been reported today about Yahoo,”
Everybody else declined having received the request, Microsoft just declined doing exactly what the report said yahoo were doing. Seems a lot more "safe".
Those are usually handled by the email service provider. Email deliverability is a speciality in itself, something even a company as tech-savvy as Cloudflare probably doesn't have the skills in-house.
Properly handling opt-outs is part of it. MailChimp does the right thing by soliciting feedback, including the option "I never signed up for these emails", hopefully that goes into whatever scoring mechanism they use to kick out abusive customers. Sadly the current state of what passes for front-end development is abysmal, with pages often not working if a user has cookies or javascript disabled, or an ad-blocker.
As for JGC, he deserves credit for doing the right thing, but that does not change the fact his company violated the law, and their marketing department richly deserves any fire and brimstone is raining down their necks right now. I would say most companies should probably have their email service provider contracts controlled by legal rather than marketing, most marketing departments have an inherent conflict of interest in this regard.
Even if their initial email requested it, wouldn't you assume that a large provider like Hetzner has at least partially automated their abuse handling? I wouldn't count on a human actually reading it before it gets forwarded to the customer.
> If they reported it to the sender it would be easier for spammers to learn how to work around it.
Of course, it would also mean those of us sending legitimate e-mails that get canned by these ever-more-aggressive spam filters know that someone did not receive the information they asked us for so we can do something about it.
Silent failure breaks e-mail. It is irresponsible, and the damage due to not getting a legitimate message through can be far greater than the damage due to letting a spam through (which you wouldn't be anyway, the spammer would just know they're not making it).
I used this to determine that Xfinity was compromise, yet still no acknowledgement despite reporting the issue to them and they went through some spiel about how I received the email by mistake and continue to receive emails by mistake at <randomword>_<randomword>@<customdomain>. The only person I shared that email with was them, and never had the issue with another provider.
no-reply emails are typical of companies like Paypal. It is a terrible customer service experience. But the worst UX is when you have to complete a web form to make an enquiry but don't get a email receipt of your enquiry. So there is no proof you submitted an enquiry and unless you copied the text to another file you have no copy of exactly what you submitted. If you are lucky enough to hear a response it's from a non-reply email address. I experienced this exact scenario recently. I thought it was blatantly cynical.
I second this. It's almost like they discourage me from sending any email at all. Even when I need to send an important security announcement to my customers I still get chills.
The last time I used Hotmail was the 90s, but I still know people who use it. But an issue like this goes far beyond email. If a company is prepared to so thoroughly sell out their customers, that's a problem. They'll probably get away with it though. In the balance of loss of revenue due to damage to their reputation with their customers versus loss of revenue due to Chinese government sanctions, the appalling truth is they probably made the right decision.
Might be a good time to mention a new development with Yahoo Mail. They now appear to use a form of shadow ban.
They will accept an email, with all outward symptoms being normal, but it will not appear anywhere in the user's mailbox. Not even in the Spam folder.
This started few months ago when we were sending out our (rather infrequent) newsletter. 5th or so message to ...@yahoo.com address failed with
421 4.7.0 [TSS04] Messages from xx.xx.xx.xx temporarily
deferred due to user complaints - 4.16.55.1; see
https://help.yahoo.com/kb/postmaster/SLN3434.html
(in reply to MAIL FROM command)
That's with just a couple of seconds in. They kept replying with 421 for a while, but later switched to just dropping connections. Then, in the course of the next few days, they would accept 1-2 emails and then go back to denying them again.
As I mentioned above, the "best" part is that none of these emails would actually make it into recipient's mailboxes. They disappear.
Better yet, all subsequent (non-bulk) emails have the same fate as do _replies_ to emails from Ymail users. This last bit is what makes this look like a shadow ban.
All attempts to contact Yahoo went unanswered, including those made through Gmail. Ditto for whitelisting requests through their web form.
If anyone has any ideas what the hell's going on, I'd be curious to hear them.
Additionally, Yahoo has a huge amount of abuse and doesn't seem to have an abuse handle either; you have to fill out some form buried deep on their site. On the other hand, I've reported abuse incidents to Hotmail before and have gotten an actual reply from a human (a rarity when submitting abuse reports; most places act on them but don't bother responding).
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