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Survival Tips for Yahoo's New Anti-Spam Policies?

skagin asks: "Yahoo has instituted a new set of anti-spam policies which are causing havoc for our customers (we're a small ISP). List mail with non-existant, over-quota, or recently cancelled recipients is being bounced whole, and much of the one-to-one mail we send is bouncing. Yahoo tells us that our mailserver is being treated as suspicious because of the number of bad recipients being sent to, but most of those are bounces from yahoo spam sent to non-existant addresses on our network. Our customers are going nuts. Is anyone else out there having this problem with Yahoo?"

18 comments

  1. just deal with the situation... by wadeb · · Score: 1

    Try not bouncing any emails to addresses at yahoo.com, wait a few weeks and they should take you off the list.

    -Wade

    1. Re:just deal with the situation... by DrSkwid · · Score: 1

      :)

      My .qmail already silently drops anything from yahoo.com (& msn.com) that's not in my whitelist so I haven't noticed.

      --
      There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
  2. possible solution? by digitalmuse · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Could you possibly use procmail to drop all that bad spammage that's being sent to the non-existant users on your domain?
    Even better, don't just drop them, collect them and drop the collection of yahoo-originated spam on their desk;
    "It's your friggin mess, you clean it up..."
    all else fails, inform all your users with a nicely worded e-mail along with some e-mail address for the appropriate people who they can complain/rant to at (uselessbastards@yahoo.com)
    Ask them to forward this to any of their user@yahoo.com associates and put the pressure on from both sides. Good luck and let us know how things turn out.

    --
    "If I wanted your input on my pet project, I'd stick my hand up your ass and use you like a sock-puppet." - Muse
  3. IN a word by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is anyone else out there having this problem with Yahoo?"

    No.

  4. That might explain by haplo21112 · · Score: 2

    I tried to send mail to a friend of mine last week, Yohoo appearently has something to do with his domain(I think they host it for him in some way)...anyway my mail bounced for no apparent reason....

    Postfix Bounce Log included:
    The Postfix program

    : host mail.san.yahoo.com[209.132.1.30] said: 550
    RCPT TO: Relaying not allowed

    [ Part 2: "Delivery error report" ]

    Reporting-MTA: dns; majere.epithna.com
    Arrival-Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 14:48:45 -0500 (EST)

    Final-Recipient: rfc822; brianb23@mystictavern.com
    Action: failed
    Status: 5.0.0
    Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; host mail.san.yahoo.com[209.132.1.30] said: 550
    RCPT TO: Relaying not allowed

    [ Part 3: "Undelivered Message" ]

    Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 14:48:45 -0500 (EST)
    From: xxxxxxxxx
    To: Brian and Angi Berkovitz
    Subject: Re: friday

    --
    Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
    1. Re:That might explain by david+duncan+scott · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Is that your friend's real address?

      --

      This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander

    2. Re:That might explain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you went around posting my email address on /. I'd bounce mail from you too.

  5. Yahoo accounts--filter the trailer by YeOldeCurmudgeon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've noticed a significant increase in the amount of spam received on the Yahoo accounts of friends since January, 2002. Personally, I believe that when various free Groups were bought and merged with Yahoo groups, some came with email address security weaknesses spammers are exploiting. I added one filter that seems to kill most of the internal Yahoo spam. If the header says it originate's from within Yahoo but doesn't have the typical Yahoo! trailer, it is spam.

    1. Re:Yahoo accounts--filter the trailer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Now that has to be the brightest idea I have heard yet on this issue. I'm going to scurry off and see how I can set that up as a filter for procmail. If it works half as well as I think it will, I owe you a beer!

    2. Re:Yahoo accounts--filter the trailer by J'raxis · · Score: 1

      You can also do the same with Hotmail. Lot of spam from forged Hotmail accounts; and real Hotmail mail includes an MSN trailer.

    3. Re:Yahoo accounts--filter the trailer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This happened to me for a few months I kept getting non address returns to me at my Yahoo address. It stopped recently (my guess is after getting the account blocked at most of the other free services), but it took me forever to figure out that they weren't hacking into my yahoo account. I've had my account since about 1996, so perhaps some security holes exposed at Yahoo.

  6. I'm switching by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is anyone else out there having this problem with Yahoo?

    I don't know but I guess it's time for me to switch to Yahoo for my mail service.

  7. Cut them off! by Martin+S. · · Score: 2

    As the postmaster [at] kitv.co.uk. I had similar problems with Hotmail, lots of junk email from them, hotmail rejecting email from my domain, an arrogant postmaster who was completely ignorant of RFC, .

    After trying to resolve it directly with them and failing. I simply blacklisted hotmail, the amount of time saved from less junk email vastly over shadowed the time required to explain that we 'no longer supported hotmail because of all the junk email they send. 'You can hear my customers sagely nodding to themselves, praising my iniative, and vowing to tell there friends to move from hotmail."

  8. Yahoo Mail -- Silent Edits by fm6 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    This is pretty offtopic, but I can't resist the chance to bring attention to this problem.

    As an anti-virus measure, Yahoo Mail filters all HTML attachments to disable malicious Javascript applets. What's wrong with that? The filtering is very simplistic. There's no attempt to identfy and remove scripts as such. They just do a global search for intrusive Javascript constructs ("eval") and replace them with benign ones ("review"). They don't even check for word boundaries! So if you get a newsletter called "Medieval History" it will come through as "Medireview History".

    The potential for garbled communication is mind-boggling. To make matters worse, they don't warn people that they do this.

    1. Re:Yahoo Mail -- Silent Edits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wow, that's truly brain-damaged, but somehow I can't get too upset if text/plain gets through.

    2. Re:Yahoo Mail -- Silent Edits by duffbeer703 · · Score: 2

      That is a complete load of crap.

      Yahoo does not filter plaintext. I just tested it.

      I cannot believe dumbass moderators modded you up without even looking at what you said.

      --
      Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
    3. Re:Yahoo Mail -- Silent Edits by fm6 · · Score: 2
      Hey, I have a stalker! Cool.

      Read my post again. I did not say "plain text".

  9. NOOOO!!!! by fm6 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Offtopic! Mod that asshole down!!!