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Yahoo's Amazing Disappearing Mail Servers
Golygydd Max writes "A Techworld story reveals that the reason Yahoo email has delivery problems is that the company's mail servers mysteriously close once in a while." From the article: "According to trimMail's Email Battles site, which recently monitored 16 of the company's advertised email hosts 240 times over a half hour period, only 133 of its probes were answered. Many of the servers were closed and unavailable. Overall availability ranged from 25 percent to 75 percent over the admittedly short test period. The average availability was 55 percent, with the worst of the servers available only 7 percent of the time."
I was under the impression that Yahoo! mail was free. Isn't the rule you get what you pay for? Seriously though, why would Yahoo put a ton of money into something which is not a revenue generator. Free email is so yesterday.
And if you don't like what I am saying you can reach me at:
server-never-works@yahoo.com
and really let me know how you feel about this. Well, you can at least reach 7 to 55% of the time.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
All you need is one server to have a functioning email system. Can anyone say 'MX priority list'? Of course maybe when each user is taking in hundreds of pieces of spam a day things might get *a little slow*...
A few quick observations about the poor quality of the analysis: 1). They only took the readings over a short and untypical period. 2). The hosts being closed was not in itself indicative of service levels.
when the 5 nines fails.
The servers will be down. Yahoo mail is in beta. I'm sorry, what? Gmail?
Servers being down some of the time shouldn't cause large-scale delivery problems. Remember, when e-mail protocols were being designed, a lot of these servers were down for a good portion of each day. E-mail protocols were designed to deliver e-mail in whatever window existed. If the receiving server is down, the sending server will try again for a good while before giving up.
Also, as someone else has already mentioned, there are the MX priority lists...
This is hardly a news story. Tomorrow: 100% of people on my front porch stub their toe at 10:19am on Friday morning. Porch declared a national disaster zone, FEMA are organizing evacuation flights.
My guess is that these servers along with Babylon 4 went back in time to aid the Vorlons and Minbari in the first Shadow war.
The average availability was 55 percent
Maybe they fight spam in stupid way by letting fake SMTP servers eat thier e-mails? Normal SMTP server will delay deliver while spam-bot will gave up. They not follow RFC from what I know.Rocksteady, are you ready to ska?
their idea of "closed" port 25 is a timeout. with their scanner hitting all the yahoo mta hosts, it's likely to be blocked as a spammer after awhile.
the test isn't all that useful -- something that measures delivery of messages themeselves would be more helpful.
I think this site is just attacking yahoo to get attention -- that's the norm for a slashdot article recently
Duh! That is why they have multiple redundant servers. When one server goes down the email is routed to another server. Personally I have never encountered a situtation where an email sent to my yahoo account did not reach me. Yahoo Groups is a different story. Emails used to disappear frequently when they merged with eGroups. Things have stabilized now, but sometimes emails sent to a group do not reach all the participants and it is not a receiver issue but a routing issue on yahoo groups servers. Overall the uptime should be close to 100%. Nobody cares what is happening behind the scenes, whether one server has 100% or 7%.
Email is DESIGNED to handle failures of this kind. Assuming Yahoo is running some form of clustering, it's quite reasonable to think that systems will start/stop as load fluctuates. Availability of individual servers is largely irrelevant - it's the availability of the system at large that matters.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Just think how much more spam would get through if they were always up.
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
And here I thought the reason for my spam reduction was because of their filters...
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
240 times over a half hour period is a high rate of connections per server (8 per minute per server), especially for email servers, so is it possible that Yahoo!'s servers were simply defending themselves against a perceived threat? Connection throttling was the first thing that came to mind on reading the blurb.
Perhaps this test just happened to coincide with a software upgrade/patch that was being rolled out to their systems, requiring some per-system downtime.
Trying out the test, it *appears* that the tool connects to port 25 and checks for a banner. There is no information about timeouts. I presume that 'Closed' means 'Timeout' or 'Connection Refused', but they don't tell us.
It seems that Yahoo! has blocked their server or something; the tool works fine on my domains but I can't get a result for yahoo.com.
AC: Only on slashdot... could the sentence "My hovercraft is full of eels." be moderated "+4, Insightful
One can only assume they are running the latest and greatest version of Microsoft Exchange with the same level of stability as Hillary Clinton carrying Rosie Rosie O'Donnell piggy-back at an NRA convention.
Yahoo is actually doing the right thing here, from a technical point of view. The worst thing you can do is have an MX that accepts connections but is not responsive enough to actually handle accepting a message at that point -- it's far better to stop accepting SMTP connections when you detect you're at your maximum capacity.
This is because SMTP clients who fail to get a connection will immediately try the next MX. If they get a connection, but can't send the message, they may back off and try again later, delaying the message further.
--
Twoflower
I admit, I have seen a few more glitches since they raised the space to 256 meg, but for the most part yahoo mail has been available nearly always in the ~9 years I have been using the service.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Anyone who uses Yahoo! for email gets what they pay for.
Same can be said for *any* e-mail service, even those that come with your dialup/broadband account. I know ATTBI used to tell its customers that credit was not permitted for mail server downtime because it was a "free" addition onto their broadband account.
GMail, after the introduction of integrated GTalk was unavailable and/or slow at times (it's mostly cleared but I still don't have it set to use the integrated client).
Whatever. It's e-mail, it's not the end of the world if you don't get it.
Does that go for free gmail also?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I've used Yahoo for %100 of my personal email for the last 6 years.
And, as an email admin, I also use it to test systems, both mine and others, and it always works...
If the servers are up and down all the time, I've never noticed it...
I'd file this under FUD...
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
We use Yahoo mail at our company. I've noticed, over the last year or so that about 10% of the time, MS Outlook or whatever POP3 client, will hang when trying to send or receive mail.
It happens across the entire company and happens enough that I have to answer questions from users about it. I tell them to cancel out and retry and 100% of the time that solves the problem.
Guess I now know why this is happening. WTF Yahoo?
Load in Linux + LinuxBIOS + a watchdog, with a copy of Postfix, for the mail handling, and you should not be getting a 50% downtime. It should be closer to 0.05% downtime, even under the kinds of loads described. (I'm including LinuxBIOS here because you can reboot with it rapidly. The watchdog is for auto-reboot on crash. The longest any machine would remain down with such a configuration is 35 seconds.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
No. If you RTFL in TFA ... You see that they hit 4 of yahoo's mx records "mx#.mail.yahoo.com" (divide by 4, that gives us 2 per minute per server), and each of these has multiple IP addresses (on average, 4, so divide by 4 again). So in reality, they were hitting a physical machine *once every two minutes*. Or, as they put it in TFL:
"Next, we took measurements every two minutes for half an hour. That's 15 separate readings of each of 16 IP addresses, for a total of 240 readings. The results were surprising."
They run FreeBSD, which rarely needs any kind of patches. Also, patching should cause a fairly even distribution of downtimes, but the description suggests it was much more random.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yes it is.
The web itself is supposed to be redundant, but it's not. Cox, under pressure from M$ and AOL, made sure you could only use their SMTP server on their network. That leaves every computer on their network reliant on their servers or web mail and it sucks. The only thing that's distributed now are the spam and DoS attacks. Yahoo's failure is just andother example of what a bad idea to concentrate services in one place. If everyone ran their own mail server, things would work much better. To DoS that, you would have to turn off everyone's computer.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My SO has had problems in the past two weeks sending email to seemly any AOL subscriber from her yahoo account. I have had no such problems. She gets a 421: SERVICE NOT AVAILABLE error message from a yahoo server. We did an experiment each sending a bunch of emails. She had 100% failure. I had 100% success. She tried sending to 6 different people. Both AOL and Yahoo customer service were useless (i guess what can you expect for a free service). Does anyone here have any ideas what could be going on?
And in other brilliant studies:
* Ethernet packets found to collide sometimes, resulting in worldwide communications silence.
* Some traffic lights found to periodically turn red almost 50% of the time; transportation system grinds to a halt.
* Study finds that if you call someone every 15 seconds and ask "can you hear me now?", unexplicably none of your calls will be answered, in addition to getting strange looks.
* Fast food restaurant closes one of its eight queues at the shift change; six people starve to death as a result.
If you have to deal with mailing lists or bulk email or lots of users you already know this is true. I create special sendmail queues just to handle Yahoo's lousy SMTP servers. With a decent provider (like *gasp*, AOL) you can open up a connection and cram in just about any amount of email. With Yahoo the conversation is usually like this.
.... Connecting to mx3.mail.yahoo.com. via esmtp...
(send one or two emails)
451 mta152.mail.re4.yahoo.com Resources temporarily unavailable. Please try again later [#4.16.5].
(hang until TCP timeout)
Too right. On good days mail from Yahoo Groups isn't actually being sent from blacklisted servers ... so actually makes it as far as the recipient's spam filter before being discarded.
has anyone else noticed that Yahoo is on multiple spam lists (psbl.surriel.com, bl.spamcop.net)? we had to stop using the psbl list at work (college) as we have so many students with yahoo accounts and the faculty stopped getting emails from their students.
FYI: Techworld linkjacked the article from Email Battles. Read the original at http://www.emailbattles.com/archive/battles/email_ aaddhghiad_ih/.
I've always wanted to know what MTA software they use at Yahoo. I've always assumed it was something homegrown, but have never heard anything one way or the other.
I was working at a large ISP and around six or seven years ago I was troubleshooting this exact problem. I noticed these same symptoms with yahoo where some of mx's were available sometimes, rarely, or never. This particular problem turned out to be that yahoo's MTA will not communicate with Post.Office, at the time a product of Software.com. Very bizarre. Even watching the traffic with a network sniffer, I could see no explanation at all.
The interim fix for that particular problem was to simply tell Post.Office to route all mail bound for yahoo.com addresses to a small Sun Ultra1 that I quickly put into production. I put postfix on it which came to the rescue just fine.
"I can be self-referential if I want to," said Tom, swiftly.
Err you must be running recent windows or a mac - for the beta - it only works on windows/mac so yahoo webmail beta is not 'webmail'.
If you have access to a unix box with a browser it will tell you to use the old webmail client, not the new beta client.
Thats my experience.
Obviously no mail administrator was ever consulted about this story before it made Slashdot's front page. All this guy did was ping the SMTP port of what he thought was a mail server. Has any Slashdot editor ever heard of round robin DNS or load balancing proxies? If not, perhaps they should hire someone with minimal knowledge of how email servers in large corporations work before posting a front-page story like this.
I would wonder about the scan method they used. The mail servers maybe designed to just ignore ping requests. While this inconsistancy from servers that respond and servers that don't pretty much proves they are disorganized and such, it doesn't quite prove that the servers are down.
Now there are other scan methodes. nmap is a great scanner though I hear there are better ones. nmap would be bloated for a simple, "Are you alive?" poke, but if the server is configured to ignore ping requests, a different type of packet is required. I'm certain there are a lot of other tools perfectly suited to this task, and probably more so.
The article left out the scan type. I would find this a tad critical considering the nature of what the article claimed. A ping can only prove something is alive, not that it is dead.
No, it's more like your mom closing her legs for the night. In other words, it shouldn't be happening.
Someone wake me up when Slashdot mods have regained their sense of humor.
True. Verizon email is nortoriously bad. Funny, I received a notice of a class action lawsuit over it too! Verizon was doing massive blocking of european email for a while there (may still be doing it.)
Yahoo's commercial e-mail service is one of the most hobbled hosting services I've ever encountered.
First thing, the "business mail" account gets you 10 e-mail addresses for $10 / month. An additional 20 e-mail addresses costs another $10 / month. However, the $12 / month "Web hosting starter" comes with *200* e-mail addresses which are identical to those that come with the "business mail package".
However, to use either service, you *have* to use Yahoo Domains to host your DNS. If you've got a web hosting package, you can't point www.yourdomain.com anywhere else... it is locked in the DNS control panel.
So if you bend over and pay for the less functional, more expensive mail-only service, you soon discover that you can't create normal aliases / forwards. The only e-mail addresses you can add to a forward are yahoo e-mail addresses *in your domain*. Now, you can forward e-mail for an individual account to an external address, which means you have to burn an extra "mailbox" for each external address you need to forward e-mail to.
It's a pity, because it almost is a great service... they actually had to go out of their way to screw it up like this. I'm sure they have some reason for it, but competitively it doesn't make a lot of sense, given that other folks are infinititely more flexible.
-R
I've been using Yahoo Small Business Email for about 3 years now, and while it's fine for IMAP/POP3, the SMTP service sucks. I can understand the use of graylisting, but from a user perspective, it makes the server unusable because the time it takes to process is longer than some devices will wait. My desktop PCs are fine, but my Symbian based mobile phone needs an SMTP relay on the road, and that always times out waiting the 1 minute plus that Yahoo takes to work it's way through the graylist process - truly: regularly more than a minute.
... they are literally the cheapest out there (US$10 a year).
At home I had to set up an internal relay, but that means VPN-ing home before sending mail whenever I take the laptop on the road with wireless connections, or a local server, which would need somewhere to relay to.
The only reason for not switching is the cost
My point is just that if Yahoo need to add a greylisting system that takes a minute plus to process, they should add enough hardware to make it perform well enough that more than just PCs can use it.
Servlet v2.4 container in a single 161KB jar file ? Try Winstone
I will continue to use their forms until they fix the problem they created. If they truly do not keep any sort of backups whatsoever, how can anyone ever trust their paid services? Does anyone know if they bound by Sarbanes-Oxley? If they are, I suspect there is a much bigger story here. If not, then I will never trust them or their affiliates with my money.
SBC has good DSL rates? Screw that. I will wait until the competition lowers their rates. Yahoo has lost my trust forever. Good riddance.
"240 times over a half hour period, only 133 of its probes were answered."
Well, if a single host tried to ping me once every 7.5 seconds for a half-hour, I'd want my hardware to ignore a few of them, too.
Please explain how your description matches the graph. Quite funny.
The point is that if the SMTP implementation you're using is correct and the DNS MX record smartly defined, then you'd need just one email server up and running!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
of course they'll be 'down'.
Yahoo is giving the missing server to the Feds and the Chinese government for them to look at it. You know, uphold civil liberties and in the case of the Chinese, jail those wanting democracy. Those kind of shits.
Isn't this exactly why domains have multiple MX records?
Come to think of it, if you look at the A records for www.yahoo.com (actually yahoo.aka-dns.com) I'd bet a good number of those hosts are down at any given moment too.
We have redundant systems so that a given host being down is not crippling. We have multiple responses to DNS queries so that we can make use of those redundancies.
All's true that is mistrusted
Anyone who knows how to look at their mail software's records has known this for years. And hotmail.com has problems nearly as bad as yahoo.com. Sending email to either typically involves trying to contact the first server in the mxlist, waiting for a timeout, trying the second server, waiting for a timeout, etc. For both of them, most of their listed servers accept connections, but simply don't respond (at least within the 120-sec timeout that I use).
This has been true for some years now. I'd expect that the people running both systems know all about it, but don't see any need to fix it.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I had one of the with @home, before Cox, thank you. It worked well.
If you just want to submit via another MSA, use the submission port (587/tcp) for that.
What's the use of trading one "smart host" for another? It wold be nice to not have to change smart hosts from one network to another, but that does not really solve the problem, it just lets me use another overloaded service.
Running a full mailserver takes far more clue than the average Unix admin has (and that is saying a lot).
Really? Is there something wrong with Exim's default settings? Would this supposed difficulty make it any easier DoS the whole world? How would this be any worse than 3/4 of all Winblows machines having a spambot on it, as is the case now? You might as well say that running a machine connected to the internet takes more clue than average. You would be right, but that does not make email special.
As I said earlier, the way things are done does nothing but concentrate the failure points and reduce reliability. I don't see how it's helping anyone but the greedheads who want to make the web look like broadcast TV.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Is it just me, or has Yahoo been down consistently in periods of a few minutes since the past month? It happens to me at least once a day, dammit!
www.afterthought.cjb.cc