Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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
I actually dropped Yahoo as my webhost provider for this very reason. Too many bounced emails at random times. The outages were usually short, probably less than a couple of minutes, but would happen more than weekly. Ironically, it seemed that ETrade always was on the bounce side for some reason. Anyway, I asked them that if I was paying $20 a month for what other companies where charging $5 a month, then why was the service flaky. They asked me to tell them exact times and dates, and would investigate and get back to me. And just like that, I was a member of Avahost.
BTW, in an interesting side note. Yahoo registered my domain name for me, but curiously, lost the details on the name and info they did the registration with. It took me 2 days on the phone between network solutions and Yahoo to get a hold of my domain name. And they wanted to know why I wanted to leave?
Bah
I also hope that they know the size of the mail system they are playing with. That mail system must have its very own schemes, countermeasures.
To see size of Yahoo mail:
http://www.senderbase.org/
ps: Some on that list are spammer friendly ISPs (non managed etc), that is the purpose of that system. They own spamcop.net too.
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.