Problems with Yahoo Email Addresses

October 20, 2007

Executive summary: Do not use your Yahoo email address on CCL. Yahoo discards CCL mail.

For a long time I was noticing strange log entries in my /var/log/maillog, when the CCL server [66.93.212.15] was attempting to distribute email to participants with the user@yahoo.com email addresses. I also saw scores of posts from yahoo.com email addresses go by unconfirmed and abandoned. I decided to investigate. I asked my friend to try to distribute a message to CCL List from his yahoo email address. This was not possible. He did not receive the confirmation/verification message from CCL and he was not able to post the message (verification of email address is a condition to post to CCL). I then sent confirmation messages to him manually and he still did not get them. We communicated over another of his email addresses. He reported that he did not receive mail from CCL.NET on his yahoo.com address. He could not find the messages in his BULK folder either. They just disappeared. I did not get bounces, and he did not get messages.

In this situation I have no recourse but to unsubscribe the CCL subscribers with Yahoo email addresses. I will do it within two weeks or so. Hence, the CCL.NET yahoo subscribers who get this message will have a chance to change their CCL email subscription address to some other provider. I do not want to endorse any particular email provider, but looking from the narrow scope of CCL mail distribution to free email addresses, I personally did not have problems with gmail.com addresses. Disclaimer: I do not owe stock or work for either Google or Yahoo.

I am sorry for doing this, but I really have no recourse. The mail from CCL is probably not getting to Yahoo subscribers at all, or if it gets there, it does so erratically. On the other hand, I receive no bounces from yahoo email accounts, and therefore, I cannot properly maintain the list of active participants of CCL forum with these addresses. Posting message to CCL with your yahoo.com email address will also not work, since you will not get the confirmation request that is a part of posting process. Please note... It is not an arrogance on my part. I am only a small prion compared to the large company like Yahoo. I am just trying to be practical. Why sent messages to people who do not get them, and why send the request for confirmation that they will never get? It only makes me look even worse than I look...

I do not even try to contact their support, since the last time I tried (when some cracker wanted to upload malicious software onto the CCL web site using a valid yahoo.com address - the cracker was able to use a password embedded in the confirmation message, so this time the yahoo.com address worked) I got an automatic form response letter whose content was totally orthogonal to the content of my initial message.

Please make no mistake. It is not only CCL's problem. Look on the following web page, for example :
http://www.ahfx.net/weblog.php?article=107

Regretfully,
Jan Labanowski
CCL Manager
jkl at ccl dot net