Yahoo Email… are you getting all your mail?
So I was looking into an issue for a client the other day that had to do with forwarding an email address from his corporate domain to his personal Yahoo account and found some found very surprising and quite enlightening information I thought I’d share. After some significant research, what I’ve found is that Yahoo itself has actually implemented some pretty radical policies that has created a lot of lost mail for a many people using Yahoo mail accounts. It really affects folks who are using mail forwarders, but there is a good chunk of lost mail from other sources as well. This is primarily all done in the name of Spam control… I’ll try not to get too technical with this, but here’s the scoop:
Rather than follow standard practices that essentially all other email services utilize, Yahoo uses an approach that marks almost all incoming email as Spam, and waits for it to be whitelisted. This is what is essentially called greylisting, and it is not a commonly used practice because of exactly what has happened here… it tends to knock out a lot of perfectly good email that needs to be delivered. Furthermore, when email is directed to a Yahoo address from a forwarder, the email is typically “deferred”. This means that the email is not delivered immediately (if at all) under the guise that server resources are needed elsewhere… so, even though there is nothing wrong with the configuration and everything is essentially okay, Yahoo doesn’t want to commit the actual physical server resources to go ahead and deliver the message. If this all sounds fishy to you, believe me you aren’t the only one… I was downright shocked to find out that a company like Yahoo was engaged in a practice like this - it’s unreal. It’s also something a lot of other people are dealing with… there are a ton of threads on the Net that talk about this, but in case you are interested, here’s a pretty good one that has had comments on it for the past 3 years.
A lot of other folks have apparently been switching to another provider like gmail and forwarding mail there… I cannot guarantee you that there would never be a problem there, but I can tell you that it is apparently not an issue at all at this time. This might not be a bad idea to consider anyway, as if you are using a Yahoo email account, you just may be losing email that doesn’t realize.
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