Emails to yahoo users not being delivered

[goaliegigs]

Hi,

I manage an online application. The application sends an email to users when they complete the registration form. The application also sends an email for other tasks.

I seem to be having trouble sending emails to yahoo addresses. The emails do not even get to the Yahoo spam folder, much less the inbox. I'm not sure why this is happening.

I can reproduce this using my application's mail program (ie: using PHP) as well as using a mail client. I can also duplicate using my own yahoo account, which never receives the mail. I've even tried adding the from addresses to my contacts list in Yahoo mail, but this did not have any effect.

I've set up SPF and domainkeys in cpanel for the site and this seemed to fix this kind of issue for other mail providers, but not for yahoo. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Steve

[bill]

Is your domain flagged in any blacklists?

[goaliegigs]

Not that I know of. I just launched the site in October. How would I check this?

I am dealing with Yahoo support, but I'm not sure if it will get anywhere. They say this "occasionally" happens, but in my case it seems to only happen, and only with Yahoo!

[Hoople]

Try sending from that server to a Yahoo! mail account with Delivery receipt requested. This *sometimes* will force internet facing gateways to return an error with some of the rejection details.

Is there a mailbox on the server for the application? Error rejections might be returned there with a specific Yahoo! postmaster URLs.

See if you can get the message ID's of the failed sent messages and forward them to Yahoo! for tracing. It might speed up their locating their rejecting server.

[Hoople]

{blacklist} How would I check this?

mxtoolbox.com does a very good meta-search SPAM blacklist query.

[onlineleben]

Haven't tried the tools Hoople mentiones, but had good success using a trial on dnsstuff com . That tool not only gave a general overview on your email setup, but also checked about 50 blacklists.

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], goaliegigs!

Yahoo! Postmaster Basics:
[help.yahoo.com...]

[piatkow]

I know of one service provider that stopped customers registering Yahoo addresses for a while because their log in advices simply weren't being delivered (not even to the spam folder).

Hotmail and Yahoo in particular have a reputation for rejecting automatically generated messages without even checking them against customers' safe lists. It annoys me that these particular providers (and AOL for other reasons) expect us to jump through hoops for the privilage of accepting their customers' business.

[GaryK]

Although the list phranque linked to claims Y! doesn't use greylisting, my experience has been that they do use it. Perhaps it's only when they detect a large volume of e-mail coming from the same mail server like mine does for a forum I run. Increasing my first retry delay solved the problem for me.

[goaliegigs]

Hi,

It seems the way to get past the problem so far is to send an email to the user with a Read Receipt request attached. This allows my email to get through to the user (at least to the spam folder).

This is not ideal, because every new user may run into the issue and I will have to send them an email manually. It's not ideal because my website is supposed to be automated. :-)

Thanks to the person who posted the Yahoo postmaster site. It talks about things like CertifiedMail as opposed to DomainKeys - unfortunately, my provider doesn't provide these forms of authentication.

Regards,
Steve

[Hoople]

@goaliegigs Yahoo was the original author of domainkeys.

@GaryK I set my retry delay to six minutes and have had no issues since.

I once had an issue with Hotmail rejecting page notifications from an app. Ensure that the sent messages have valid 'Reply-To:' 'From:' 'To:' 'Subject:' 'Date:' aka fully RFC compliant. I had to edit an XML file for them to add the missing headers. Valid = present + non-null value.