Yahoo.com is currently deferring emails coming from our mail servers. A deferral is a temporary failure which they have put in place due to excessive user complaints about spam. We tracked down the issue to a user’s email account which had the password compromised and was being used to send spam through our servers. We have disabled the account in question and hope to see Yahoo! lift the deferrals soon. Email sent to Yahoo! accounts right now will not be delivered immediately, but instead will sit in a queue until Yahoo! starts accepting them. If the message is not delivered for four hours, you will receive a notification of delay. Only after five days will the message be permanently rejected. We don’t expect this issue to hit the five day mark, but if it did, you would receive another notification of the permanent rejection.
We do apologize for the inconvenience and we are working with Yahoo! to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. Updates will be posted here as always.
Update: 10:30am – We have rerouted our email destined for yahoo.com through another network. This will get the messages delivered, but it does have the side effect that domains with SPF (most of ours) *may* have their email delivered to Yahoo! users’ junk folder. However, the email will at least get to the intended recipient. This rerouting should also help get our servers off of the “deferral” list at Yahoo!.
Update: 10:45am – Well, Yahoo! has blocked our other relay server as well now. Our queue probably had some spam in it as we did not want to delete any legitimate email. When we forwarded it all through another server, Yahoo! put that one on their list. The good news is that all of the “bad” email should be out of our queue which should allow Yahoo! to quickly remove our main servers from their list.
Update 4/21/2013 – The server we are relaying Yahoo! messages through has been dropped off of their block list, so the Yahoo! emails are going through. However, our primary server is still on the list, so we are still working on the problem. Unfortunately, Yahoo! seems to be “trigger happy” on blocking spam this week AND some of the links on their site which are used for correcting these type of issues are broken, so it is slow going…
Update 4/21/2013 5:30pm – We had a problem with the rerouting of the email that caused some failures to be delivered back. These emails are permanent failures and will not be retried. The failure notice will let you know if that is the case. That issue has been corrected and the email is again flowing to Yahoo!.
Update 4/21/2013 11:00pm – We also had to reroute email for the sbcglobal.net domain as they subcontract with Yahoo!. Email for that domain should be working now.
Update 4/22/2013 5:00pm – Yahoo! is still deferring email sent directly to them, but our secondary server we are using to reroute to them is still working, so email is still flowing normally. We will continue to update this page as things change.
Update 4/23/2013 7:45am – The block from Yahoo! has been lifted. We are leaving our “rerouting” of the email in place for a few more hours just to make sure everything is OK. We should return the routing to normal sometime today.
Update 4/26/2013 7:45am – It looks like everything is still progressing OK with Yahoo!. This issue has been closed.