A SPF record is all that should be needed, yahoo are on a bandwagon that noone else seems to care about. So what if its open, they made the spec in the first place.
richms: A SPF record is all that should be needed, yahoo are on a bandwagon that noone else seems to care about. So what if its open, they made the spec in the first place.
SenderID is basically the improved version of SPF.
Setup consists of creating a single TXT dns record... I mean come on you can't spare a couple of minutes to set this up when it is used by MS Exchange, Yahoo, Hotmail and others?
Don't really understand your attitude on this one tbh.
It's best practice to do everything you can to improve your servers trust rating, that means:
I disagree; a lot of that stuff is well beyond the call of duty for most folks, as evidenced by the fact that that the rest of the world dont need such a strong degree of compliance.
Unfortunately the big players get to use their influence to strongarm things...
We're having exactly the same problem with emails sent to Xtra users being incorrectly flagged as spam. We've owned our own domain for over ten years, never send bulk email and are generally well-behaved netizens.
I've just started selling a pile of stuff on TradeMe again... sales are going well, everything's good. Except several users are not receiving my emails, and they're all with Xtra. I should point out that SOME Xtra users are getting my emails... it's pot luck apparently.
So I filled in the form on the Xtra site, but couldn't send it as I don't have a valid Xtra account number. Bugger! But no problem, I rang their helpdesk instead. They were friendly and emailed me a link to a form I could complete to be added to their email whitelist. Now that's great.
Except it's an application to be approved as a bulk emailer (i.e. spammer). Sometimes you have to jump through little hoops to achieve an end so I completed the complex form. Nope... someone from Yahoo came back wanting all manner of info include a URL of our privacy policy. We've never had nor needed one of those, but hey... let's make life easier and build one to keep Xtra / Yahoo happy.
http://www.digitaldog.co.nz/privacy.html
Did that work? Nope! We're on a shared server so they'll never whitelist us. They helpfully say...
"Our studies have indicated that when users see messages incorrectly categorized, they notify us within hours of delivery."
So someone who buys something off me via TradeMe and apparently doesn't receive any communication from me is going to complain to Xtra? What colour is the sky in Telecom's world?
A quick Google search shows that loads of domains are affected by the over- active Xtra / Yahoo email filter including Forsyth Barr and there have been a few Geekzone posts over the years. I've set up a temporary Gmail account so that I can email Xtra users... but wouldn't it be nice if their customer service showed just a little humanity?
Ragnor: We aren't talking about "most folks" though, we are talking about people running email servers, more specifically outgoing smtp servers for domains.
Email is flawed and wasn't designed to deal with authentication and spam issues that we face today.
I don't understand the reluctance to follow industry standard best practice configuration for your email server.
Is there some reason why you can't make what are effectively simple dns and email server config changes?
Some of the measures are standard. Some are somewhat exceptional, though becoming less so over time.
Mail providers who insist on holding the threshold higher than the majority of folks (and by folks I mean mail server admins) currently comply with, however, is in my mind strongarming.
Xtra/Yahoo are probably the single biggest source of this sort of issue (people fighting to get their mail accepted and not spamflagged) that ive ever seen. Most players of a smaller scale would cringe at the idea of continually generating false positives and impacting on their customers experience like this. Again its only because theyre so big, that they can be so single-minded and expect the world to follow the practises they are in effect dictating.
We may need to agree to differ. But interestingly I dont (currently) have reputation issues delivering to yahoo or xtra - and im not running domainkeys. valid fwd/rev dns, and spf records, along with a non-spammy reputatinon, seem to be working at present.
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