Problems sending mail to yahoo?

Fri Apr 11 14:22:11 UTC 2008

On 10 Apr 2008, at 23:58 , Rob Szarka wrote:

> At 02:23 PM 4/10/2008, you wrote:
>> Maybe we all should do the same to them until they quit spewing out  
>> all the
>> Nigerian scams and the like that I've been seeing from their  
>> servers lately!
>>
>
> If there were an coordinated boycott, I would participate. Yahoo is  
> *by far* the worst single abuser of our server among the  
> "legitimate" email providers.

Having done my own share of small-scale banging-of-heads-against-yahoo  
recently, the thing that surprised me was how many people with non- 
yahoo addresses had their mail handled by yahoo. It turns out that if  
Y! doesn't want to receive mail from me, suddenly I can't send mail to  
anybody in my extended family, or to most people I know in the town  
where I live. These involve domains like ROGERS.COM and  
BTINTERNET.COM, and not just the obvious Y! domains.

In my more paranoid moments I have wondered how big a market share Y!  
now has in personal e-mail, given the number of large cable/telcos who  
have outsourced mail handling to them for their residential products.  
Once you pass a certain threshold, the fact that Y! subscribers are  
the only people who can reliably deliver mail to other Y! subscribers  
provides a competitive advantage and a sales hook to make the resi  
mail empire even larger. At that point it makes no sense for Y! to  
expend effort to accept *more* mail from subscribers of other services.

To return to the topic at hand, you may already have outsourced the  
coordination of your boycott to Yahoo!, too! They're already not  
accepting your mail. There's no need to stop sending it! :-)

Joe