In case it is useful to anyone I tend to go through the following
steps with customers (with their own mail server) who have issues
emailing Xtra/Yahoo users. Your mileage may of course vary.
1) Check our mail logs if the mail is being relayed through us. Just
to prove that Xtra are actually accepting the mail for delivery rather
than bouncing it for any reason. Whilst I see the above complaints are
about emails being bounced we tend to find they are often accepted but
then never actually received by the recipient.
2) Explain that the emails that "aren't being receieved" are most
likely in the Spam folder in the Yahoo webmail system. I believe these
mails are generally there (I don't know for sure, I don't have an Xtra
account for testing).
3) Check out reverse DNS. If a customer is running a mail server where
the following don't match there will be issues:
-MX record for customer's domain name
-Name the mail server EHLOs as
-Reverse DNS of the IP that the email originates from
Often once we change the reverse DNS from x-x-x-x.blah.sta.isp.net.nz
to mail.customerdomain.co.nz things get a lot better.
4) From here we let the customer know that there is a form they can
fill out (obtainable from Yahoo/Xtra) if they are having issues
getting mail delivered to Xtra customers. Advise customer to get form
from Yahoo/Xtra. (I don't know where this form comes from exactly but
most customers seem to be able to get it pretty easily so it can't be
that hard)
5) Customer phones us to get help with a couple of tricky questions.
6) Customer will generally either wait until they have submitted the
form 2 - 3 times and at least a month has passed. After this all mail
from their domain/mail-system is generally accepted and there are no
more problems. At least until the customer alters their mail
configuration to some degree.
Not ideal, but it is possible for someone having issues getting mails
delivered to Xtra customers to get "their" issues resolved.
Wearing an ISPANZ hat I once tried to get people to speak out
publically about these issues when they first popped up about 2 years
ago now. I couldn't find a big corporate willing to be quoted (many
were pissed, just didn't want to be quoted speaking out against
Telecom) so we left it at that. ISPANZ may be happy to hear from you
if you are a big corporate with issues emailing Xtra customers.
Cheers
Dave
On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 2:29 PM, Jay Daley
They are doing it to us now. *Sigh*.