Re: [nznog] Xtra temporarily deferred MX

just my 2 cents to this lengthly thread. i used to run a rather large mail relay for customers (many of them yahoo actually) and had the exact problems. as we had some contractual relationship with those guys we had some kind of pressure to push them to whitelist us. as far as i remember the issue has nothing to do with "traditional" greylisting - it is a reputation system that takes mail volume plus internal spam ratings into relation. the problem is always the mail volume, you never get high enough with a small mail server to be listed and therefor always drop into the "new unknown and suspicious" category. mail delivery gets deferred and partly rejected. once you have enough volume you get complaints (some idiot marking your bill or registration mail as spam) and you get bad rankings due to that ... all in all it is a pain to work with never mind if you run a small or big mail server. refuse to use yahoo MX (sorry xtra) and the world is a better place cheers lenz On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 5:12 PM, Dave Mill wrote:

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 wrote:

...

They are doing it to us now.  *Sigh*.

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