Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2009 21:30:54 -0700
Reply-To: John Goubeaux <john@UCSB.EDU>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: John Goubeaux <john@UCSB.EDU>
Organization: UCSB
Subject: Re: List Mail Problem
In-Reply-To: <211850.18075.qm@web82704.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
David,
I manage a large mail system for the University of California and
regularly ( for the last few years) have seen a lot of mail outbound
from our servers to yahoo.com addresses getting delayed, sometimes for
the better part of the day. Meaning it gets queued on our end until they
accept it. Most of the time the mail gets accepted by them in a couple
of hours. It is not uncommon for this type of problem to be as a result
of overly aggressive anti spam measures, however a misconfiguration on
either server can also account for this, but i have never been able to
get any real answer from Yahoo in my case. Presumably they can also
"whitelist" certain known good domains which they should have done at my
request at some point. Whomever relays the vanagon.com email could
likely tell real quick by looking at their logs.
In the end though keep in mind they ARE giving you a free mail account
(along with any other services you might be using from them) and unless
you have made another arrangement with them ( eg $$ ) they really have
no obligation to provide you with any assurance of anything.
Lastly, we are talking about an organization - yahoo.com inc - that
handed over it's logs to the Chinese government, allowing them to
incarcerate several dissidents who were presumably using email to
criticize government policies.. :)
-john
David Kao wrote:
> From time to time (very frequent actually) I do not receive list
> mails for a day or two. Sometimes I receive a few in a day but
> apparently not all that should reach me. I think I finally have
> a clue of why. If the cause is already known by most of you I hope this
> will be beneficial to whoever also have this problem but still don't
> know why. I am talking about Yahoo Mail.
>
> I received no list mails in the past few days. But they suddenly
> appeared in my mailbox this morning. What's interesting is that
> the late mails did not show up at the top of my mailbox. They showed
> up deep inside the mailbox. Had I not looked deep into the past
> few days I would probably have missed them and kept thinking that
> I did not receive list mails again for the past few days.
>
> I believe the reason these late mails did not show up at the top of
> my mailbox because they were not received late by Yahoo. They were
> probably received instantly (almost) by Yahoo. But they were not
> instantly known by the mail server that I logged into Yahoo to read
> my mails. My guess is the mails were received by a server always
> almost instantly. But this server somehow left them in the queue
> for a long time (very long like a day or two) then eventually let
> the mail server that I logged into know that there are more mails
> there. These mails were not late. But they were not know by the mail server that has my mailbox.
>
> This is very scary. They can receive mails for you but don't let you
> get them until a day or two later. Some of them may be lost. Some of
> them may be late to show up in your mailbox for many days and you will
> miss them because they will be deep in there by the time they showed up.
>
> If you get lots of mails everyday like I do you may never seem them
> unless you spend the time digging your mailbox back a few days each
> time you check your mailbox.
>
>
> I maybe wrong. If this is the fact Yahoo mail is not very usable.
>
> David
>
