[Mimedefang] Mildly Off-Topic: Yahoo! Mail

[Gordon Henderson]

On Tue, 8 Jan 2008, Kevin A. McGrail wrote:

> I am becoming increasingly frustrated with Yahoo! Mail.
>
> A large majority of our mail to Yahoo! is being deferred akin to greylisting 
> practices.  That I can live with.  But even after the deferment is done and 
> the mail is delivered from our side, Yahoo! users are complaining the email 
> is never received.  And these users are familiar with checking bulk mail / 
> spam folders for false positives.
>
> Filling out their forms seems to be a waste of time because our servers are 
> "shared" servers that host multiple domains, legitimate mailing lists, etc.
>
> Of course, we are white-hats, don't send/allow UCE, have full smtp auth and 
> anti-viral/spam policies.
>
> We also allow mail forwarding and we only tag, not block SPAM.  We are also 
> the backup MX for hundreds of people.  This means that despite even best 
> internet practices, we do send DSNs, we do relay "spam" (marked as such), 
> etc.
>
> Anyway, so short of telling people we will no longer perform backup MX, not 
> allowing mail forwarding or changing our fundamental policy on tagging spam 
> and avoiding false, positives, I'm looking for answers.

I stopped providing (& using) backup MX's some years back.

I'm also having a similar problem with MessageLabs )-:

It seems that they have 2 MX records for various domains they forward 
email for - the higher priority is purely a spam-trap, and my guess is 
that they record all IP addresses of servers that try to connect to the 
"backup" one and block it from the primary one.

They claim that the primary one (a cluster of many servers) will never be 
unavalable so the backup should never be contactable by legit. email 
systems. "Yea, Right".

So I'm stuck with a mailserver in much the same situation as you - multi 
clients, valid mailling lists, etc.  that messagelabs rejects all email 
from.

So much for standards.

Any easy way to get sendmail to ignore all backup MX's ... ?

Gordon