I am currently engaged in a week-long struggle with Yahoo! Mail’s “customer care” about an email that they’re blocking. Since the beginning of the year, my server has been sending a daily report about crawler performance to me and to my coworkers. The email consists of a single HTML file, inside of which are some internal links and hundreds of text URLs, but no actual links to those URLs. Our company’s email is hosted by Yahoo.
Until 10 days ago, that report was delivered daily, without fail. But since we changed our colocation setup and got new IP addresses, the mail has been sporadic: bouncing eight of the last ten times I’ve tried to send it. The error message I get back from Yahoo’s server says that the message is rejected “for policy reasons.” Digging deeper, I find that Yahoo’s filter seems to think that there are “links to potentially objectionable material or malicious software.”
When contacting Yahoo, I gave them considerable detail, including the text of the message, a full description of the problem, and the reason why I thought that their filter was being over zealous. Their responses have been canned boilerplate paragraphs, first asking for information that is not relevant or that I’ve already supplied, then explaining the policy: the same policy that’s on their Web site and that I told them I already understood. I have yet to receive a response from Yahoo to indicate that they’ve actually read and understood any of the information that I’ve sent to them. I’m convinced that if I sent a message requesting a ham and swiss on rye, they’d reply by asking me to forward the full headers from the email in question.
I would strongly discourage anybody from using Yahoo for their business email. Their response to this simple request has convinced me that Yahoo’s incompetence is not limited to search (which they’ve finally agreed to farm out to Microsoft), but permeates the entire organization. If you want reliable email and intelligent, helpful support, find somebody other than Yahoo to host it.
I’ve never understood why any business that includes a fair amount of technical computer ability would outsource such things as email. None of the existing massive providers will give you much (if any) personal attention when something’s not working, and they’re not likely to do so any time soon.
Why outsource email when I’m fully capable of doing it myself? There are a few reasons.
First, when we started this we didn’t have any significant Web presence. We got the Yahoo package, put up a simple page about the crawler, spent three minutes creating email accounts, and we were done. Total time spent: 30 minutes. Had we done it ourselves, it would have taken a week to find a hosting site, install the server, configure the software, etc. A large part of that time would have been spent just learning about the intricacies of DNS, SMTP, and mail routing. Don’t underestimate the amount of time it would take the acquire the knowledge that you take for granted.
As it turns out, two and a half years later I still have better things to do than futz with email hosting issues. Sure, there are some minor annoyances now and then, but I’m still time ahead. I suspect that we’ll host our own mail at some point. But for now it’s way more efficient and effective to let somebody else handle it.
Certainly it depends how important email is to your business, and that can change over time. I understand if you’d rather not spend precious time on something less than critical. It may become critical later, and worth your time. There’s a lot I have to say about this, but comments aren’t the venue. Maybe I’ll write something up soon.