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.