Yahoo email outage earns retailers ireFor a few weeks, email delivery at Yahoo was crippled by a major problem: seemly randomly, a Yahoo email server would erroneously decide than an incoming IP address was on a Spamhaus DNSBL. This caused up to 50% of the subscribers to not receive their copy of the email, and consequent loss of email driven response.
Retailers & other B2Cs that typically see yahoo.com in their top 3 delivery domains had no recourse but to wait for Yahoo to fix their systems.
The ESP chatter about this major outage was surprisingly sparse, with only Pivotal Veracity sending out proactive notices as Yahoo tried to fix the problem. Yahoo itself was silent about it on their Email Blog. This is unfortunately typical of the ESP industry, which generally prefers to keep their clients in the dark about delivery problems lest they be blamed for causing them. A better approach, and the one we take here at iPost, is to educate our clients on what’s in their control, what’s our responsibility, and keep communication among everyone as open an transparent as possible — like email itself.
iPost clients were sporadically affected from May 23rd through June 10th, 2009; other ESPs’ may have been affected longer. Were you or your clients affected? Did you heard from Yahoo or others about this outage? Share your experience below.
