I recently set up email on a new server. All the test emails went off happily, so I started using it for family emails. No problems..

.. except with Yahoo, including the organisations stupid enough to let Yahoo manage their email for them, like Sky and BT who both put their internet customers on it. Yahoo send a ‘we’re never delivering any email from you, ever’ rejection message:

All messages from (your server) will be permanently deferred

Why? They don’t say – the message points you to a webpage that doesn’t exist. The real link gives the not very helpful info that

This message indicates Yahoo is seeing a high volume of emails from your (server), which is a characteristic of unsolicited, bulk emailing. .. We do not disclose further information about our filtering practices.

One of the joys of running your own email server is that you can see for certain how many a “high volume” is. In this case, it’s four. In a week.

Elsewhere on the mess that’s Yahoo’s ‘help’ area is the advice to “Send email only to those who want it” – each of the people who we’ve had problems emailing this week are friends who have emailed us – and run your email server properly and securely. Not that Yahoo would recognise a secure email server if they fell over one: hacked Yahoo accounts are the single biggest source of the spam that gets through the filters here (the victims are people I know, so their mail is treated differently to that from addresses I’ve never heard of).

But the thought to take away is simple: if you have a Yahoo email address, is this happening to mail from potential clients? I don’t know… and neither do you.