Email issues to Hotmail continue, joined by issues to Yahoo

[denise]

For the past week and a half or so, Hotmail has been rejecting all email from us. Sadly, Yahoo has now joined them. This means that if your confirmed email address is @hotmail.com or @yahoo.com, you won't get any email from Dreamwidth at all. (This includes comment notification emails, password reset emails, lost username emails, confirmations/receipts for payments, email from your @dreamwidth.org forwarding address ... basically, if it's email and it's from us, it won't reach you.)

This is a block at the system level, so there isn't anything you can do to work around it. It's not due to spam filters on your individual account, so whitelisting Dreamwidth in your mail application won't work to fix things this time: these providers are blocking all mail from us, across the board. When a provider makes that kind of block, they don't discuss the exact reasons that led to the blocking, but our best guess is that it's due to a combination of the amount of email we send out (especially email with highly similar subject lines and content, since -- for instance -- a notification of a new comment to an entry quotes the entry) and an uptick in the amount of spam sent to @dreamwidth.org forwarding email addresses, since that forwarded spam can look like we were the ones to send it.

We've gone through the process to request unblocking from the providers directly, but haven't seen any progress there yet. We are, however, actively working on alternate solutions that will reduce the risk of us being identified as spammers in the future -- we ran the first test yesterday and results are looking promising. We'll keep you posted on the progress.

Comments

Re: Just wondering, Denise...

[azurelunatic]

... reading a little more on SPF, there are in fact some circumstances where SPF breaks forwarding as well, although I don't know enough about the nitty-gritty to even begin to say whether those circumstances include Dreamwidth's use case.

Re: Just wondering, Denise...

[marahmarie]

Thank you for looking into that. What you're saying pretty much lines up with what I'm suspecting based on the fact that in the OP Denise says they're working on a solution of some sort. Given that I know her and Mark would likely take into account and/or rule out every option before acting (something I definitely admire about them and about how they run DW) it makes sense that SPF would be an issue based on the sending and forwarding issues it would cause, as it seems they want users to keep having the option to use @dreamwidth.org available.