[Mailman-Users] Mailman postings deferred by Yahoo

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Charles Marcus writes:

 > No one has a 'Right' to talk to anyone else's mail server.

Everybody here concedes that, I think.

 > If they aren't playing well, document it: let anyone who uses your 
 > services know that if THEY choose to use a problematic service, that is 
 > their choice and their risk (of lost messages).

But the problem is that *Brian* (as an example) is an ISP whose
reliability comes into question not because *his* customers use Yahoo,
but because *his customers'* customers (subscribers, whatever) use
Yahoo.  His customers are paying him money so that he takes care of
the mail; they do not want to tell their customers to change their
mail services.

Worst of all, if spam gets through, it's definitely Yahoo's fault
(although shared with everybody else in the pipeline); they *could*
have stopped it, for sure.  But if mail delivery is poor, you get
fingers pointing in every direction, and Yahoo is quite justified in
claiming that even if they make their best effort, they can't deliver
mail that got lost somewhere else.  Yahoo's customers are going to be
disposed to believe that the problem is indeed elsewhere (the
alternative is accepting their own responsibility for choosing a
broken service, you see).

So Brian (and other ISPs/hosting services like his) is caught in the
middle.  He can't guarantee reliability because that depends on the
customers' customer base, but reliability is what he takes pride in.