[Mailman-Users] Ongoing delivery issues - First Yahoo, now AOL

[Rick Harris]

I have shared hosting and as such, am not in charge of anything.  In
testing, I turned off all addresses except my AOL address and it came
through just fine.  Then I turned all back on.  (25 addresses).  4 more
messages were sent to mailman yesterday morning.  I immediately rec'd
messages via my remote host, but not by my AOL or my local ISP accounts.
However, all of those (AOL and ISP) arrived in the wee hours of this
morning... approx. 16 hours after original posts.

I queried my hosts regarding a mail transport issue and sent them headers
from messages in question.  Here is the response:

"According to my investigations the message contained more than 10
recipients. That's why the first 10 recipients got their emails immediatelly
and other copies of the message were delayed. I just advise you to
reconfigure your maillist software to send individual email to each
recipient."

Should I be looking for different hosting?

Rick 


-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Morgan [mailto:minxmertzmomo at gmail.com] 
Sent: Saturday, March 08, 2008 8:08 AM
To: Mark Sapiro
Cc: Rick Harris; mailman-users at python.org
Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Ongoing delivery issues - First Yahoo, now AOL

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 2:58 PM, Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net> wrote:
> Rick Harris wrote:
>  >
>  >I posted a couple of weeks ago regarding mail not being delivered to
Yahoo
>  >addresses.  I've all but written that off as an Internet black hole.
>  >Messages from my list almost never make it to Yahoo recipients.  If I
post
>  >to the list, and cc a Yahoo address, then that works fine.  Background
noise
>  >only, none of this matters today.
>
>
>  Since your original post on this issue, I have looked at my maillog and
>  I see lots of these
>
>  host e.mx.mail.yahoo.com[216.39.53.1] refused to talk to me: 421 4.7.0
>  [TS01] Messages from 72.52.113.16 temporarily deferred due to user
>  complaints - 4.16.55.1; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts01.html
>
>  type messages (3500 in the last month, but only 46 in the last 5 days).
>  I also get lots of
>
>  host g.mx.mail.yahoo.com[206.190.53.191] said: 451 Message temporarily
>  deferred - [250] (in reply to end of DATA command)
>
>  and
>
>  host c.mx.mail.yahoo.com[216.39.53.3] said: 421 Message temporarily
>  deferred - 4.16.51. Please refer to
>  http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html (in reply to
>  end of DATA command)
>
>  and
>
>  host c.mx.mail.yahoo.com[68.142.237.182] refused to talk to me: 421
>  Message temporarily deferred - 4.16.55.1. Please refer to
>  http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html

This is greylisting:

http://greylisting.org

in which the receiving MTA responds with a temporary failure to
suspicious or unknown senders. It kills a lot of spam, because most
spam is sent by non-compliant MTAs that don't bother retrying.

>  The important thing is that in my case at least, every one of these is
>  successfully retried, either immediately via a different MX or after 1
>  or a few delayed retries. All of these messages were eventually
>  accepted by Yahoo and I have gotten zero complaints of missing mail
>  from Yahoo list members.
>
>  Perhaps there is some issue with your outbound MTA not retrying these
>  421 and 451 status returns.

Ditto. Rick, are you in charge of your MTA? One way or another, you
should figure out how your MTA handles temporary failures and retries.

--Matt