We got informed by one of our customers that he got removed from his own newsletter and our logs stated that the reason was the feedback loop. We’ve begun to analyze the content of the complaints and it has turned out that Yahoo had started to a add couple of headers to their messages.

Here’s a sample:

X-IP-SENDER: 98.136.44.45
Received: from [216.252.122.216] by n77.bullet.mail.sp1.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 27 Oct 2008 03:48:09 -0000
Received: from [69.147.65.166] by t1.bullet.sp1.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 27 Oct 2008 03:48:09 -0000
Received: from [127.0.0.1] by omp501.mail.sp1.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 27 Oct 2008 03:48:09 -0000
X-Yahoo-Newman-Property: ymail-5
X-Yahoo-Newman-Id: 939505.70691.bm@omp501.mail.sp1.yahoo.com
Received: (qmail 63926 invoked by uid 60001); 27 Oct 2008 03:48:09 -0000
Message-ID: <20081027034809.63924.qmail@web46108.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>
X-YahooUserId: REDACTED
X-YahooUserIP: 124.13.176.52
Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2008 20:48:09 -0700 (PDT)
From: yahoo mail bot
Subject: NOTSPAM: Top Dog Trading Video #2
To: notspam@mailservices.yahoo.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

The Subject and To fields are most interesting. The Subject has the original message’s subject prefixed with “NOTSPAM:”. The To field seems to match the subject. After noticing this we started to browse different complaints. It turned out that after since October 25th the majority of Yahoo complaints has those new headers present.

Except the notspam@mailservices.yahoo.com address we found out that some of the complaints had the To set to possiblespam@mailservices.yahoo.com.

The notspam@mailservices.yahoo.com email address was added in the To field only between October 25th and October 30th. We have checked this across multiple servers. We still see some amount of the possiblespam@mailservices.yahoo.com in the To field and it seems to be the new standard as the number of messages with the old header-less format is minimal.

The question this brings up is whether Yahoo hasn’t sent us the data of people that were clicking “This is NOT spam” and instead of removing those email addresses from the list we should restore them as they were actually good subscribers. I’m talking about the interval between October 25th and October 30th.

Some of our customers and industry specialists reported that there was a drop in the average number of complaints coming from Yahoo’s feedback loops at the end of October. After a couple of days things went back to normal. Maybe this has also something to do with this. Obviously they were making some substantial changes in their system.

I just wouldn’t like if our customers lost some good subscribers because of this.

Has anyone noticed similar behavior and got similar reports from your customers? It would be great if the Yahoo team could make an official statement for sender’s, so we would know how to react.

BTW: It would be a great to see, who clicked “not spam” – this is a clear indicator that emails ARE wanted, no just the ones that are not

Comments

It seems that after publishing this post the possiblespam@mailservices.yahoo.com email is now gone again and things are back to the way they used to be before October 25th. Back to the good old days:) However the dilemma is still not solved