First it was AOL (natch) and now Yahoo. I’ve put a note on our Contact page to warn people about this problem which deserves a wider airing for those unaware of it.
Do you have an email address on btinternet.com, btopenworld.com or Yahoo?. If so some of your incoming emails could be - and probably are - disappearing down a black hole, or if you’re lucky, delayed and delivered much later into your ‘junk’ folder or equivalent. Mail for all the above domains is now apparently handled by Yahoo, which is currently blocking or delaying our emails, and many others are suffering the same problems. If anyone has sent an email or feedback form to us using those domains and wondered why we haven’t replied, well we have: Yahoo either threw it away or filtered it.
In the case where our reply is Delayed or Deferred, we receive a cryptic response email from our web provider’s mail server saying that Yahoo hasn’t delivered it. Yahoo’s so called help page is mesmerizingly unhelpful about this. It says absolutely nothing about why it happens, just a vague hint that Yahoo doesn’t like it and an invitation to fill in a support form. There is even a link at the bottom of the page to a pre-formed Google search on the problem, which acknowledges its own uselessness. Anyway, undaunted I filled in the form and submitted it, and I got a reply the next day asking me to forward a copy of the delayed email including the header fields. I duly sent that off and I’m awaiting a resolution.
As for our replies which disappear without trace and don’t return a mail server response message at all, I must assume it’s essentially the same cause. Anyway I’ll keep trying to sort it out, meanwhile I suggest checking the junk folders before emptying them and not setting spam filters to ‘high’ sensitivity (if that control option is available to you). These filters are a bigger nuisance than the spam itself.
Guilty until proven innocent, eh?.
