A few months ago I commented on how much I liked the Yahoo Complaint Feedback Loop.

Well, I think I’m going to revise that statement slightly.

While I still like the idea … and their general implementation … it doesn’t really seem to be working.

Even though I’ve gotten a number of reports from the feedback loop, my mail server is still showing messages to Yahoo subscribers as delayed …

<xxx@yahoo.com>… Deferred: 421 4.7.0 [TS02] Messages from 69.3.23.26
temporarily deferred due to user complaints – 4.16.56.1; see
http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts02.html

Now if I wasn’t in the feedback loop … or I wasn’t responding to spam reports … I could understand my messages being delayed.   However, I am in the feedback loop and I am responding to complaints.   So there should be no reason for messages to be delayed ‘due to user complaints’.

Additionally … the deferrals are quite inconsistent … during a single mail delivery some messages will be deferred and others will be delivered.

Unfortunately, Yahoo isn’t all that responsive to inquiries from postmasters.   I sent a message to them 3 days ago and have yet to receive a response.

On a related note … I’ve been getting really annoyed at people who report mailing list messages (from my server) as spam … and, when I try to contact them directly to see what the problem is, they report my message as spam also.   There are EASIER ways to get removed from a mailing list.

Update 3-Sep : I finally got a reply back from Yahoo … they asked for a WHOLE lot of information regarding my mail practices … and I got this reply …

We appreciate your responses to the questionnaire. As a final step to
the application process, Yahoo! will evaluate and monitor your
submission.

Please know that during this monitoring period, your mailings will go
through our SpamGuard technology and it is possible that the delivery of
your mailings will oscillate between the Inbox and the Bulk Mail folder.
Once we have completed the monitoring process, we will contact you for
the final results of your application.

… which, if I recall, is the same reply I got from the LAST time … and got no followup. This time I’m going to make sure there’s some followup.

One other thing I noticed … Yahoo is deferring deliver to some of the small business hosted email also … so that means any business, that is using Yahoo for their email, is having mail delayed for no good reason. If you are a business using Yahoo for mail, you might want to consider this.