Yahoo's Amazing Disappearing Mail Servers 139
Golygydd Max writes "A Techworld story reveals that the reason Yahoo email has delivery problems is that the company's mail servers mysteriously close once in a while." From the article: "According to trimMail's Email Battles site, which recently monitored 16 of the company's advertised email hosts 240 times over a half hour period, only 133 of its probes were answered. Many of the servers were closed and unavailable. Overall availability ranged from 25 percent to 75 percent over the admittedly short test period. The average availability was 55 percent, with the worst of the servers available only 7 percent of the time."
Is this caveat emptor day? (Score:5, Funny)
And if you don't like what I am saying you can reach me at:
server-never-works@yahoo.com
and really let me know how you feel about this. Well, you can at least reach 7 to 55% of the time.
Re:Is this caveat emptor day? (Score:1)
Re:Is this caveat emptor day? (Score:5, Informative)
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/business_service
They also have a lot of people who use Yahoo as a web host (paid) and get email @theirdoman.com....
So Yahoo mail is not always free.....
Re:Is this caveat emptor day? (Score:2)
-nB
Re:Is this caveat emptor day? (Score:2)
I often have to look at the mail queues on our servers and see that mail to our clients hosted by Yahoo is again unable to be sent; it happens to Hotmail and Yahoo fairly frequently, but Yahoo is more commonly unavailable.
Fortunately it generally means only a short delay, but it's not a service I would personally be pround to run.
And boy is Yahoo business mail lousy (Score:2)
First thing, the "business mail" account gets you 10 e-mail addresses for $10 / month. An additional 20 e-mail addresses costs another $10 / month. However, the $12 / month "Web hosting starter" comes with *200* e-mail addresses which are identical to those that come with the "business mail package".
However, to use either service, you *have* to use Yahoo Domains to host your DNS. If you've got a web hostin
Re:Is this caveat emptor day? (Score:2)
Re:Is this caveat emptor day? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Is this caveat emptor day? (Score:2)
I had my ex-register register kavlon.info (because I own kavlon.com and kavlon.org) and try to blackmail me into buying it from them. They put it in my name but wouldn't give me access to it. I tried finding some legal method to force them to give it to me, or sale it at a fair price, since it's a name that I hav
Re:Is this caveat emptor day? (Score:1)
Re:Is this caveat emptor day? (Score:2)
Re:Is this caveat emptor day? (Score:5, Funny)
Still it's way better than hotmail.
Print out the mail you wish to send then smear feces on it. Tie it to the leg of a blind pigeon. Release the pigeon then taking pot-shots at it. The results are still better than hotmail.
Re:Is this caveat emptor day? (Score:2)
I have had a throw away hotmail account for years and have never had a problem with it. Email always arrives, is always sent and no spam other than the ones I send there.
Re:Is this caveat emptor day? (Score:1)
Re:Is this caveat emptor day? (Score:1)
Re:Is this caveat emptor day? (Score:2)
I'm most satisfied with my gmail account.
hotmail is ok, but it sucks that my accounts have sometimes been suspended due to inactivity. It deletes all my mail, so that one important email from a year ago is gone. A few times, I've had it throw up server errors instead of the page. I have a screen shot somewhere of one of them.
Yahoo, I've seen problems with too many time. My girlfriend has a paid account w
Re:Is this caveat emptor day? (Score:1)
Re:Is this caveat emptor day? (Score:1)
Re:Is this caveat emptor day? (Score:2)
It also meant during their last email server upgrade I was without email at that account for about a month because for whatever reason their server couldnt handle my-name@yahoo.com. However I could still recieve email at my-name@geocities.com.
Go figure.
As long as one of them is up... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:As long as one of them is up... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:As long as one of them is up... (Score:5, Insightful)
Move along people, simply the dot.bomb times are back. Yet another metric company making big noises about the fact that someone BIG looks bad on their metric. Reason is most likely that the metric is badly designed and does not take current large scale mail handling practices into account. We have all been there a few years ago when everybody and his dog was pushing metrics around just before the bubble collapsed. Move along, nothing new here.
Re:As long as one of them is up... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:As long as one of them is up... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As long as one of them is up... (Score:2)
Someone knowledgeable who looked into one such incident concluded that some of Yahoo's mail servers are just plain misconfigured, making them act like no mail was received nor sent.
I first became aware of the problem in 1999 -- our project LOST our coder (who used yahoo for mail) b
Re:As long as one of them is up... (Score:2)
Blacklisting would be very unlikely to affect multiple domains (national ISPs not sharing any resources), and doesn't explain why these same domains had no trouble reaching SOME Yahoo mail accounts. But others just fell off the planet.
When this mail-eating b
Re:As long as one of them is up... (Score:2)
========
"I was testing some filters on my mailserver the other day, and I happened to do a test of sending an email to a Yahoo! account. After realizing the mail got stuck in the queue, I inspected Yahoo's mail servers. Unbelievable, They have 6 MX addresses, each one having 13 IP addresses (round robin). Well, I became curious after realizing the
machines
Re:As long as one of them is up... (Score:2)
Back to the original "lost mail" problem: my email was being sent from Earthlink and from a ktb.net subdomain (actually an old-fashioned dialup BBS with a UUCP account; KTB is a small local ISP.) The 3rd person in our project uses Sympatico (which goes thru an Aliant backbone, I think) and Hotmail. At the time there were NO spamfilters at any point. -- None of our emails sent via a
Re:As long as one of them is up... (Score:2, Interesting)
To see size of Yahoo mail:
http://www.senderbase.org/ [senderbase.org]
ps: Some on that list are spammer friendly ISPs (non managed etc), that is the purpose of that system. They own spamcop.net too.
So that's where the 0.001 goes (Score:2)
Well, obviously - (Score:1)
you mean the recent windoze/mac beta (Score:1)
Err you must be running recent windows or a mac - for the beta - it only works on windows/mac so yahoo webmail beta is not 'webmail'.
If you have access to a unix box with a browser it will tell you to use the old webmail client, not the new beta client.
Thats my experience.
Shouldn't be responsible for delivery problems (Score:5, Informative)
Servers being down some of the time shouldn't cause large-scale delivery problems. Remember, when e-mail protocols were being designed, a lot of these servers were down for a good portion of each day. E-mail protocols were designed to deliver e-mail in whatever window existed. If the receiving server is down, the sending server will try again for a good while before giving up.
Also, as someone else has already mentioned, there are the MX priority lists...
Re:Shouldn't be responsible for delivery problems (Score:2)
Re:Shouldn't be responsible for delivery problems (Score:2)
Re:Shouldn't be responsible for delivery problems (Score:2)
Re:Shouldn't be responsible for delivery problems (Score:2)
-matthew
Maybe they were having a bad day... (Score:5, Funny)
And in other discoveries (Score:4, Funny)
* Ethernet packets found to collide sometimes, resulting in worldwide communications silence.
* Some traffic lights found to periodically turn red almost 50% of the time; transportation system grinds to a halt.
* Study finds that if you call someone every 15 seconds and ask "can you hear me now?", unexplicably none of your calls will be answered, in addition to getting strange looks.
* Fast food restaurant closes one of its eight queues at the shift change; six people starve to death as a result.
Re:And in other discoveries (Score:2)
Solution: Add the "yellow" light to them. Then they will only turn red what, 25% of the time? Boom, instant improvement.
Re:Maybe they were having a bad day... (Score:2)
Going back in time? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Going back in time? (Score:4, Funny)
Dumb spam protection? (Score:3, Interesting)
The average availability was 55 percent
Maybe they fight spam in stupid way by letting fake SMTP servers eat thier e-mails? Normal SMTP server will delay deliver while spam-bot will gave up. They not follow RFC from what I know.Re:Dumb spam protection? (Score:2)
Re:Dumb spam protection? (Score:3, Informative)
meh (Score:1, Interesting)
the test isn't all that useful -- something that measures delivery of messages themeselves would be more helpful.
I think this site is just attacking yahoo to get attention -- that's the norm for a slashdot article recently
Failover and clustering (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Failover and clustering (Score:1)
I've never had mail permanently go missing (Score:2)
Load in Linux + LinuxBIOS + a watchdog, with a copy of Postfix, for the mail handling, and you should not be getting a 50% downtime. It should be closer to 0.05% downtime, even under the kinds of loads described. (I'm in
Re:Failover and clustering (Score:1)
Yahoo Groups is a different story (Score:2)
Re:Failover and clustering (Score:2)
Yahoo marks every email from Yahoo Groups as Spam unless I explicitly add the address to my addressbook.
Now, that's efficient, ain't it.
This is meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)
Not Meaningless (Score:2, Informative)
Yes it is.
The web itself is supposed to be redundant, but it's not. Cox, under pressure from M$ and AOL, made sure you could only use their SMTP server on their network. That leaves every computer on their network reliant on their servers or web mail and it sucks. The only thing that's distributed now are the spam and DoS attacks. Yahoo's failure is just andother example of what a bad idea to concentrate services in one place. If everyone ran their ow
Re:Not Meaningless (Score:2)
Re:Not Meaningless (Score:2)
Re:Not Meaningless (Score:2)
Running a full mailserver takes far more clue than the average Unix admin has (and that is saying a lot).
I don't think mail is special. (Score:2)
I had one of the with @home, before Cox, thank you. It worked well.
If you just want to submit via another MSA, use the submission port (587/tcp) for that.
What's the use of trading one "smart host" for another? It wold be nice to not have to change smart hosts from one network to another, but that does not really solve the problem, it just lets me use another overloaded service.
Running a full mailserver takes far more c
Re:I don't think mail is special. (Score:2)
I would say that you would be running your own server colocated somewhere, so you don't have to bother about the overloaded service.
And about the default settings, I work for a fairly large email service provider. I know the problems caused by default installations. And then it doesn't take much to convert that box into an open relay either
no wonder (Score:2, Funny)
Re:no wonder (Score:5, Informative)
95%+ of the SPAM reduction on Yahoo is due to the use of greylisting. Essentially the mail server simulates that it is unavailable to anyone it does not know as a well behaved relay. A well designed MTA will come back and deliver the mail later and the server will accept it. A SPAM zombie will skip to the next target.
A probe will be judged a zombie until proven opposite. A probe that does not try to deliver mail or do anything usefull will cause the SPAM ranking of the originating IP to go up until firewall shielding rules are deployed. From there on you cannot even reach the servers in question until the entry expires. In addition to that well behaved MTAs go to MXes in a predictable order. Anything hitting MXes in a different order is immediately considered a SPAMBOT and will cause the greylisting code to either set a "refuse" with a high timeout on it or (if the code is there) to raise firewall shields outright to tarpit any connections from the BOT. This also essentially disallows you to test any specific host for MX connectivity without testing the entire MX pool in correct order. If you do, you guarantee yourself a blacklist entry which will be generated automatically on the fly.
By the look of it this pretty much summarises what has happened here. Quite funny actually. It is indicative of the current crop of "security companies" and professionals. They claim understanding of security without knowing how things are done.
Re:no wonder (Score:2)
I was with you until "In addition to that well behaved MTAs go to MXes in a predictable order. "
Wouldn't dns round-robin (and the distributed nature of dns in general) make the prediction of the order of hosts problematic?
Or would it be a matter of one server telling the next in order (no matter the starting point) to expect the spambot that just tried?
It seems possible (it is possible) just not extremely as straight-forward as you may have made it seem.
If you have more information
Re:no wonder (Score:2)
yahoo.com. 7200 IN MX 1 mx1.mail.yahoo.com.
yahoo.com. 7200 IN MX 1 mx2.mail.yahoo.com.
yahoo.com. 7200 IN MX 1 mx3.mail.yahoo.com.
yahoo.com. 7200 IN MX 5 mx4.mail.yahoo.com.
mx1-3 will be contacted first by a legitimate sender (in any order). Each might be a round-robin DNS, in which case each would only be attempted once at whatever IP each returns first. T
Re:no wonder (Score:2)
In fact they do not need a higher value MX at all having all those lower level ones. In fact I will bet a case of beer that it is there to detect zombies. Anything hitting it before touching the lower ones will be presumed zombie and put on "long probation".
Re:no wonder (Score:2)
However -- sometimes Yahoo just plain EATS mail without a trace (both incoming and outgoing), and when that happens the problem will persist for months. Someone with a clue who checked into one such incident concluded that some of their servers are just plain misconfigulated.
Down or defense? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bogus Math (Re:Down or defense?) (Score:2)
No. If you RTFL in TFA [emailbattles.com] ... You see that they hit 4 of yahoo's mx records "mx#.mail.yahoo.com" (divide by 4, that gives us 2 per minute per server), and each of these has multiple IP addresses (on average, 4, so divide by 4 again). So in reality, they were hitting a physical machine *once every two minutes*. Or, as they put it in TFL:
"Next, we took measurements every two minutes for half an hour. That's 15 separate readings of each of 16 IP addresses, for a total of 240 readings. The results were surprisin
Re:Bogus Math (Re:Down or defense?) (Score:2)
Other explanations.. (Score:2)
Unlikely. (Score:2)
Methodology? (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems that Yahoo! has blocked their server or something; the tool works fine on my domains but I can't get a result for yahoo.com.
Microsoft (Score:1, Funny)
Yahoo is actually doing things /better/ here (Score:5, Insightful)
Yahoo is actually doing the right thing here, from a technical point of view. The worst thing you can do is have an MX that accepts connections but is not responsive enough to actually handle accepting a message at that point -- it's far better to stop accepting SMTP connections when you detect you're at your maximum capacity.
This is because SMTP clients who fail to get a connection will immediately try the next MX. If they get a connection, but can't send the message, they may back off and try again later, delaying the message further.
Re:Yahoo is actually doing things /better/ here (Score:2)
If I was them I would have also tracked the connections and tagged as a potential SPAM Zombie anyone who deviates from the expected MX fallback pattern. For example someone who hits MX with a value of 5 without trying any of the 1s is an immediate Zombie candidate. Someone who skips from 1 to 5 directly without going along to the other 1s is an obvious Zombie candidate. Someone who hits more than 1 but not all IPs from one MX in sequence before going to the next MX is also likel
Re:Yahoo is actually doing things /better/ here (Score:2)
Yahoo gets a lot of mail. A LOT of mail. A shitload. Take a large number, and multiply it by another large number. Add a zero or two to the end of that number. Imagine getting that many incoming SMTP connections, even over an extended period of time.
Graylisting is unlikely, firewalls talking to ea
I don't have a problem (Score:2)
Never had any problems (Score:4, Informative)
And, as an email admin, I also use it to test systems, both mine and others, and it always works...
If the servers are up and down all the time, I've never noticed it...
I'd file this under FUD...
Re:Never had any problems (Score:1, Troll)
I have alot of experience with yahoo's mail servers. I would have to say that I've never heard someone refer to
themselves as an "Email Admin" say yahoo mail is great. I've seen yahoo fail to send email from our client servers to
yahoo email addresses 25-30% of the time, from servers in NYC, Chicago,
and LA. We get bounces all the time saying that the email server
mx(insert number).yahoo.com isn't accepting connections at this time.
Their servers
Re:Never had any problems (Score:1)
We use Yahoo (Score:2)
It happens across the entire company and happens enough that I have to answer questions from users about it. I tell them to cancel out and retry and 100% of the time that solves the problem.
Guess I now know why this is happening. WTF Yahoo?
Re:We use Yahoo (Score:2)
Re:We use Yahoo (Score:2)
Re:We use Yahoo (Score:2)
Do you at least have a real domain? Or does everyone have a @yahoo.com email address?
-matthew
Distributed Services are Better. (Score:2)
Yahoo to AOL delivery problems? (Score:1)
This is so true (Score:1)
(send one or two emails)
451 mta152.mail.re4.yahoo.com Resources temporarily unavailable. Please try again later
Yahoo on spam lists (Score:1)
Re:Yahoo on spam lists (Score:2)
Nothing new here... (Score:2)
I've always wanted to know what MTA software they use at Yahoo. I've always assumed it was something homegrown, but have never heard anything one way or the other.
I was working at a large ISP and around six or seven years ago I was troubleshooting this exact problem. I noticed these same symptoms with yahoo where some of mx's were available sometimes, rarely, or never. This particular problem turned out to be that yahoo's MTA will not communicate with Post.Office, at the time a product of Software.com [software.com]
Ignorant Slashdot editors stike again (Score:1, Interesting)
Um... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, if a single host tried to ping me once every 7.5 seconds for a half-hour, I'd want my hardware to ignore a few of them, too.
DNS is the solution (Score:2)
Ummm... so? (Score:2)
Isn't this exactly why domains have multiple MX records?
Come to think of it, if you look at the A records for www.yahoo.com (actually yahoo.aka-dns.com) I'd bet a good number of those hosts are down at any given moment too.
We have redundant systems so that a given host being down is not crippling. We have multiple responses to DNS queries so that we can make use of those redundancies.
This is news? (Score:2)
This has been true for some years now. I'd expect th
Re:SLAs (Score:2)
Same can be said for *any* e-mail service, even those that come with your dialup/broadband account. I know ATTBI used to tell its customers that credit was not permitted for mail server downtime because it was a "free" addition onto their broadband account.
GMail, after the introduction of integrated GTalk was unavailable and/or slow at times (it's mostly cleared but I still don't have it set to use the integrated client).
Whatever. It's e-mail, it's n
Re:SLAs (Score:2)
Re:SLAs (Score:2)
Re:SLAs (Score:2)
Re:A few problems with the analysis (Score:2)