Immutable Security

For some time now I have had problems with Yahoo! accepting mail from the domains I manage and marking the messages as spam. They continued to blackhole me depite having never been an open relay, having a valid PTR record, having a valid SPF record, not sending any spam or mailing list e-mail, sending to and from only a few select people and having nothing in the message body that could possibly be considered spammy. Only Yahoo! has problems with the server. Everyone else seems to think I’m an OK guy.

Several attempts to resolve the situation fell on deaf ears.  Several times I dutifully filled out the forms and provided all the details requested. I even requested to not receive a scripted response, hoping a human being worked somewhere at Yahoo!. The experience led me to conclude one of two things: either they really don’t care at all about letting you know how your mail server offends them or the place is so (in)efficient that the machines have risen and killed off all the humans, only to run Yahoo! all by themselves.

It seems that I have now appeased the Yahoo! mail gods. Yesterday, I implemeted Domain Keys using the excellent guide over at Brandon Checketts’ site.  Yahoo! now considers me worthy of sending mail to their underlings. I can only hope that I continue to please the Yahoo! gods, for they are all powerful.