back to article Yahoo! Mail! goes! titsup! in! Blighty! due! to! mystery! error!

Yahoo!'s email service tumbled off the interwebs in the past hour when it began spewing out a "temporary error" message to an unknown number of users in the UK. The Purple Palace, however, remained silent about the outage on its official Twitter customer care account. At time of publication, it was not clear how many netizens …

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Ok I do

        For all those times that you have to enter an email addy knowing full well that it will only be used for SPAM and invitations of a certain kind from Russian Beauties.

        1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
          Coat

          Re: Ok I do

          If only they were actual Russian beauties . . .

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        To be fair

        It actually used to be quite good. At least up until gmail came along.

        1. regadpellagru

          Re: To be fair

          "It actually used to be quite good. At least up until gmail came along."

          Yes, true, but that was, what ?, 10+ years ago ? I've used them myself but the GUI became terrible, and gmail was indeed ramping up with interesting services, like the POP/IMAP service to consolidate all your ISP-bound email addresses.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        would any Reg reader own up to using a Yahoo email account?

        Not only do I have a yahoo email, I have had it for years (mid 1990s?) and it's been my primary email for most of those, and instances of email failures and rejection can be counted on the fingers of one foot.

        It's also not been affected by any of the occasionally reported "major outages". But then I try to stay at least one version behind their latest webmail client, when I'm not using it via a proper email client.

        YMMV.

        Anyone who uses ISP-based mail is being very silly. I have no intention of using gmail for anything significant. Where else should I be looking, assuming I don't mind paying a *small* fee?

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  2. Mark Allen

    Yahoo and DKIM

    One of the bizarre sides of Yahoo is they were involved in setting up DKIM standard to check if the mail server sending an email is legit. Yet they often forget to register their own mail servers correctly and end up with lots of mail bounces. Especially from their BTInternet.com hosting.

    1. taxman

      Re: Yahoo and DKIM

      The thing about BT is that they are causing denials themselves with their CPcloud server acting as a mail forwarder. If you look at BT they are running THREE email services under the name of BTInternet.com, one of which uses the Yahoo! mail service. To direct to mail to the correct service the CPcloud server is stripping off the original header info and substitutes itself as the sender. A great way to get mail be labelled as Spam.

  3. chivo243 Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Yahoo NDN?

    I have many higher ups that communicate with regular people daily, and when I hear:

    VIP - "Is there something wrong with our mail system?"

    Me - "No, everything seems to be working normally."

    VIP - "Well I sent a contract to someone and they've called and still have not received the e-mail"

    Me - "Did you receive a message back, a problem delivering the e-mail?"

    VIP - Silence greets me... then "No, I didn't get any notification."

    ME - "I can look in the spam filter, can I have the e-mail address?"

    VIP - "Let me see again, oh yes, someone@yahoo."

    Me - "I will check, but Yahoo is notorious for having issues delivering mail in a timely manner."

    VIP - "I want that mail delivered, please contact Yahoo and sort this out!"

    Me - Silently opening the drawer where the scotch is kept... as I face palm.

  4. Banksy

    It's back on now for me.

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  6. x 7

    BTinternet mail was giving a similar error this afternoon from around midday onwards. Seems to be OK now. Interesting in that BT supposedly split from Yahoo 12 months ago, yet its still possible to use the Yahoo servers and software to get BT mail (especially important for Android as theres no BT mail app....)

    But before that around 8:00 this morning mail sent to BT addresses was getting black-holed. Didn't start getting through to the recipients until 7pm this evening. No warning message to the sender - it simply vanished for several hours

  7. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Devil

    "Yahoo! Mail is not experiencing an outage"

    That's actually a refreshing difference from the usual "only a small amount of subscribers are experiencing issues" that is usually trotted out.

    Of course, in the case of Yahoo!, they'd have trouble talking about a small number of subscribers, since that's all they have.

  8. Robert Helpmann??
    Childcatcher

    Doesn't seem fair

    The UK gets the new Avengers movie ahead of the US while the US gets Yahoo! Mail and the UK does not. I think the UK came out ahead on this one.

  9. Martin-73 Silver badge
    FAIL

    "Not experiencing an outage" my arse

    The 'temporary error 1' is the same problem they had last week when their entire system went mammaries skyward.

    Yes I do have a yahoo address, no I don't use it. I need a yahoo account for ymsgr.

    Yes that's still a thing

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Random black hole for mail?

    AC for obvious reasons.

    I did a spell for a well known ISP with some "added value" features.

    Turned out the programmers who produced these didn't really have an in depth appreciation of SMTP.

    When an email was ready to go then they just fired it into port 25 as one long stream and got on with the next one.

    Every now and then the MTA would not be ready to accept the email and would complain (although the program wasn't listening) and the failed message would be side lined to an error queue.

    Over time this queue became quite large.

    Nobody was keen to go public with this so I wrote a little Perl ditty which fed the error queue into the MTA at a gentle pace.

    Genuine errors were rejected again, transient errors were picked up and the message re queued.

    Over time all the stuck emails were delivered (albeit a bit late) and the programme was updated to confirm acceptance by the MTA.

    Quite likely there are similar black holes in a lot of ISP software.

    Testing often doesn't catch transient errors.

    TL;DR just because programmers work for an ISP doesn't mean they understand email.

  11. Mike Bell

    Yahoo! Mail is not experiencing an outage

    I'd like to know how Yahoo! Mail can experience anything. Does Roger Penrose know about this sudden leap in computing technology?

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