Randy Cassingham's Blog

Posted by Richard, Sun Valley, NV on August 2, 2008:

I'm so sorry to read this. I've had occasional dealings with Yahoo "customer service", and they are unresponsive.

In order to help out in some small manner, I have downloaded two of your banners and have placed them on my websites. It may not help much, but I will also let my friends and associates know about This Is True and suggest they subscribe.

Posted by Tanja, Australia on August 2, 2008:

Just wanted to say that maybe Aussie True readers are not as daft as the rest. I have a yahoo.com.au acocunt and I have never had to tell my server that it's not spam. I've never missed an edition. The Aussie Yahoo seems to know the difference between spam and subscriptions.

Posted by Jacy, Houston TX on August 3, 2008:

Thanks for writing about this. I was just thinking to myself...where is This Is True?, so I came to the website and saw the most recent issue highlighting the problem. I've complained now, hopefully this can be speedily resolved.

Posted by Jim, Texas on August 3, 2008:

You might have misunderstood me Randy. My suggestion was to have your attorney send a notice, not to file a lawsuit.

But please don't dismiss a lawsuit so quickly. If Yahoo is doing you wrong, they are doing others wrong too. A lawsuit might be a good thing by causing ISP's (not just Yahoo, all of them) to sit up and take notice that their actions have consequences; that they cannot be so lazy as to allow their users to be the sole determination as to what is and isn't spam.

It might cause them to have a structured appeals process for "spammers" like yourself, it might cause them to create a warning system giving notice. It might force a *gasp* real human being (even better, a committee) to review the situation each and every time a newsletter (This Is True and All Others) reaches some arbitrary and invisible threshold of "this-is-spam" clicks by users.

Lawsuits can be a good thing and an extremely powerful tool, please don't dismiss them so quickly. Lawsuits were designed to assist people who have been wronged. Losing 15% of your subscription base because Yahoo won't override some silly setting somewhere in their system isn't quite like spilling hot coffee on your legs.

Posted by Marc, MA on August 3, 2008:

I haven't ever been a yahoo user, but I wonder if user whitelists are effective for letting True get through. Many emails I've opted into (from my bank, airlines, etc) say at the top "Add us@domain to your address book so our email doesn't get filtered as spam". Maybe that would work for true, too.

Yes, it's stupid that your readers need to take this extra step when the problem lies with yahoo and your ex-readers, but at least this is something you can do which has a possibility of working. I assume you have a yahoo test account of your own (or you can get one easily) to try it out.

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While the "add to the address book" helps at one level, it's moot if the site has instituted a transaction-level block. -rc

Posted by Crystal - Albany, OR on August 3, 2008:

I've been a free subscriber to This is True for a long time now, and as much as I like your publication I've never been able to justify the expense of a pay subscription. In fact, I don't subscribe to any pay publications either on or off-line because I just don't have a "discretionary income."

I don't say that for the purpose of garnering sympathy, nor am I asking for anything. But when I read your article about the loss of income you've experienced due to the yahoos at Yahoo! and the danger it presents to the survival of your publication, I realized that I would seriously miss it if you had to go out of business.

So I've purchased a year's paid subscription and ordered some of the plastic Get out of Hell Free cards that I've been wanting for years. I promise I'll forward the free publication to my friends too. I sincerely respect the fact that you can point out the idiocy that surrounds us without promoting either a conservative or liberal agenda and I hope you continue doing so for a long time to come.

I may not always agree with you, but you've always provide well reasoned and thought provoking commentary and you've brought several issues to my attention that I might never have recognized on my own, for example the problems caused by the widespread misapplication of the 'Zero-Tolerance' concept.

Please keep on doing what you're doing.

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Thanks, Crystal. I know that $24/year is beyond many people's means. That's why I emphasized "spreading the word" first. But I'm glad you were able to get some of the cards you always wanted! -rc

Posted by Anthony, United Kingdom on August 3, 2008:

You're possibly missing something. Free webmail accounts such as those offered by Yahoo! are disposable, and are regarded as such by their users. It is by no means certain that the (say) abc123@yahoo.com that you are mailing now is the same abc123@yahoo.com who originally subscribed to your mailings. Most free webmail account holders don't unsubscribe from mailing lists when they switch webmail providers, they just re-subscribe from their new free webmail account. Then, when whoever is re-allocated their original free webmail account address receives the previous owner of the address's mailings, they report them as being unsolicited (which they are from the perspective of the email address's new owner, of course...).

There isn't an easy way to handle this with regard to Yahoo! at present since, at this moment, they don't have a Feedback Loop (FBL) program that you can sign up to.

Ordinarily, with most mail service providers, setting up an FBL then immediately unsubscribing recipients who complain (no ifs, no buts - *immediate* unsubscription) would resolve this kind of issue, however until Yahoo! put their FBL properly in place, you're going to find this difficult.

In the meantime, working with a good email deliverability consultant (one with a good reputation, who Yahoo! trust) would help.

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Spammers keep sending mail to an address no matter what. I don't follow spammer practices. If someone at Yahoo closes their address, Yahoo bounces back a "User Unknown" -- at which point that address is taken off my list. I seriously doubt Yahoo allows them to be reissued in less than a week, so I find it pretty much impossible to believe that there are any instances of the scenario you suggest happening. -rc

Posted by Lionel, France on August 3, 2008:

Yahoo has other problems, we've more than 40,000 yahoo subscribers to a news service and their system purposely slows the delivery at a point where we risk emails to be lost (nearly 5 days for delivering all mails). Delivery are simply temporarily refused (because of user-reported SPAM). There's no meaningful answer from their postmaster (a robot as usual).

Posted by John, Independece, MO on August 3, 2008:

As far as Yahoo re-issuing email accounts, I don't think they do. I have been trying to get them to re-issue me my yahoo account, that I'd had for over 8 years, due to the fact that I changed the password, went on vacation, and couldn't remember it after I got back. Wrong info to reset my password, so I am thoroughly scr^@#d, and Yahoo won't help. This was almost 2 years ago, and I STILL can't sign back up for it, but email sent to it bounces, saying it is not a valid mailbox.

Posted by Cory, Minnesota on August 3, 2008:

I work for a company who delivers subscription email for web publishers and we have seen the same delivery problems with several of our customers. Yahoo! is the largest email provider w/o a feedback loop and they don't seem to care about delivering messages that their customer requested. Feedback loops have worked well for every email provider who offers them -- unfortunately, few do.

We had a customer with a list of about 120K get slowed/blocked by Yahoo! last week. Message delivery was being permanently delayed for over 37,000 messages when we filled out Yahoo's complaint form and got their typical robotic answer. Fortunately, delivery resumed to a normal pace shortly afterwords. I don't know if our complaint made a difference, but it appears to have helped.

I would like to see all email readers offer an opt-out link whenever the List-unsubscribe header is provided. This should help reduce the false spam complaints and make it easier for the subscriber.