Leaving well enough alone - Yahoo email groups
There are email lists for an amazing number of topics ranging from accurate time keeping to My Little Pony to collecting Edison cylinders to Civil War re-enactment to... You get the picture. Many of these are hosted on the
Yahoo Groups website.
Yahoo makes money by selling targeted advertising to those people reading the groups through a web browser. You can also have new emails sent directly to your own email account to be read by your email app (Outlook, etc.).
The Yahoo system had a clean interface and worked really well -- fast message handling.
Unfortunately, a couple months ago, Yahoo made a major change to their email software and screwed up the user interface. This not only hurt web based email readers, this also hurt group administrators as they can only do their administrative functions through the Yahoo web interface.
Rather than retract the new UI (like Slashdot did a month ago
THANK YOU!!!), Yahoo is forging ahead to the extent that -- from
The Register:
'Yahoo! Breaks! Every! Mailing! List! In! The! World!' says email guru
Email luminary John Levine has accused Yahoo! of sabotaging email lists for everyone, everywhere.
In a post titled “Yahoo! Breaks! Every! Mailing! List! In! The! World! Including! The! IETF's!'”, Levin explains “an emerging e-mail security scheme” called DMARC that “lets a domain owner make assertions about the From: address, in particular that mail with their domain on the From: line will have a DKIM signature with the same domain, or a bounce address in the same domain that will pass SPF [sender policy framework.”
Levine explains that DMARC has weaknesses, notably because “Lists invariably [sic] use their own bounce address in their own domain, so the SPF doesn't match. Lists generally modify messages via subject tags, body footers, attachment stripping, and other useful features that break the DKIM signature. So on even the most legitimate list mail like, say, the IETF's, most of the mail fails the DMARC assertions, not due to the lists doing anything 'wrong'.”
Most of the time that's not a big problem for the world at large. But Levine says “over the weekend Yahoo published a DMARC record with a policy saying to reject all yahoo.com mail that fails DMARC.”
Aside from lots of bounced emails that should go through, here's what Levine says will result from Yahoo!'s change:“Since Yahoo mail provokes bounces from lots of other mail systems, innocent subscribers at Gmail, Hotmail, etc. not only won't get Yahoo subscribers' messages, but all those bounces are likely to bounce them off the lists.”
In other words lots of email not getting through, lots of automatic unsubscribes and lots of angry users and sysadmins.
Of the 33 lists I subscribe to, 24 are running through Yahoo Groups. Performance over the last two months has sucked. I can send 30 emails and they each show up in a few minutes but then I send one to the same group and it takes forever.
Someone needs to get their collective crap together or Yahoo Group's client base will start moving somewhere else and they lose their advertising revenue and goodwill...
Posted by DaveH at April 16, 2014 8:06 PM