I finally managed to get around Yahoo! filtering all e-mail from our SMTP IP address for the time being. Here is what I feel is happening, and really don't know if there is a solution:
Users with their own domain names use our e-mail services to forward messages to their Yahoo! and AOL accounts. Lets say Jim has the domain: jimsdomain.com hosted with us. Jim decides that the Yahoo! account he has is the best thing sliced bread, and figures that he should just have all e-mail from jimsdomain.com forwarded to his Yahoo! account. Not a problem! He logs into qmailadmin, sets up the forward and everything is merry! Not so fast, Jim has had jimsdomain.com since the advent of DNS and his e-mail address has made it's rounds on spam lists, etc, etc, so Jim gets quite a large amount of SPAM on a daily basis.
This SPAM hits our SMTP server, gets forwarded to Yahoo and placed in Jim's INBOX just like it should. Jim takes one look at: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]@x CHeaPEr oNLINE" and instantly flags it as SPAM in his Yahoo account. He does this with every spam e-mail he receives, and pretty soon Yahoo! takes a look at the headers and realizes that our SMTP servers are responsible for "sending" quite a bit of SPAM to Jim. Our servers get blocked, and Jim instantly complains that his Aunt Janice's really important e-mail got moved to his Bulk folder and he missed some important correspondence.
Natuarally, you can see the problem here. We are getting our IP ranges marked in providers blacklists due to e-mail forwarding that we are doing on behalf of our customers. Is there anyway around this besides calling each customer and educating them about what they are doing?
AOL has a great program with their SPF implementation, feedback loop, and whitelisting. I never thought I would say this, but AOL's postmaster department has a great website, and even greater postmaster customer service reps. Yahoo's is a nightmare and I have a feeling the people that can unblock an IP range sit locked away somewhere with no lines to the outside.
As a provider this is extremely frustrating, as we constantly have to tread lightly with Yahoo!
Any ideas/suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Peter
