Yahoo! Block List

[thepvp.org]

This post is for anyone suffering from Yahoo's actions.

Some time ago my political party, The PVP, had a problem with sending mail from our shared-hosting domain to Yahoo! addresses. It turned out that we had been arbitrarily blocked by Yahoo!'s membership of an anti-spam "club" operated by an American firm called Barracudacentral working in partnership with Emailreg.com - also American.

As you might imagine we contacted Barracudacentral and, after a - let's say animated - discussion were removed from the block list without having to stump up the $20 fee that was being demanded by Emailreg.com. We're pretty sure that copying them into our email complaint to the American Embassy was instrumental in gaining their co-operation.

Now we're being blocked again, this time by Yahoo! themselves and we are getting repeated 421 error codes which Yahoo! says is because they have either seen unusual traffic from a domain or because of complaints from users. Neither Barracudacentral nor Emailreg are involved this time as far as we can determine. I've checked Spam Haus and Spam Cop and found that we do not appear on any block lists.

The PVP does not, as a matter of basic policy, spam anyone and the main correspondence has so far, because we are only a very new party, been between myself and the party's founder at his home email address. So, either we have been the subject of a malicious complaint by a rival political party or Yahoo! has taken it upon itself to decide that we are a spam risk. Either way up, our attempts so far to get any kind of meaningful response from Yahoo! have been fruitless.

Is anyone else out there, who uses shared hosting, getting the "421" problem from Yahoo!? If so, The PVP has decided that the practice of arbitrary domain blocking is unacceptable in a world where communication is key to the democratic process and we intend to take the matter to Parliament as a formal representation. As far as we are concerned, getting rid of spam should be the responsibility of the end-user, which is why the likes of Yahoo! and their ilk provide spam boxes in the first place. Are they, then, saying that these end-user features do not actually work?

If you have the Yahoo! 421 problem and are ready to take action to get it stopped please get in touch with me either on-page or via the PM system.