Yahoo Considered Harmful
(or why I despise large email providers)
In getting ready for burningman I've been sending mail to a bunch of new people and was informed by multiple people that my mails to yahoo addresses were going into spam folders. So I sent a message to yahoo explaining my situation and asking why my mails are systemically being tagged as spam.
The response I got was a form letter asking me to fill out an "application" asking a few dozen questions about where I'm harvesting my email addresses from, who I'm selling them to and what am I using my mailing lists for, to which almost all of my replies are "no lists". They also want a list of any addresses I might be using to send to yahoo mail users, my contact information etc. So I fill out the thing, basically saying that most of the questions asked aren't applicable and that there are no company policies on x, y or z because there's no company (doing much to not be snarky in my responses). To top things off, this had to be sent to mail-abuse-bulk@cc.yahoo.com. This morning I got a response that says: "Based on the information you have provided us, we cannot systematically deliver your email to the Inbox at this time." followed by "While we cannot fully exempt your mail server from our SpamGuard technology, we have made appropriate changes to this IP address of xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx in our database."
So the upshot is yahoo may or may not filter messages from me to it's spam filters. After I got this message I created another yahoo account and a message to it and this new message went to the inbox this time rather than the spam box like it did when I tried this a couple days ago.
But the far more insidious thing is that mail providers are filtering messages a) without information on why b) without any clear way of "correcting" the problem. At least yahoo delivered the mail to the spam folder where some people check periodically. Many mail providers silently drop the mail so their user is unaware that they're not getting the mail and doesn't know to complain. If you do notice your mail being filtered and you do complain, the typical response is that you (the user and they're customer) can't do anything about it. You have to have the person who's sending you messages contact their mail provider and have them email your isp who will presumably have them fill out a similar "application" to the one I filled out for yahoo.
In the last couple of years, a new twist has come to this. Last time I checked, there are now seven large email providers (including hotmail, aol and comcast) who will now let you pay to have your mail server whitelisted. So for the right price you can fill people's mailboxes with spam all you like and it will be faithfully delivered.
So the upshot of all of this is that if you care about getting your email you should at the very least know how the messages coming in to you are being filtered. Most small providers will be more than happy to tell you this information. Most large providers call it as a trade secret.