I belong to a tech list for other agencies within the Call Center /
Answering Service community. I have been having trouble getting e-mails to
some of my clients. FYI here is the response I received from an knowledgable
source on the list. I just wanted to share because this has been a bit of a
hot topic lately:

> *Jeff:
>
> Many AT&T DSL broadband Internet subscribers, whose email is typically
> hosted by Yahoo, have had nothing but email trouble in recent weeks. (I
> say
> that as both an annoyed AT&T DSL subscriber and from having dealt with it
> while trying to ensure our TAS messages are reaching clients who use AT&T
> DSL Yahoo accounts.)
>
> AT&T and Yahoo have gone on the warpath against spam recently and are
> refusing SMTP connections or eating legitimate email that AT&T and Yahoo
> don't like. While I'm sure they are making a big dent in spam by doing
> this, they are also blocking a lot of legitimate email at the same time.
> The worst part is they often don't send "bounce" messages to senders when
> this happens, and the intended recipients are not able to find the missing
> messages in their Yahoo bulk email folders. Many messages just go missing.
>
> AT&T and Yahoo DO actually have some very skimpy new web resources you can
> use to try to resolve the problems, but from what I've read, this is
> pretty
> tough to pursue. In some cases, I've read where some admins get their SMTP
> servers whitelisted by AT&T/Yahoo only to have them blacklisted again
> within
> a day or two. Also, depending if you operate your own SMTP server, or
> relay
> through your ISP, you may have to have your ISP wrangle with AT&T and
> Yahoo.
>
> I suggest you do some web searches to turn up the many forum topics around
> the web on what AT&T and Yahoo are up to.
>
> I don't know anything about live.com email woes, but as a general note
> many
> of the biggest service providers that handle enormous quantities of email
> are taking new initiatives to try to cut spam. For them, the constantly
> rising cost of handling spam is so incredibly high that they are
> constantly
> evaluating new technology to try to contain their bandwidth, storage and
> processing costs for handling email.
>
> The recent grief we've seen within our industry with sending email to
> SMTP2SMS wireless text messaging gateways operated by Verizon Wireless is
> a
> great example of this. VZW is just trying to better screen spam, but their
> latest techniques are causing a lot of legitimate text messages to not be
> delivered via SMS.
> *

--
Thanks,

Jeff
'90 Carat (Grover)
'86 (We call this one Parts)
'78 Bus (Melissa) Patty's Bus