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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

We, an online store, have found deliverability to yahoo.com and btinternet.com addresses by far the worst, I don’t have statistics to hand but it’s up to a 10% failure rate. Much like the OP it seems to be silent too. We have literally no issues with other providers.

The unfortunate thing is that we also find the demographic of customers here in the UK still using btinternet.com email closely aligns with customers who tend to be more problematic…

(My parents have a btinternet.com email address)

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For reference Yahoo are absolute shits when it comes to mail delivery. They literally will black hole addresses, domains and IP addresses with no recourse ever. The sending server will get a response code back of roughly "fuck you until you've manually filled in this form at this URL". The form is submitted by any attending mail admin if they even notice the response code, then silently with no confirmation they will either ignore you until the universe dies or suddenly mail will start working. If you fuck the form up, you have to wait 6 months to try again.

They actually stopped me hosting my own email because I couldn't be bothered to deal with this shit any more.

They also have recently become absolute shit at IMAP support, so has AOL. Both of them have set up a COPY Rate limit, basically if you move X amount of messages, (10 on aol, around 50 on yahoo) the move will fail with this message:

  > IMAP< 72 NO [LIMIT] UID COPY Rate limit hit. 
  > \* IMAP error on imap.aol.com: UID COPY error

The mail clients themselves could implement a bandaid fix for these types of servers but still, I see a future where you can only use webmail/apps coming, either pay or don't use email.

I got a call from a recruiter some years ago to take over yahoo mail as a manager. In theory this would have been a huge step in career. I noped out of that hard. Did not want to oversee a declining product.

If every competent recrutee reacted that way, that would explain the present situation.

If the ship is sinking. Perhaps one shouldn’t buy tickets.

If I recall correctly didn't Yahoo used to provide the BTinternet.com email service? I seem to remember some announcements about BT eventually moving off it but not sure if the backend MTAs changed.

https://home.bt.com/pages/email/index2.html

They did indeed! I'm not sure on the infrastructure, but I'd love to know if it was run within Yahoo's data centres and white-labelled, or run in BT data centres using Yahoo Mail's application.

> The unfortunate thing is that we also find the demographic of customers here in the UK still using btinternet.com email closely aligns with customers who tend to be more problematic…

Maybe this is just wishful thinking, but if the more problematic customers are losing you money, then isn't it a valid business case to stop doing business with them given that you can identify them in advance? Wishful thinking because it'd be really nice to create a feedback loop such that users of email providers start to understand their reputation, which would make provider reputation for deliverability matter, which might improve their behaviour. But most businesses probably aren't in a position to turn away business like that.

There is “losing money to deal with this issue” and there is “losing more money than you are making from these users”, I imagine that this is more the former.

It doesn't help with BT that you often have to figure out how to log into the webmail interface (often outlook/Hotmail) and only then do you seen the spam folder. If you don't do this and currate the spam folder it all get steadily worse... And you never see why if you are using an email program set up years ago on your PC.

> if you are using an email program set up years ago on your PC.

Yes, the demographic of a btinternet email user.

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