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I have no idea if this still works, and it probably wouldn't work for a school, but 15-20 years ago the way to get Yahoo to stop blocking your emails was to call up your ad rep and say something like "Why the heck should we keep spending $10000/month buying ads on Yahoo when any new customers we get from those ads that use Yahoo email end up pissed off at us and maybe even charge back because it looks like we are completely ignoring them because they don't see our emails????".

That would get you added to a "never block mail from this domain" whitelist that had higher precedence than everything else.

Aka: extortion

What does outward rotation about an axis or fixed point have to do with politely asking corporate overlords to get their shit together?

There is a form and people you can talk to if the form doesn't work. The form should have been mentioned in the reject message but is at <https://senders.yahooinc.com/contact#sender-support-request> though you should first review their information, rules, etc, starting at <https://senders.yahooinc.com/>, and the mailop mailing list at <https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop> is where you can ask for help if the former doesn't suffice that will often result in direct contact with someone at Yahoo! that can get things done or at least give knowledgeable advice.

> And yet after like 50 emails to parents with yahoo email addresses they are giving me errors because of "unusual volume of emails from your domain"

Scandalous, it's almost as if the established major providers have a financial interest in making it difficult for smaller providers and individuals to send mail using their own domains!

It is - this would be the better antitrust angle to pursue

> And Yahoo is the Single worst email service to send to.

During the pandemic we had a lot of problems with the confirmation email for our 5000 T.A. in the virtual campus of the university. I had to guess what was happening because I was not part of the administration team, just collecting forwarded messages form the T.A and guessing:

* Gmail: Most of the time it works.

* Yahoo: The server receives a few hundred emails per day and the other are delayed. These were confirmation emails with half an hour tolerance, if they were lucky to pass the next day they were not useful. (After a week the sending server stops retrying.)

* Hotmail: Sometimes the email is received and sometimes it just disappears. No spam folder. No bounce email. It just evaporate. (Try sending an email from hotmail to the no-reply address and cross your fingers.)

* Others: No enough data to have a good guess.

> sometimes it just disappears. No spam folder. No bounce email. It just evaporate.

Gmail will do this too. Happened a few months ago with a single (important) message from a private individual sender on Hotmail, one unknown to my Google account. The fix was adding the Hotmail address to a Google Contact.

I seriously don't get why we can't have some sort of licensing authority for this type of thing. Maybe they issue you a secret key to include in email headers, or put your entire domain on some sort of whitelist. And complaints get handled by a human to confirm that it's not a "oh I don't like this, or I don't remember signing up for this" non-sense complaint that would get you blocked or have your license revoked with a normal provider.

Am I crazy or just missing some super obvious gap with this path?

SMS has something similar to this. You have to honor requests to stop sending or are banned.

You should try starting one. You'd just need to work with every email provider on the planet (including people running personal email servers) and convince them to let you decide for them what is spam or not, get them to implement a massive list of IPs/domains to whitelist on their servers, get them to let you edit that list whenever new mass mailers sign up for your "We're totally not spam" service, and then get them to provide some way for complaints to come back to you so that you can enforce your rules. It'd be a hard sell for mail providers, and it wouldn't solve the spam problem for any messages that aren't sanctioned by your service.

You'd also have to do a lot of work to validate new senders long before they send their first message and you start getting complaints or else you're just letting spammers pay you to completely bypass every mail provider's spam filters until they finally get blocked and have to create a new account with you under a different company name.

If you can convince everyone to trust you, and your service, and that it'd be worth it for mail providers to do all that work on their end on top of everything they're doing currently to prevent spam, it really could improve deliverability.

> You'd just need to work with every email provider

Why would you need to do that? Just work with those that'll pay you for it. The others won't care as they'll just ignore the header.

Would email providers pay for it at all? I suspect it'd be easier to take money from the would-be spammers than to get mail providers to do a bunch of extra work and then pay you for the privilege just so that your clients can send messages that look like spam a little easier.

I suppose that really you'd be able to get a lot of utility by convincing just a handful of very popular email providers (gmail) to trust that your service will never be used to send spam (or that they should let spammers who slip by you right past all of their spam filters). The more email providers you can get to use your service though the more you could charge the mass mailers for guaranteed message delivery.

Such a service could lead to two very bad outcomes though. Parents being told that if they want to get email from the school they'd better sign up for an email account at one of the few supported email providers (gmail) and/or (if it becomes successful) any sender who isn't paying for the privilege of sending email being treated like a spammer.

> I don't remember signing up for this

This is often not a non-sense complaint. A lot of newsletter signups are still via pre-selected checkboxes that are easy to miss.

Why confirm via mail at all?

maybe to confirm that the email is valid?

Correct! With schools and students there is always incentive for shenanigans. If I didn't test for emails they could just book-block all teachers.

There would be other ways to clog the system using trashmail providers but thankfully no student cared enough for that yet

This is a requirement in some jurisdictions (double opt in) for some cases. Not sure about "User has a confirmed email + account at our service, he wants to sign up for a reminder" use case though.

"Double opt-in"is a spammer term for what normal folk refer to as "confirmed opt-in".