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Emails to Hotmail and Yahoo subscribers temporarily delayed

October 01, 2009

UPDATE: The blacklisting has now been removed, and we've verified that emails to Hotmail and Yahoo are being delivered as per normal. We've released all the delayed emails and they are sending right now, although it may take some time for the queue to be fully sent.

Some smaller domains may take a while to refresh their blacklists, so we would expect to see slightly higher bounce rates while the removal trickles down. Please accept our apologies for the delays.

Late last night (Sydney time) we discovered that some of our delivery servers have been picked up by the popular blacklist provider Spamhaus. In this case, the servers were blacklisted because of one or more complaints about a campaign sent by one customer in particular.

As soon as we became aware of the issue, we took the following immediate steps:

We closed this customers account pending a further review from our approvals team.
We contacted Spamhaus about the issue, provided them with all the details about this customer and explained our commitment to never spamming. We are currently awaiting a response.
Immediately stopped delivering emails to ISP's that are known users of Spamhaus. The most significant of these is Yahoo! and Hotmail. To ensure those emails are not rejected, they are currently quarantined on our mail servers and will be released the moment the listing is resolved.
Working with any customers impacted before we identified the issue. If you sent a campaign in the last two hours and notice a high bounce rate, get in touch and we'll organize a full refund for the campaign and let you know how to resend to those recipients later.

Should I still send this campaign I've been working on?

If your email is timely and must get delivered to your Yahoo! and Hotmail subscribers at the same time as the rest of your subscribers, then we don't recommend sending now. While we'll be quarantining the majority of email impacted by the block, there may be additional subscribers at other domains that could also result in a bounce. If you want to avoid any risk of this altogether, we recommend holding off sending until the issue is resolved.

However, if you're prepared to accept that risk and for your Hotmail and Yahoo! subscribers to receive your campaign a little later than everyone else, feel free to send now. At this stage we don't have an estimate as to when the listing will be resolved, but in our experience it can take up to 24 hours. While this delay shouldn't impact most of you, we wanted to be as transparent as possible.

How will I know when email to these subscribers will be sent

We'll keep everyone updated through this blog post, and also via our Twitter account. As soon as we have confirmation these subscribers are in the clear, we'll let you know.

Posted in: Observations & Answers

43 Comments

Phil Wardour
October 1, 2009 12:46am

I am having problems sending emails to accounts that are not Hotmail / Yahoo or web-based at all.
David Greiner
October 1, 2009 12:57am

@Phil, if that’s the case, please get in touch and we’ll look into it further for you.
Oliver Jones
October 1, 2009 12:59am

Me too. All system emails are not getting through like validation emails on new accounts.

I’m sure you guys are on the case, hard to run an emailer business if you can’t email.
Smita
October 1, 2009 1:03am

What about gmail accounts ? I sent a test email and it is not getting delivered.
Phil Wardour
October 1, 2009 1:04am

Cheers David, although I did try that a while back - will ping another request.
adrian109
October 1, 2009 1:09am

I’m having problems sending emails to non web-based email accounts too
Stig Morten Myre
October 1, 2009 1:16am

Hi guys, thanks for the feedback.

If you’re seeing an unusual number of bounces for other domains, please contact us and let us know which campaign/account, and we’ll have a look.
Stephen Ng
October 1, 2009 1:23am

Hi,

I’ve ran a Spam Test and no screenshots are appearing and no Filter Checks are being generated. They’re all saying ‘checking now’ but it’s been 45 mins and nothing appears. Is this being affected too?
Stig Morten Myre
October 1, 2009 1:29am

Hi Stephen,

That wouldn’t be related to this, no. But if they don’t show up for another 15-30 minutes, please email us, and we’ll have a look. Sorry for the trouble.
Stephen Ng
October 1, 2009 2:00am

Hi Stig,

All okay now! That’s the results returning for the screenshots and filters now. Thanks!
Stig Morten Myre
October 1, 2009 2:08am

That’s great to hear Stephen, thanks for the update.
Antoine C.
October 1, 2009 2:19am

I’m having problem sending test emails to gmail.com and google apps addresses too.
Danielle HRD
October 1, 2009 2:22am

I have sent test emails to Outlook, Yahoo gMail and none of them are getting through… should I just give up until tomorrow morning?
David Whelan
October 1, 2009 2:30am

I sent a campaign this afternoon, and addresses of all kinds bounced, including my own. > 20% bounce reported, but at least one address I know hasn’t delivered and hasn’t reported bounced. I have sent a ‘help’ request.
Victor
October 1, 2009 2:37am

Its working on gmail for me but not Hotmail for me.
Stig Morten Myre
October 1, 2009 2:39am

Hi Antoine C. and Danielle HRD,

Gmail and Google Apps issues would be unrelated to this actually - could you check the spam folder?

Yahoo, Hotmail and any other email servers using Spamhaus will be impacted in this case, but we’re only holding back Yahoo and Hotmail emails.

If you’re able to wait with any campaigns, that’s the safest way to ensure as many as possible of your recipients it.
Stig Morten Myre
October 1, 2009 2:42am

David, thanks for the email, we’ll follow up soon as possible.

Victor, good to hear Gmail is working for you. Hotmail addresses should receive the email eventually, provided the campaign was sent after we stopped sending to those addresses.
Chris Hooton
October 1, 2009 2:59am

Hi Stig - My test emails going to my own Outlook account aren’t coming through - I’ve waited 30 mins. They usually arrive instantly or in a few minutes at worst.

Any ideas? - Many Thanks, Chris
Stig Morten Myre
October 1, 2009 3:01am

Hi Chris, it’s difficult to say without knowing which email service you’re using, but it sounds like they could also be using Spamhaus. Did you check your spam folder?
Chris Hooton
October 1, 2009 3:03am

Hi Stig, I use a webmail account hosted by Fasthosts in the UK - nothing in the spam folder…
Stig Morten Myre
October 1, 2009 3:20am

Hi Chris, I’m not familiar with them, sorry. But they could very well be using Spamhaus.
Jake Holman
October 1, 2009 3:43am

@Chris Hooton - we use Fasthosts too, we sometimes get some odd issues with Emails coming through, sometimes because of server issues but sometimes because of their Spam Filtering. I recommend dropping them an Email about it, they’ll usually help you within the hour!
debbidoo
October 1, 2009 4:16am

Hi, another Fasthosts user here. When the test email didn’t get through, alarm bells rung (I remember the last time this happened) so I tried sending the test message to addresses hosted with other hosting companies, to see what would happen. Any addresses with Fasthosts did not get through (presumably they use Spamhaus). One with another host came through, but was marked as spam. The final one went to my Googlemail account, and that worked fine.

As for the actual campaign… I’ll hold onto that until this issue is fixed. Thanks to CM for being so open about it, and for keeping us up to date with events. You guys rule :)
Stig Morten Myre
October 1, 2009 4:21am

Thanks for sharing those details Jake and debbidoo, very much appreciated.
Chris Hooton
October 1, 2009 4:31am

Thanks Jake and Debbidoo, my latest test emails are now coming through immediately to my Fasthosts account… Hmm, oh well !

Stig, I’ve added CM to my iPhone Twitter page now, so I’ll be eagerly awaiting confirmation of the Spamhaus issue being resolved as I tuck into a lasagne and a glass or two of Australian Shiraz, what else?! - it’s supper time in the UK…

Ready to press that “send” button,

Many thanks, Chris
Phil Noland
October 1, 2009 5:02am

It is definately better to wait until the issue is resolved. I had an issue where the newsletter needed to go out to as many as I could get and am having about 25%-30% bounce rate and it usually runs about 3%.
Brad
October 1, 2009 5:50am

One of our clients received 43 bounced messages from a mailing list of 400. 32 were domain bounces. Of that only 6 were Yahoo accounts. Forgive my ignorance - but if things are cleared up with Hotmail/MSN - what happens to lil’ ol http://www.smalldomain.com?
Mathew Patterson
October 1, 2009 7:11am

@Brad - most small domains don’t maintain their own blacklist, they just piggyback off the major ones, so as we resolve the big listing it should disappear for smaller providers too.
Lindsay Talsness
October 1, 2009 7:20am

I tried to run a spam and design test at 4:15 CST and am not returning any results at all - nor does the request look like it is processing - although the billing went through. Could this be related to the issue mentioned above?
Antoine C.
October 1, 2009 7:59am

@Stig Morten Myre : you were right, test emails were in the gmail junk folder.
David
October 1, 2009 8:31am

Test emails not getting through to .mac accounts either. Gmail OK for me.

However I now I can’t run a design test because:

“AOL 9, AOL Web, Apple Mail 2.1, Apple Mail 3, BlackBerry, Gmail, Gmail (Older), Lotus Notes 6.5.4, Lotus Notes 7, Lotus Notes 8, Mobile Me, Outlook 2000, Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Outlook Express 6, Outlook XP, Thunderbird, Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Mail, Windows Mobile 5 and Yahoo! Mail are not returning screenshots right now, so they won’t be available for this test.”

SHIT - client job due to go out now and I can’t make it happen…..arghhhh.

Please get the fix done ASAP guys. Good luck.
Mathew Patterson
October 1, 2009 8:56am

@David Sorry, we are working on an issue affecting some design and spam tests right now and it should be back shortly.

We’ve just updated the blog post to reflect that the blacklistings have been removed and email is now being sent and delivered normally.
debbidoo
October 1, 2009 7:55pm

I’m also having an issue with the spam test being stuck at 82% - apple mail 2.1 and yahoo are taking a really long time to respond.
Mathew Patterson
October 1, 2009 8:08pm

Sometimes one or two of the services are not available (they are external tools), but they should arrive later. If we detect this happening we do provide a warning before you pay.

Sorry for the trouble, we’ll watch out for any ongoing issues.
Matt Borghi
October 1, 2009 11:18pm

Great work on this folks!
My campaign was scheduled to run early AM EST/US and it did, no bounces, all is well… Great work again, and thanks for turning this around so quickly!!!!

Matt
Justin
October 1, 2009 11:34pm

I’ve been having problems as well, bounce rates are showing as 0 on campaigns sent yesterday, and unusually high numbers haven’t been opened! Not great!

Here’s a thought for the dashboard! Some sort of status, should we hit the send button or not!!

I might have lost a lot of credability with new customers because of this!
Andre
October 2, 2009 12:15am

I’m also experiencing very low open rates. Is this because the queue is so long that they haven’t been sent yet?
Justin
October 2, 2009 12:28am

There is a Manitou .net mail server also has the IP blacklisted
Travis Bell
October 2, 2009 2:53am

Hey guys,

If you are experiencing issues this morning it would be best to get in touch with support. There aren’t any issues that we’re specifically aware right now and campaigns that were sent last night/this morning should be going through ok. We’ll make sure to help you out!
Kyle
October 7, 2009 3:52am

I noticed here in Arizona all the qwest emails have bounced.
JG
October 7, 2009 6:18am

emails are still not getting through to earthlink.net accounts.

Excerpt from one email I just received:
Hello, this is the mail server on m6.createsend.com.
Reporting-MTA: dns;m6.createsend.com
X-PowerMTA-VirtualMTA: preview
Received-From-MTA: dns;cmweb2 (206.72.127.202)
Arrival-Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2009 06:46:27 +1100

Final-Recipient: rfc822;xxxxxxxx@earthlink.net
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0 (undefined status)
Remote-MTA: dns;mx1.earthlink.net (209.86.93.226)
Diagnostic-Code: smtp;550 550 Dynamic/zombied/spam IPs blocked. Write .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
X-PowerMTA-BounceCategory: spam-related
John
October 9, 2009 4:32am

is there any way that we can find out when earthlink has lifted their blacklisting?
Travis Bell
October 9, 2009 6:44am

Hi John,

The Earthlink + Mindspring blocks have been lifted so you should be good to go. If you run into any issues, feel free to email us at support [at] campaignmonitor.com

Cheers!

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