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Yahoo Mail Slowed To Fight Spam
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-04-17
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When a security company tested the ability to reach mail servers at Yahoo, it found half of the listed public servers unavailable to receive email messages.
 | | Yahoo Mail Slowed To Fight Spam |  |
Dymeta, a maker of email protection hardware, said it was curious about complaints that sending email to Yahoo took longer than it should need. The company posted results of its testing using a new diagnostic tool called Mail Server Profiler.
The diagnostic mapped out 16 mail servers behind 4 MX records. Only 8 of the 16 servers had port 25 closed, and could not receive new messages. Further analysis over a 30 minute period of each individual mail server's IP address found that Yahoo only received mail 55 percent of the time.
This has an impact on mail servers everywhere trying to reach Yahoo. As messages are rejected by a closed recipient server at Yahoo, they requeue on the sender's mail server. After set periods of time, the mail server tries sending them again.
Multiply that by thousands of mail servers sending and resending messages to Yahoo, and the load on machines all over the Internet jumps, as does the bandwidth being used.
Techweb noted that Yahoo replied to questions with a statement on the issue. Fingers pointed at the scourge of email and recipients everywhere, spam:
"As spam attacks continue to hit all e-mail services at unpredictable rates, Yahoo is constantly enhancing technologies and improving operations in order to deal with the load," the statement said.
Some commenters on the article thought that the connections made by the profiler may be hitting a firewall at Yahoo, resulting in their being blocked. Since the diagnostic tool made connections to port 25 as a normal mail server would, that may not be the case.
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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