Tag Archives: yahoo

Hotmail, Cisco, ReturnPath, Yahoo sued for blocking email

  By Remy | November 5, 2010 - 08:50 | Deliverability, Email marketing
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Two months ago Dela Quist posted on Deliverability.com about a class action lawsuit waiting to happen: this is because certain webmail providers like GMail and Hotmail are diverting email from landing in inboxes which they deem either spam or unimportant. An important quote from that post:

“….in the US it is a Federal crime to hide, keep or open others people’s (snail) mail without permission…”

Of course, spamfighting is a good cause, but when email you are expecting is withheld from you, that is not a good thing. Right now ‘good’ email is getting blocked more and more and so far it’s a downhill ride. Currently Hotmail, Cisco, Yahoo and ReturnPath are being sued by Holomaxx, says Ken Magill: the reason would be the blocking and reading (wiretapping) of legitimate email through faulty filters.

Quoting:

“According to HolomaXx, Yahoo and Microsoft began blocking HolomaXx’s messages after the firm acquired its own block of IP addresses and began sending from them in June.

As a result, the complaints claim, Yahoo and Microsoft have disrupted HolomaXx’s contractual relationships and threatened its ability to survive as a business.

Moreover, the complaints allege, Microsoft and Yahoo have “intentionally and recklessly disregarded HolomaXx’s repeated requests to cease their conduct and … have refused to provide any information that would permit HolomaXx to remedy the situation.”

The question is whether this law suit will be just a fad or the first in a line of many cases against (web) mail providers and other companies running spamfilters: the missing regulation and clear checklist rules hasn’t helped in providing the best email experience for both senders and receivers. Lately there have been more and more false positives or simply missing emails popping up here and there: some have blamed GMail’s new Priority Inbox, others are pointing to the learning spamfilters which try to get it all right and maybe are getting a bit too tight.

More info can be found here (Techeye) and here (Spamresource).

GMail, Yahoo web mail spam filters gone crazy?

  By Remy | October 19, 2010 - 14:30 | Deliverability, Security
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From various people (which I will quote later on) I’ve seen mentions that their or other’s email campaigns have recently ended up in GMail and / or Yahoo’s spam filters. From one person I received their emailing which arrived in GMail’s spam filters with many subscribers, making their campaign results plummet. In the email itself I couldn’t find any reason for a spam filter to regard it as being spam: next to that previous messages from the same sender and reply address have never been sent to the spam folder. I tend to think I can think like a spam filter, or at least know a bit of how they work, but these instances have left me dumbfounded.

Here’s one other mention from Janet Roberts about Yahoo:

@remybergsma Looks to me like they’re fiddling w/the dials cuz the emails in my folder today are ones I *always* open and often act on.

Furthermore, some people have noticed that their GMail calendar reminder emails have been marked as spam by GMail’s own spam filter. Chad White from Retailemailblog noted this:

Lots of murmuring about Gmail’s spam filters becoming hyper-aggressive suddenly. Some blaming Priority Inbox.

So far I’ve seen some messages in my own GMail inboxes being sent to the spam folder, for really no apparent reason: they were just fine layout and content wise, and I’ve been subscribed to them for quite a while. Not too long ago someone else mentioned that GMail’s own Calendar reminder emails have been ending up in the spam folder too: the only thing he did to the reminder emails is delete them, and that should not be a reason to mark something as spam.

Have you noticed any web mail provider’s spam filter behaving in an odd manner recently? Please let us know in the comments: hopefully we can find out more about what’s going on.