Not Receiving Emails From Yahoo!

[Carbo]

This one has me scratching my head. For the past month or so I have noticed that emails sent to me from any Yahoo! account aren't being received. I can send emails to Yahoo! accounts, but folks trying to contact me from there aren't getting through. Nor are the emails being bounced back to the sender, leaving them to believe I received their correspondence. Needless to say, this is creating confusion and, in a few cases, some angry folks who think I am ignoring them. Just where are these emails going? More importantly, how do I get to the bottom of this issue? I don't even have any error messages to clue me in.
Thank you.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Check your email filter settings with your ISP.

 

[phisrow]

What is the chain of events by which you get your email?

e.g. are we talking Yahoo -> Verizon Home -> Verizon's Mailserver -> IMAP -> Thunderbird
or
Yahoo -> Some bulk provider's T1 -> Exchange -> whatever horrid proprietary protocol Exchange uses -> Outlook ?

First step to solving the problem, give us as much information as you know about what steps your email takes on its journey. Then we can find the likely weak spots.

 

[Carbo]

Originally posted by: phisrow
What is the chain of events by which you get your email?

e.g. are we talking Yahoo -> Verizon Home -> Verizon's Mailserver -> IMAP -> Thunderbird
or
Yahoo -> Some bulk provider's T1 -> Exchange -> whatever horrid proprietary protocol Exchange uses -> Outlook ?

First step to solving the problem, give us as much information as you know about what steps your email takes on its journey. Then we can find the likely weak spots.

Yeah, I was kind of vague. . .
Using OE6 as my email client. Comcast is my ISP. HostPC hosts my website. I can receive emails with my my personal email, ****@comcast.net. But my website based email accounts aren't receiving any Yahoo! sent messages. I'm not receiving any error message, and the recipient isn't finding any bounced back emails on their end.
I am now recommending they CC the email to my backup Gmail account, and I am receiving those emails just fine.

Breaking news! I just sent a variety of emails from a Yahoo! account I have. Again, the ones addressed to my Comcast email were received. But the emails sent to my website based email accounts didn't get through. Then, when I went back to my Yahoo! account I found this message:
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at yahoo.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following
addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

:
83.170.64.234 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 relay not permitted
Giving up on 83.170.64.234.
Does any of this make sense to anyone?
Thank you.

 

[phisrow]

I don't know much about the dark underbelly of email systems; but google pulls up a fair amount of good looking stuff with the search term "550 relay".

You have definitely found the right symptom.

 

[Carbo]

Thanks. I'll keep digging around.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Carbo
83.170.64.234 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 relay not permitted
Giving up on 83.170.64.234.[/b]
Does any of this make sense to anyone?

The "550 relay not permitted" typically means that the target mail server doesn't think it's responsible for the domain name of the mail recipient. It thinks it's being asked to Relay the email to another mail server that IS responsible, but that's not allowed. Hence the "relay not permitted" message.

If you open up a Command Prompt, what happens if you issue the following command:
telnet 83.170.64.234 25

If your outgoing packets aren't blocked by your ISP, you should see something like:

220 uk2mxserver3-9.uk2.net ESMTP UK2.NET - UK's Biggest Host Fri, 01 Dec 2006 06:14:51 +0000

This is the mailserver responding. You can then try sending manual SMTP messages addressed to your mailbox and see what happens.

 

[Carbo]

RM, I did as you said and received that exact message. However, being a lo-tech kind of guy, I'm not sure what you mean when you say I can "try sending manual SMTP messages addressed to your mailbox". Can you explain, please? Thank you.

 

[RebateMonger]

I didn't want to add specific directions if it wasn't going to be useful to you:

----------------------------------------------------------------
EXAMPLE OF TELNET SESSION TO MAILSERVER
Type in the following commands in a Command Prompt window. Hit the "Enter" key after each line. After the message line "this is a test", hit enter, and then add a line that only has a single "." (period) in it:

telnet 83.170.64.234 25
helo mydomain.com
mail from: test@test.com
rcpt to: myaccount@mydomain.com
data
this is a test
----note: end the message with a "." on an empty line
quit
----------------------------------------------------------------

Here, use your hosted email domain name and account name in place of "mydomain.com" and "myaccount@mydomain.com"

The above commands will tell the hosting mailserver that you want to send an email with the content "this is a test":

From: test@test.com
To: myaccount@mydomain.com

this is a test

 

[corkyg]

I find this amusing in that I have blacklisted in general all yahoo.com email. That is a huge source of spam, and I don't have any personal contacts with Yahoo addresses. So, I would say that your anti-spam filters are set like mine - somewhere in the chain. Create a white list with thos specific Yahoo sender you want and you should have no trouble.