Ordinary Nothing

[Update: There has been some changes on this Yahoo! issue. I'll keep tracking it]

I did some more checking about the problem with Yahoo! Mail’s spam filter, from the post in which I complained about the horrible customer support experience with Yahoo and Kana.

Since I can’t seem to actually get any info to them, I’ll try posting it here. The behaviour is very peculiar.

First of all, those messages get to the Bulk folder only when the sender and the recipient are the same. I made attempts with several different Yahoo mailboxes (real ones, of friends. Creating fake addresses just for this seemed a bit too much).
Messages of the problematical format sent between different addresses arrived to the Inbox (Again, this is where ALL senders are in the address book, so unless there are user filters, they have to go to the Inbox and not the Bulk folder).
Messages in the problematical format sent from an address to the same address, arrived in the Bulk folder, even when the address is inside the address book.
The only way this would make sense is if messages where the sender and the recipient are identical are somehow more suspicious. But people do send emails to themselves, and in all my tests the messages where sent from the Yahoo! Mail web interface, and I assume they can know that, which makes the likelihood of the address being spoofed rather low.

And what about the problematical format?

All I tested where text (i.e. non-HTML) messages.
Anything on the Subject field didn’t matter, only the message Body.

The problems occurred when the body of the message consisted of a URL.
Only URLs pointing to anywhere under the http://www.geocities.com/ address caused the problem. Links to any other domain I tried in any other format, went to the Inbox as they should. This includes both random real domains, bogus domains, and other Yahoo! domains.
For the GeoCities URL, the main domain alone ( http://www.geocities.com ) does not  cause the problem. But put anything at all under it, and it will. All of these went to the Bulk folder:

• http://www.geocities.com/whatever
• http://www.geocities.com/whatever/
• http://www.geocities.com/whatever/something/
• http://www.geocities.com/whatever/something/page.html
• http://www.geocities.com/somepage.html

Also, if the URL started with http://geocities.com , there was no problem.

What about other things in the message body?
Putting even a single line of text after the URL resulted in the message getting safely to the Inbox. Putting just empty lines however resulted in the message being sent to the Bulk folder.
Putting a single line of text before the URL, with several different texts, still got the message sent to the Bulk folder.
Putting more than one line of text before the URL got it properly to the Inbox.

Strange… Very strange…

Anyway, I do hope someone from Yahoo! Mail will somehow notice this post. This is a problem, even though not a major one (Well, not major in the sense that not many people email themselves geocities links. Major in the sense that whatever is causing this problem may have other side effects, that may bite someone at a different time and context, and that that they have a system behaving differently than it should). It’s broken. They need to fix it.

October 5th, 2004 at 18:39 EET | Categories: Web | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.