system

Yahoo! blocking! antiflux! mail!

For reasons unknkown to us, Yahoo! started blocking all mail from antiflux earlier this week. Anything sent from antiflux to a Yahoo! address is blocked but won't bounce until maybe a few days later when the antiflux mail server gives up.

Looks like it started last Sunday morning.

Jun 28 08:56:33 okcomputer postfix/smtp[20779]: 1E8BA38F9E: host b.mx.mail.yahoo.com[66.196.97.250] refused to talk to me: 421 4.7.1 [TS03] All messages from 216.234.161.200 will be permanently deferred; Retrying will NOT succeed. See http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts03.html

(That URL is wrong. It's actually here.)

There's no automated way to find out why they're blocking mail from us and they seem to be ignoring the query I sent. I started the process to sign up for their Complaint Feedback Loop but they won't do anything until we start signing outgoing mail with DomainKeys/DKIM. We're looking into that.

Update (July 5): Yahoo! seems to be accepting antiflux mail again, with no clue as to why they changed their minds. After a series of emails back and forth with their support department, I still have no idea why they were blocking us. Either they don't know either or they just refuse to give out any information. Their suggestions ranged from us being listed on a Spamhaus block list (we aren't) to us sending a "high volume" of emails "indicative of unsolicited mailings" (we weren't), but they refused to give any kind of definitive statement of why we were actually being blocked. Seriously, if you use Yahoo! Mail and want to actually receive email, I strong suggest that you move to Gmail or someone else that doesn't randomly block mail servers.

outgoing SMTP service disruption

You may notice problems sending mail out through antiflux right now. We're working on it.

Update: fixed

Debian upgrade time

Greetings all,

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 was released last month [1] so we're in the process of upgrading everything on antiflux.org. This shouldn't involve taking the whole server offline until right at the end for the new kernel, but you may notice individual services (e.g. web server, email, databases) going offline briefly while the new packages are installed. The plan is to start this afternoon and it may take a day or two to get through everything.

We'll post updates at http://log.antiflux.org/system/ (or http://antiflux.blogspot.com/ if something happens and we go offline). If you notice anything severely broken that isn't noted in either of those places, please contact us at root@antiflux.org if it lasts more than a few minutes.

Thanks,
Tim

[1] http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214

PHP 5

We upgraded to PHP 5 this week. If this breaks anything, let us know.

system upgrade

I'll be working on a long overdue system software upgrade later today and possibly tomorrow.

There shouldn't be any significant downtime. Mail may be slightly delayed. The web server may be down briefly.

Status updates will be posted to our status blog.

antiflux.org downtime notice

Greetings,

The time has come to add a new 1 TB drive to the antiflux.org server! Everything will be offline while it's being installed. Any email sent to you during the downtime should be queued and arrive when the server is back online.

Date: Tuesday, June 24
Time: 9:00 AM MDT
Window: approximately 30 minutes