In At The Bleep End

A Yahoo security upgrade that caused chaos for thousands of BT customers who use their own domain name to send email has been temporarily removed after protests from users.

The problem arose when Yahoo decided as an anti-spamming measure to stop any emails going through the servers, which it runs for its partner BT, that did not have a matching BT/Yahoo address in the From: field. People who tried to send using their own domain names found the email did not get sent, and received a confusing message saying that they had "error 553" and offering a link where they could "validate their domain".

Neither BT nor Yahoo could give firm figures on how many were affected, though BT confirmed that it was several thousand. The upgrade has now been temporarily removed but will be rolled out again "shortly".

"Problems arose because it affected significantly higher numbers than we expected," said BT. Fixing it was cumbersome and difficult, according to message boards, forums and blogs. Typical of the tales of woe is freelance web consultant and blogger Phil Gyford, who spent many hours sorting it out for his mother (tinyurl.com/2fgo7f).

He says: "BT's new security could be a good idea. Trouble is, they implemented it without telling anyone, then made it fiendishly complex to fix. The issue is even more confused by the apparently pointless partnership with Yahoo."

--- The 'fix' for this is here but see the fix-fix in Phil Gyford's post mentioned above also.

Posted by d - 11:01 pm - 0 Comments

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