Vital business emails are going astray, intercepted and quarantined by YahooXtra’s spam filters without the knowledge of the sender or the receiver.

Wellington-based Graphic Dimensions, which provides IT support and services to architectural design companies, has had problems sending email to xtra.co.nz addresses since the beginning of February.

Email from the company, which is also an Xtra customer, is classified by the YahooXtra mail filter as spam, says Graphic Dimensions’ technical director, Paul O’Brien.

This is causing problems for Graphic Dimensions because important messages from its clients, primarily architects, to contractors are going AWOL, O’Brien says.

“If an Xtra user uses a POP client [for example Microsoft Outlook] the messages are not downloaded, appearing to the user that the email has never been sent,” he says.

Xtra users will only be able to see the messages if they log on to their webmail at YahooXtra Bubble — but the messages will then be in the spam folder, he says.

“Xtra has not advised customers that legitimate email may be in their bulk folder and the only way to see it is via Yahoo Bubble,” he says.

Xtra has also advised O’Brien that Telecom has no direct influence on Yahoo’s anti-spam policy, and referred him to Yahoo’s html help page. O’Brien has contacted Yahoo but has had no reply.

“To say the only way to deal with this is by logging on to WebMail and going through the spam messages and adding the email address to the ‘not spam’ is not a practical solution for any business,” he says.

Now, when they are aware of the problem, O’Brien’s clients have to ring to confirm that the emails have gone through.

“This is having a major impact on our clients,” O’Brien says.

Four of his clients say the situation is causing business continuity problems. O’Brien has also talked to a number of other support companies that have the same problem with sending email to xtra.co.nz addresses.

One of Graphic Dimensions’ engineers sent email from his work address to his xtra.co.nz address and this was placed in his spam folder, says O’Brien.

Xtra does want to ensure that senders’ legitimate email gets through to its customers, and has been working to provide information on the minimum standards that are required to ensure uninterrupted delivery, says Xtra spokesman Nick Brown. The company is also working to educate customers so they can use their spam filtering most effectively, he says.

Brown says the Yahoo spam filtering process provides management based on international best practices and operate in a different way to the previous localised Xtra anti-spam service, says Brown. “So we’ve changed the way we filter emails and how our customers deal with spam,” he says.

O’Brien says it appears as if New Zealand domains that do not have an Xtra IP address or their domain name handled by Xtra, are having email “mis-classified” as spam.

“From our tests we have isolated this problem to domains with sending mail servers that do not have their DNS hosted at Xtra, and those that do not use Xtra as their ISP,” says O’Brien.

Brown says all the major email providers in New Zealand manage the reputation of their mail systems on behalf of their customers who use their mailboxes. If you are managing your own mail server, you need to ensure you’re adhering to best practice to ensure you have a good reputation, he says.

Xtra has sent O’Brien’s information to its security team for investigation.

Source: computerworld.co.nz