Email Delivery Issues – Updated 10/7/2024 10:29pm PDT

10/6/2024 – The tool provided by our website hosting company through which we must make a recommended configuration change to try to resolve the Yahoo mail delivery problem is not working as advertised. We continue to iterate with their "escalated support", which is proving to be much more challenging than it should be, taking a day per iteration with a different agent responding each time and not properly reading the case notes to understand what we need them to do.

What you need to know

Since about Friday, September 13th, Yahoo! has been deferring delivery of email to addresses in domains for which they provide email service so long that they are eventually returned to us. Email through all other service providers is working normally.

This problem has primarily affected our Daily Voting Reminder emails for the Shelter Challenge, but acknowledgements of adoption applications, adoption approvals, spay/neuter voucher requests and so on have all been affected.

You can always vote in the Shelter Challenge directly without waiting for the daily reminder email.

If you want to switch your email address to one not affected by this problem, please email webmaster@cathouseonthekings.com with the new address and we will make the change.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Diagnosis and Resolution

It's taken several weeks trying to get help from our hosting provider, but eventually we identified the root problem ourselves.

There are two related parts to this problem which are described below.

Yahoo! Email Block

The first problem is that no email from our email server (i.e. from any @cathouseonthekings.com address) has been accepted for addresses in domains handled by Yahoo! email servers. Those domains include, but are not limited to, the following:

We finally found an explanation confirming what we had begun to suspect was the case. A technical explanation is available here for anyone interested in the gory details.

We have implemented the first of two recommended mail server configuration changes and must wait 48 hours be able to tell if they worked before applying the second, more draconian configuration change.

AT&T domains delivering email to Junk folders

It turns out that email for addresses in AT&T domains, such as @att.net, @sbcglobal.net, @pacbell.net etc. is also being handled by Yahoo! email servers, but instead of blocking our email to these addresses, the email is being delivered to the recipient's Junk/Spam folder.