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   TidBITS Delivery Restarted for iCloud, Yahoo, and AOL Subscribers

   Adam C. Engst

   Do you use an AOL, Yahoo, or iCloud (mac.com, me.com, or icloud.com)
   email address? If so, and if you subscribed to the email edition of
   TidBITS at some point in the past but stopped receiving issues along
   the way, my sincere apologies. Recently, while tracking down a problem
   that caused significant email deliverability problems for comcast.net
   addresses, I realized that thousands of subscribers from AOL, iCloud,
   and Yahoo had also bounced due to inaccurate spam filtering on the part
   of those email providers. The iCloud bounces happened in the past few
   weeks, but the AOL and Yahoo bounces took place earlier.

   I have now restarted email delivery for everyone in these domains, so
   if this is the first issue of TidBITS you've received in a while,
   welcome back, and I'm tremendously sorry for the deliverability
   problems! You can resend issues to yourself manually, which is also a
   great way to test if your email provider is blocking TidBITS for some
   reason. For details, read '[1]Resend TidBITS Issues to Yourself' (8
   March 2013).

   You can also check on the status of your subscription and restart
   delivery manually in the event of problems by [2]logging in to your
   account. That page also lets you change your name, email address,
   password, and more.

   Of course, if you've already resubscribed to TidBITS from another email
   address, or if you're no longer interested in Apple-related news and
   products, unsubscribing is simple. Just scroll to the very bottom of
   the message and click the Unsubscribe link there.

   How Did This Happen? -- We've been distributing TidBITS via email since
   1990, with the technology underlying the list changing a number of
   times. We currently use a homegrown system that ties in with the
   overarching account database that also tracks everyone who buys Take
   Control books, so sending email, whether for TidBITS or Take Control,
   is a matter of building a list on a fly from a database query.

   Because we've been doing this for so long, and for the most part
   successfully, I've been lax in keeping up with the latest in the email
   deliverability world. Or, rather, I was until earlier this year, when I
   buckled down, implemented technologies like [3]SPF and [4]DKIM, and
   started signing up for [5]feedback loops that alert me when a
   subscriber at a major email provider marks one of our mailings as spam
   instead of unsubscribing.

   (Marking a legitimate, if unwanted, message as spam is unfortunately
   common, but please don't do it, because it hurts the reputation of the
   sender for no reason, and that in turn can hurt email deliverability to
   other users in your domain. To get off a list you subscribed to, always
   use the unsubscribe link, usually available at the bottom of a
   message.)

   One aspect of our system that's not ideal, in retrospect, is that the
   primary reporting it provides is the number of active users sent to
   each week. In the past, I've often gone weeks or months without
   checking it, since it normally isn't particularly interesting. Losing
   750 Comcast subscribers was noticeable, and the loss of another few
   thousand iCloud subscribers on 27 October 2014 also got my attention.
   Unfortunately, the URL in the bounced messages that purported to
   explain the problem showed that there was no problem, and email to
   postmaster@mac.com is bouncing.

   I'll be keeping a closer eye on both subscription numbers and the
   bounce logs in the future, and if you notice problems, please let me
   know and complain to your ISP or email provider.

References

   1. http://tidbits.com/article/13621
   2. http://tidbits.com/account
   3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework
   4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail
   5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email)

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