Rogers Is Eating things It Calls spam

Last Updated on: 29th September 2013, 01:38 pm

Remember the other day when I was talking about how much my spam had gone down? I’m beginning to figure out why. Yahoo, who handles the Rogers email, has started doing some spam autofiltering, rejecting messages before I even see them.

I figured that out when my friend Jen said she was trying to send me a link and it kept being sent back for policy reasons. I told her to send the rejection message to my hotmail so I could see it. This is what it said, except all identifying information has been stripped out.

: host xxx said: 554
Message not allowed – UP Email not accepted for policy reasons. Please visit. http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-04.html [120] (in reply to end of DATA command)

I don’t know what the end part is all about, but I included it for the purposes of helping with google searches.

So, I clicked on that happy link, and got this explanation:

554 Message type not allowed. UP Email not accepted for policy reasons

If you receive an SMTP error or bounce message containing the text string

UP Email not accepted for policy reasons. Please visit http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-04.html

there is something about the message contents that Yahoo! Mail will not accept for policy reasons. For instance, it is against Yahoo! Mail’s policy to send phishing/fraud attempts or viruses. If you feel you have received this error for a message that should be accepted, we encourage you to provide us with detailed information about the rejected message.

So, since Jen didn’t take too kindly to being called a fraudster/phishing scam artist/purveyer of viruses, she decided to click that link and provide them with more detailed information. That’s when we found out, without too much of a surprise, that if you’re blind and have WebVisum, do that part in Firefox and use it for what it was intended. There’s a nice verification graphic you’ll have to solve. There is an audio link, but I didn’t try it. I just cut straight to the good stuff. so if you don’t have WebVisum and can’t see the picture, use the audio link. I can’t vouch for how well it works or how often it’s operational. But it’s there, which is a step up from “Give us your phone number and maybe we’ll call you…if the moon is in the seventh house and Jupitor aligns with Mars and we feel like it.” No that’s not what they say, but that’s how it used to feel.

She got an autoreply saying a human would speak to her in 48 hours. We’ll see how that goes.

So if you send us an email and you get the ugly code 554, you know what to do. We do want to get your emails!

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