Do you ever feel like you're outside in the cold, looking in on someone else's wonderful celebration? Is that what you felt like this weekend, when you looked at your Yahoo test box and saw other people's emails being delivered yet yours were delayed? It's not fair! You send good email. You get low complaints. Your users are engaged. This cannot be!
When I worked in network abuse, the department responsible for stopping spam coming out from ISPs, I hated this time of year. You pretty well work from Thanksgiving straight through to New Year’s including weekends, along with the mail admins. You do this so that people get the email they asked for and your mail servers don't turn into a burning pile of expensive slag. We would rotate who worked with a laptop on one knee and the new nephew on the other each holiday. It's not much fun and it's not very rewarding.
ISPs’ mail servers are SWAMPED on Thanksgiving weekend, close to Christmas, and immediately following Christmas. Everyone is sending right now. First priority is personal, meaningful email. One-to-one family and friend emails. Second is small mailings, usually To: a small list of people with a small list of Cc:s and a lot of traffic back and forth. After that is lower-volume regular mailing lists. Then comes highly engaged mailing lists (think hobby lists). Then marketing lists, trying to prioritize in order of how engaged their subscribers are. Scattered in all of that is trying to block a lot of spam and fighting off random Denial of Service attacks.
Everyone sends more email during the holidays, including individuals. That puts a horrible strain on the ISPs’ mail servers. It’s not that Yahoo and Hotmail and AOL don't want your recipients to get your marketing emails. It’s that their users have made it clear that their first priority right now is finding out whether or not they’re going to get to see their new niece or whether they have to wait until Christmas. After that, they’ll find out what you have in mind for savings.
Highest priority is given to email being sent from other ISPs’ outbound mail servers. Sometimes during the holidays, complaints rarely come into play with priority. If there’s not enough MTA sockets (the number of slots that you have for inbound connections) or bandwidth for the other ISPs’ outbound servers (personal email), then ESP customers, business emails, etc, have their connections deferred. It’s much more important to Jane and Joe User to find out what time everyone is meeting at Grandma’s house and who is bringing the pie than it is to find out which items are on sale at which store.
Mail servers will continue to try to deliver email for up to three days, so anything that got deferred on Thursday will keep pounding on Yahoo until Saturday. Spammers spike their volume Wednesday around midnight because all the abuse admins are away for their family gatherings. Some offers go out Thursday, but the main bulk of them hit Friday. Mailers keep on trying to send or resend because their email hasn’t been delivered yet, which causes more problems. Then you have Cyber Monday and more mail on already overloaded servers. It will be Thursday before some customers see their mail bounce and much of it will be mail that would normally be delivered.
Don't take it personally. Mail servers are at capacity right now. Annalivia Ford who wrote that fantastic poem from last week, Laura Atkins from Word to the Wise, and Mickey Chandler who is the go-to for all things related to spam law all talk more about this on their own blogs.
It's truly not that ISPs don't want to accept your email. They have limited resources and they're doing everything they can to get as much wanted email to their users as the can. Their mail servers are like the roads on the holidays. Plan ahead and expect delays.
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