SOAR

SOAR Customers,

Many of you have started experiencing delivery issues with your SOAR Email Lists over the weekend. We have figured out the commonality with what is going on - Yahoo yet again.

• If you send an email FROM a Yahoo email account to a SOAR Email List it will not get delivered to any of the Email List members.
• If you send an email FROM any other email domain it will not get delivered to members with Yahoo email addresses.

Why? - The Short Version

Yahoo has been plagued with receiving spam to their email accounts, being the fake sender of spam to others, and numerous counts of large numbers of hacked accounts.

Over the weekend Yahoo implemented new spam filtering that is intended to significantly decrease all of that. They are doing this with the intent of improving their reputation. Unfortunately it is breaking some email standards and etiquette that has been around for decades and creating delivery issues for email and distribution lists across the Internet, not just your Email Lists at SOAR.

Why? - The Long Version

For over a decade, email standards and etiquette for sending email to "distribution lists" (what SOAR calls Email Lists) has been the following:

From: <email list address> on behalf of <original sender's email address>

Some examples of what you are used to seeing:

From: announce@troop123.com on behalf of scoutleader@gmail.com
From: Announce <announce@cubpack123.com> on behalf of John Smith <jsmith@yahoo.com>

This is accomplished by leaving the original FROM address in place and adding a SENDER address to the email.

From: <original sender's email address>
Sender: <email list address>

From: John Smith <jsmith@yahoo.com>
Sender: announce@cubpack123.com

This allows you to see who originally sent the email and which email list it came to you through. It also allowed you to Reply directly back to the original sender individually and Reply All back to the email list itself.

Yahoo accounts receiving email:

• To reduce spam to Yahoo email accounts, Yahoo has decided that is no longer acceptable.
• If the FROM address does not match the SENDER address or there is any "trail" in the email headers before the FROM/SENDER address, Yahoo is now considering this spam.
• Not only are they considering it SPAM, they are rejecting it outright.

Yahoo accounts sending email:

• To prevent people from "faking" email coming from Yahoo addresses, they have also cranked tolerance settings on three spam technologies in combination (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC)
• This tells external email servers if they should accept email that comes from a Yahoo email address.
• These new settings do the the same thing - if the FROM and SENDER do not match or the DKIM signature does not exist or the message has been altered and no longer matches the DKIM signature - they tell the remote email server to reject the email message.
• There is nothing the remote server can do, they have to follow the instructions of the originating email domain and their settings.

Why does SOAR offer Email Lists?

We consider the SOAR Email List features to be a huge benefit to our customers. You communicate with your members directly through your own email client from your desktop computer, tablet, or mobile phone. Communications works on your terms.

We mention this because the SOAR EBlast is not being affected by all this. Why? Because those emails originate from the SOAR servers directly and do not have the FROM/SENDER matching issues or any other previous email "trail" inside them.

We could switch to an email feature (like others in the scouting website market) where you have to login to your unit website, compose an email message on a web page, and pick the groups/members you want to send to. The website would then send the email out from the server. This is an easy solution to create and maintain and avoids all the delivery issues Yahoo is raising.

We believe that would be an inconvenience to you, or customers, and force you to do email "our way". This would take away the ease in which you communication with your members - compose an email like you do any other email.

What is SOAR doing to make sure email is delivered?

We have put a short term solution into place while we determine a better long term approach to deal with the new Yahoo changes.

The issue here is really with Yahoo. At the same time we understand that you need your Email Lists working without questioning if emails are being delivered.

We have switched all Email Lists to the Return Type of "Email List" to ensure email delivery and stop the email bounces. This makes sure the FROM and SENDER addresses in the email match and will increase delivery to and from Yahoo.

We are also scrubbing all the information of any email "trail" before the email was received by SOAR, including the DKIM signatures. This will address the second part of what Yahoo has done.

SOAR has and will continue the following to ensure email delivery

1. Use of SPF technology to allow remote email servers to verify emails coming through SOAR are authenticated and not spam.
2. Membership in the major (Yahoo, AOL, Google, Comcast, etc...) ISP's email white list and spam feedback programs to ensure high delivery rates.
3. Constant monitoring of the "black lists" to make sure SOAR does not get on any of them.

What does this mean to me?

1. The "original sender" and their email address will not be included or displayed in email going to SOAR Email Lists.
2. Reply and Reply All will both go back to the Email List itself, not the original sender.
3. Members that send email to the email list are going to have to make sure they add a "signature line" at the bottom of each email to indicate who sent the email and what their contact information is.

Note: This does NOT affect the Authorized or Global Senders options on your Email Lists. We still check those on the way in to make sure the FROM address is allowed to send email to a given Email List on your website.

Side Note

Many of you have your own personal "vanity domain" for your family but really use Yahoo or Gmail for email services. If you do not have your email configured properly, you may start having the same issue...

If people receive emails from you and it looks like the following you should change your email settings to a single email address.

• J Smith on behalf of John Smith

What Do I Need To Do?

1. Make sure members are adding a "signature line" to all emails with their contact information.
2. Avoid sending from Yahoo email accounts if at all possible.
3. Stay tuned for our investigation into a longer term solution.

The SOAR Support Staff
support@soarol.com
585-388-0211
M-F 9AM-4PM EST