April 14, 2006 Yahoo Plagued By Slow E-Mail By Antone Gonsalves Courtesy of Page 1 of 2 A small security firm in Iowa says it has discovered why Yahoo's is sometimes slow. An analysis of Yahoo Inc. mail servers found that they were only able to accept email about half the time on average, making it likely that email was taking longer than normal to deliver, the security firm said Friday. In testing 16 Yahoo mail servers, Dymeta Inc., based in Bettendorf, Iowa, found on average that the servers were unable to accept email 45 percent of the time, and the number of available servers ranged from as low as four to as high as 12, Aaron Gillette, chief technician for the company, said. "We're not saying that mail isn't going to get through, but it's likely to take longer than normal," Gillette said. "Normally, when you send email from one account to another, you can expect it to be delivered in minutes. With the problems they've got, it could take hours or even days to get through, or it could be bounced back entirely." Yahoo, among the largest providers in the world, sending more messages per quarter than the U.S. Postal Service, Federal Express and the United Parcel Service combined in a year, declined a request for an interview. The company, however, did email a statement that blamed its problems on fighting "As spam attacks continue to hit all e-mail services at unpredictable rates, Yahoo is constantly enhancing technologies and improving operations in order to deal with the load," the statement said. Dymeta, which sells the email security appliance TrimMail Inbox, conducted the analysis April 12 after receiving what it considered an unusual number of complaints from email administrators at a number of businesses. The company posted its finding in its online publication Dymeta embarked on the analysis out of curiosity and as an opportunity to test its new tool called Mail Profiler, Gillette said. In establishing a connection with Yahoo servers, the testing tool found that they were able to get a response only 55 percent of the time. The rest of the time, there was no response at all. SMTP, or simple mail transfer protocol, is the standard means for between mail servers on the Internet. E-mail This Story Print This Story Page 2: next page Page 1 | 2 Get the latest Messaging news, product info, and trends every week.			Office Letter: Display The Size of Outlook Messages Microsoft Preps E-Mail, Collaboration Managed Solutions Top 10 Best New Services AT&T, Yahoo Jointly Offer VoIP Big Loss For IBM: P&G Making Lotus-To-Microsoft Switch Microsoft Patch 'Erases' Outlook Express Addresses; Users Irked     Messaging Pipeline's Main RSS Feed     Messaging Pipeline's Blog RSS Feed Editorial and vendor perspectives The Six Flavors Of Windows Vista Microsoft plans to release a full six-pack of Vista versions, one for every taste. Which Vista will be right for you? Hope is Not Enough When It Comes To Compliance Three Ways To Authenticate E-Mail And Stop Spam Wikis In The Workplace Review: Google Desktop 3 Do you think making payments via IM or other messaging platforms will become popular? Sure     37% When it's more secure     33% No way     18% Don't know     12% In search of messaging products? Check out our brand new Product Finder for a directory of groupware and collaboration tools, security products, archiving solutions, and more.