Today’s top item on the b3ta front page, under Site News:
Yahoo please talk to us! Help! – our yahoogroups list (with over 100,000 subscribers) has been deleted. We don’t know why. If you work at Yahoo and can help us sort this out please contact me at robmanuel AT gmail dot com.
posted by rob on 10th Feb at 2pm
B3ta is a long-established UK humour site who send out a weekly newsletter, every Friday afternoon, using Yahoo! Groups as their mailing list service. They’ve been doing this for years. Yep, that’s 100,000 subscribers.
Anyway, if anyone from Y!Groups, or anyone who knows someone there, is reading, please do get in touch with the b3ta guys — this is a very serious catastrophe for them. I’d be curious to hear how/why this happened.
To tie this into spam-filtering and email operational topics, it brought this posting from Jeremy Zawodny to mind:
This all makes me wonder if it’s worth it for smaller organizations to bother running their own mail servers anymore. If Google offered small business mail the way Yahoo does, there’d be some serious competition in the market and it’d make a lot of people’s lives much easier.
While Jeremy was talking about a different service from list hosting, I think we’re seeing the other side of the email-outsourcing coin, here.
Update: fwiw, it’s back:
Yahoo update – on Friday Yahoo deleted our list of 100,000 newsletter readers email addresses, hence we didn’t send a newsletter. Today they’ve been in touch and have promised a response by Tuesday. Fingers crossed. UPDATE: It looks like it’s back! Hooray for Yahoo!