My email server is being blocked by Yahoo: TS03 Message permanently deferred

I've dealt with this frequently for our clients. Unfortunately, you are at a TS03 level which can be harder to get removed.

Here's some tips to get this moving forward:

  • Determine how much email you are sending to Yahoo on a daily/weekly basis

  • Examine some of the rejected emails. See if they are indeed spam.

  • Get your sender score: https://www.senderscore.org/ (sign up for more detailed results)

  • Forwarded emails? Are your users forwarding emails to Yahoo?

  • Setup DKIM (you've already done this great)

  • Join the compliant feedback loop http://help.yahoo.com/l/au/yahoo7/mail/postmaster/postmaster-30.html

I am assuming you have ruled out the following:

  • Open Relay

  • Insecure web script being used by hackers/spammers

  • Client sending out large newsletters

Forwarded Emails

Just a special note about this as many people don't realize this can get you blocked.

If your client forwards and email to Yahoo (or AOL, Gmail, MSN etc) and then the user flags the email as spam at their ISP:

Your server's sender reputation is damaged not the original sender.

Since as much as 80% of email is spam, a large percentage of the forwarded emails could be spam. Even at low volumes such a large percentage will get you blocked.

See if any Email Gets Through

You will also want to scan your logs over several days to see if any email gets through. Sometimes a block will be lifted but if you are still sending a high amount of spam, you will get blocked.

If you can update your question with some details on the mail stats, forwarding and other items, perhaps I can provide some more assistance.

As a last resort, you can change your server's IP address, but do this only after you clean up any items that could be triggering their policies.


I had the same problem.

What ultimately worked for me (I have several users forwarding all kinds of personal email via .forward) was to actually become a "Yahoo! Verified Bulk Sender":

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/bulkv2.html

It took a couple of days but I haven't had any problems at all ever since. Note that I am not a bulk sender in any usual sense, I just have normal users using normal .forward files.

I know it seems ridiculous, and I was cursing yahoo (or Yahoo!, as I learned) the entire time, but it works after all the workarounds (routing mail through a different ip, server, whatnot) and checking or tweaking extra stuff (DKIM, Domain Keys, SPF records) doesn't...


I know this is an old thread but the problem doesn't seemed to have changed over the last couple of years. My solution, which is kind of radical and probably can't be followed by everyone, is to ban Yahoo. I do not send emails to people with Yahoo accounts and I don't allow people with Yahoo addresses to sign up.


I had (and have) the same problem - I just 'inherited' an IP in the datacenter for my new mailserver and it was probably an IP from which some spam / crap was sent to Yahoo so it was banned. There are 3 solutions:

  1. ask Yahoo for whitelisting your IP at http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/bulkv2.html. I did, after 3 weeks of automated responses and one-way communication they confirmed that "they've made appropriate changes to the IP in their database". In fact nothing changed at all and all my (my server) emails are still returned as "deferred".
  2. use 3rd party SMTP (you'll get a different IP and your emails will be delivered properly). There are plenty of services, some of them free to certain amount of sent emails like https://mandrill.com/
  3. the most radical solution - don't play the game of the fool. They don't like you? Don't like them too and simply disallow to e.g. register a new member with @yahoo.com email (and recommend another freemail, there are plenty of much more friendly services). Simply ban Yahoo, the did the same to you.

(P.S. Make sure your email politics fulfills all the standards - you have rDNS, you have DKIM / DomainKeys, you have a PTR record on your domains. All mature freemails will accept your emails then... except Yahoo :-) ).


I had this problem with sending emails to Yahoo when one of our offices got a new internet connection and a new IP address. It seemed that a previous "owner" of the IP address had used it for something that got them banned from the Yahoo mail servers.

As a result, after doing the same thing you did and not getting any help from Yahoo, we set up a Send Connector (in Exchange) so that any emails going to @yahoo.* would be routed through a different mailserver that Yahoo DID accept mail from.