I’m not sure for how long this has been going on, but I noticed today that Yahoo! is running Verizon.net’s email services.
I’m not sure for how long this has been going on, but I noticed today that Yahoo! is running some email services for some of Verizon.net’s customers.
Things to look for, of course, include Yahoo headers in rejections and bounces. The headers I’m looking at today indicate that email is being handled by a Verizon server on the first hop, but is immediately handed to Yahoo after that.
I’m sure it’s old news, and a search for “verizon yahoo email” on google turns up lots of stuff like the portal page at http://verizon.yahoo.com/.
UPDATE: Ok, so I think I have discovered what’s going on here after some gentle, back channel nudging to look at things again. Verizon certainly doesn’t make it easy to figure out what is going on. If I ever find a single page that explains things, then I’ll post a link. In the meantime, the clearest example I can find is a PDF document for FiOS customers (see page 5 of the PDF, which is really page 1 of the document).
What’s happening is that Verizon has partnered with several megaportal sites depending on which Verizon service a subscriber is using. FiOS customers can pick between AOL and Yahoo while DSL customers get AOL, Yahoo, MSN Premium, or Windows Live to select among. The portal site that you select may also impact email routing. If you, for instance, select Yahoo then when mail comes to your Verizon.net address it is immediately shunted to Yahoo’s system. If you select MSN or Windows Live, then mail will be shunted to Microsoft’s systems. And, of course, if you select AOL, they will immediately forward the mail to AOL’s mail system. For those of you who run *NIX mail servers, think of it like a .forward system.
There is also, I am told, the option to not partner with any of the megaportals with the result that Verizon will continue to handle all of the mail for that client.
UPDATE (Part the Second): As you’ll find in the comments below, JD found the original Press Release and the DSL Fact Sheet for the Yahoo version of what Verizon is doing. Thanks, JD!
Here's the press release about this from 2005:
http://newscenter.verizon.com/press-releases/verizon/2005/page.jsp?itemID=29708038
and the fact sheet, also from 2005:
http://newscenter.verizon.com/kit/consumer-dsl/dslfactsheet.html
[...] Yahoo! running (some of) Verizon’s Email Services. Talk about old news making the news again. In the course of investigating a blocking issue for my employer, I discovered that the mail server for the Verizon customer we were mailing was flowing through Yahoo’s service. The rest, as they say, is history. [...]