BT-Yahoo! security feature withdrawn

19th May 2008

Yahoo! and BT have suspended a security feature temporarily after it prevented some BT customers from being able to send emails, it has been reported.

According to the Guardian, the measure required messages to display a Yahoo! or BT address in the from field in order for it to pass through the server.

However, this meant that senders using their own domains found their messages blocked, being issued with the information that error 553 had occurred and asked to validate their domain by clicking on a link.

Phil Gyford, a freelance web consultant and blogger, commented to the publication: that BT's attempts at honing security measures were essentially a good thing.

"Trouble is, they implemented it without telling anyone, then made it fiendishly complex to fix. The issue is even more confused by the apparently pointless partnership with Yahoo!," he added.

In related news, the Associated Press has reported that two spammers were given a $230 million (£118 million) judgement after failing to turn up to a court hearing over more than 730,000 spam messages sent on social site MySpace.