Send message error (possible abuse - Yahoo)

verybusy · Post by **verybusy** » March 11th, 2012, 8:03 am

bpindar wrote:change the background color to yellow (or anything but white, like #fffffe) and the email goes through

Actually all you need to do is "CHANGE" the background color. It doesn't matter if you change it to the default "white"/"#ffffff" or any other colour.

It seems that there may be incompatible code that Yahoo is just now filtering on.

Is this Yahoo or Thunderird's fault? Not sure.

I suspect that Thunderbird may just change the default email template to fix the problem.

For now, if I get the error when sending an email, I just click "Format", "Page colors and Background", click "Background" and set the color manually to the same white background. When I click send again, it goes through fine.

Cheers

stormseye · Post by **stormseye** » March 11th, 2012, 8:20 am

Thanks so much, bpindar. How did you discover this unusual - if not bizarre - workaround?

To help others who may not know how to do this, here's how to set that up globally so that you don't have to do it for each email you send:

1. In the TB menu bar, press Tools > Options > Advanced.
2. In the "General" tab, press the "Config Editor..." button.
3. Note the information in the "about:config" warning popup (ie, be careful), then press the "I'll be careful, I promise!" button.
4. Scroll down the resulting list until you find the line beginning with "msgcompose.background_color", which probably is set to the default value of #FFFFFF (pure white).
5. Double-click on that line and change it to #FFFFFE (nearly pure white), then press the "OK" button.
6. Close the "about:config" window.

That's it. Works for me, even with html emails.

Obviously, this is only a workaround. The core problem still needs to be addressed by Yahoo (or whoever)!

Cheers

verybusy · Post by **verybusy** » March 11th, 2012, 8:20 am

Further to my previous post, this could indeed be a problem with Thunderbird. Someone said that going back to Thunderbird 3.0 fixes the problem. Is there an error in the email template that came up post 3.0 that is only now coming to light?

If I manually change the background color of my email to the SAME background color that it already has in the template, it works fine. The fact that Yahoo now blocks the html emails could simply indicate that an "error" in the html code that has been around for years has come to light because of Yahoo's new filters.

If manually changing the background color of the email sovles the problem, doesn't this mean that the html code in the template is incorrect? Presumably the manual color change simply sets the background to what it was supposed to be by default.

Cheers

Post by **rsx11m** » March 11th, 2012, 8:28 am

Apparently Yahoo checks exactly against <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> produced by default in Thunderbird 5.0 and later. Earlier 3.x releases work as confirmed in http://gsfn.us/t/2p90e potentially because the background color there is specified in lower case (#ffffff) rather than upper case as in the more recent TB releases.

Why Yahoo would consider a basic style definition (which appears to be old but valid HTML) as a hard and determining factor in their spam/abuse detection is an absolute mystery to me...

cscasi · Post by **cscasi** » March 11th, 2012, 8:36 am

Anonymous wrote:same message here

Transaction failed : Cannot send message due to possible abuse; please visit <a class="postlink" href="http://postmaster.yahoo.com/abuse_smtp.html">http://postmaster.yahoo.com/abuse_smtp.html</a> for more information.

started today for no reason--TB must be compromised

Here is an email address you can use to send your issue(s) to Yahoo. I am not sure you can cut and paste anything into the email but you can try. Maybe if they get enough complaints they will get this issue resolved; although I am sure it has been working on it since yesterday.

"Yahoo! Customer Care" <customercare-en@cc.yahoo-inc.com>

verybusy · Post by **verybusy** » March 11th, 2012, 8:54 am

Based on the information contained in the link you provided, you just need to set the background color to lowercase #ffffff from uppercase #FFFFFF.

In Thunderbird, click on "Tools", "Options", "Advanced", "General", "Config Editor", "I'll be careful, I promise!", type "msgcompose.background_color" next to filter, double click on "msgcompose.background_color", change #FFFFFF to #ffffff and click OK, close the editor window and the other open Thunderbird windows.

Enjoy!

Texas Guest Again · Post by **Texas Guest Again** » March 11th, 2012, 9:04 am

The "#ffffff" fix totally worked for me.

Didn't check to see if I can have HTML working again - but is a good workaround - THANKS!

FrankSmith · Post by **FrankSmith** » March 11th, 2012, 9:16 am

The above suggestion to change background color to #FFFFFE (slightly off white) does send the email but it never arrives.
Lost in the Yahoo cloud somewhere.

verybusy · Post by **verybusy** » March 11th, 2012, 9:26 am

Texas Guest Again wrote:The "#ffffff" fix totally worked for me.

Didn't check to see if I can have HTML working again - but is a good workaround - THANKS!

Thunderbird has the "msgcompose.background_color" set to uppercase #FFFFFF

however

if you want to change the background color in your message manually, Thunderbird offers you the colors in lowercase hex code.

It would seem that Thunderbird changed the color code to uppercase for the default template (i.e. "msgcompose.background_color") but left the manual color code options in lowercase.

This may in fact be a bug in Thunderbird that Yahoo's new filtering may have inadvertently uncovered.

I wonder who will ultimately make the change to fix the problem... Yahoo or Thunderbird or both?

Cheers

Post by **rsx11m** » March 11th, 2012, 10:15 am

verybusy wrote:I wonder who will ultimately make the change to fix the problem... Yahoo or Thunderbird or both?

While CSS-like style definitions are preferred these days over hard-coded HTML attributes I'm not aware that the way how the HTML editor encodes it is no longer legal. Thus, the immediate fix should come from Yahoo and seems to be very simple by just removing that offending rule from their system. They can fix it in 10 minutes or so whereas making major changes to the Mozilla Mail/News Core code would take quite a while until those effectively reach a release.

verybusy · Post by **verybusy** » March 11th, 2012, 10:24 am

rsx11m wrote:
verybusy wrote:I wonder who will ultimately make the change to fix the problem... Yahoo or Thunderbird or both?

While CSS-like style definitions are preferred these days over hard-coded HTML attributes I'm not aware that the way how the HTML editor encodes it is no longer legal. Thus, the immediate fix should come from Yahoo and seems to be very simple by just removing that offending rule from their system. They can fix it in 10 minutes or so whereas making major changes to the Mozilla Mail/News Core code would take quite a while until those effectively reach a release.

I agree that it should be Yahoo's job to fix it since it's their new filtering that broke it. However, I wonder if the change from lowercase to uppercase was deliberate or inadvertent on Thunderbird's part. Default background color setting is uppercase whereas manual color background setting is lowercase.

chaplain · Post by **chaplain** » March 11th, 2012, 10:33 am

Okay, bpindar, fix yourself up a PayPal link, so we can all buy you a beer or two. : >)

Post by **rsx11m** » March 11th, 2012, 11:09 am

Yes, linking the issue to the style definition was certainly the key to finding that workaround!

verybusy wrote:However, I wonder if the change from lowercase to uppercase was deliberate or inadvertent on Thunderbird's part.

In general, different people are working on different parts of the code, thus the way how preferences are named or styled may not always be consistent. The msgcompose preference defaults were set as far back as 2003 and specified in upper case at that time already. Apparently the editor code translated that into lower case on the fly up to 3.x, I can't figure out where this may have happened. In general, both versions should be legal HTML, so apparently someone removed the "redundant" conversion at some point, thus triggering the upper-case presentation in the <body> tag which Yahoo used as template for their trigger rule.

RufusBrown · Post by **RufusBrown** » March 11th, 2012, 11:11 am

Thank you bpindar and stormseye. In settings, as outlined above, I changed my background color from EEEEEE to EEEEEF. This solved the problem. I can now compose in HTML without getting the error message. I can live with this change. My eye can barely see the difference. A much better solution than deselecting compose in HTML.

I hope Yahoo gets this fixed before the start of business tomorrow, or they will have many, many unhappy users demanding a fix. Look out ATT and others. Your corporate clients won't settle for "not our problem" or paying $49 for nonexistant tech support.

Essex Man · Post by **Essex Man** » March 11th, 2012, 11:32 am

The ffffff fix certainly appears to work -- our thanks to the clever individual/s who figured that one out.

But to a non-tecchie this whole thing beggars belief. ffffff instead of FFFFFF and the whole thing collapses. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Come on Yahoo and Mozilla nerds -- get your frigging act together !

Send message error (possible abuse - Yahoo)

Re: Send message error (possible abuse - Yahoo)

Re: Send message error (possible abuse - Yahoo)

Re: Send message error (possible abuse - Yahoo)

Re: Send message error (possible abuse - Yahoo)

Re: Send message error (possible abuse - Yahoo)

Re: Send message error (possible abuse - Yahoo)

Re: Send message error (possible abuse - Yahoo)

Re: Send message error (possible abuse - Yahoo)

Re: Send message error (possible abuse - Yahoo)

Re: Send message error (possible abuse - Yahoo)

Re: Send message error (possible abuse - Yahoo)

Re: Send message error (possible abuse - Yahoo)

Re: Send message error (possible abuse - Yahoo)

Re: Send message error (possible abuse - Yahoo)

Re: Send message error (possible abuse - Yahoo)