Emails sent from oxfordschools.org to either yahoo.com or aol.com accounts were blocked by Yahoo since approximately Dec. 2.
The block affects all schools in the Oxford Community Schools district.
The block only went one way. Parents were still able to email staff from Yahoo and AOL accounts, but staff was unable to respond to those emails.
AOL.com accounts were also affected because both AOL and Yahoo are owned by Verizon Media. “ymail.com” accounts may also be affected. The exact number of accounts affected is not known.
The district’s technology department resolved the issue by Tuesday morning. Emails from the school district can now be received by Yahoo and AOL addresses. They will still be marked as spam, however. Parents are advised to check their spam folders and mark emails from the district as “not spam.”
“Yahoo is quick to block, but not so quick to unblock,” said district senior technology consultant Debbie Fox.
The issue was on Yahoo’s end, so it was up to Yahoo when the Oxford Schools domain was unblocked.
“We can’t call Yahoo directly because there is no contact number,” said district network technician Saso Vasovski.
Yahoo limits the number of emails allowed to be sent from one domain over a certain amount of time. Once that limit has been crossed, emails sent from that domain to Yahoo accounts are flagged as spam and blocked. Yahoo does not publish the email limit number for security reasons.
While the snafu was in full effect, Oxford Community Schools administrators were able to communicate emergency information with those email addresses through schoolmessenger.com.
Vasovski does not think there is any risk of this address being blocked, but he cautions parents to not mark emails from this address as spam. If the address is marked as spam too many times it could also be blocked by Yahoo’s algorithm.
“My personal opinion is to shy away from yahoo,” Vasovski advises. “I’ve been a Gmail user for many years. Not to say this would never happen with Gmail if we hit their limits, but Gmail’s limit is a lot higher and its algorithm is much more lienient.”