Tech Forum

I have a ward that would like to use Yahoo mail. They can actually access Yahoo fine but apparently Mail is unusable because another site required by the mail client -- yimg.com -- is blocked. I'm not sure what level of filtering we have and will contact the GSC tomorrow, but I thought I would see what I could find out here. Has anyone run into this?

From the name I assume that domain contacts necessary images. I can understand how the church might block certain image sites but I am told this is not the site for general images. I have not looked at it myself; this information is coming from a very competent programmer in that ward.

Thanks.

Edit:
I forgot to do a search first ... I see a mention last year of this site being blocked, but I'm not sure at what setting.

I would suspect that yimg.com is also used for images posted to yahoo groups some of which have very objectionable images on them.

Aaron Z

I guess that must be why they block yahoo groups -- our stake had created one and I ran into that issue a while ago. I didn't know you could put images out there. According to this ward clerk that's not where the Yahoo image search is looking though. I just realized that I have an old Yahoo mail account and checked and see that that domain is used for style sheets, themes, scripts, and a bunch of stuff. But I have limited knowledge in that area.

I use yahoo mail in my meetinghouse without a problem. All blocking is done by the firewall you have installed. While I'm no expert, you can talk to the stake president to see if he will allow a loosening of restrictions on what is allowed on the meetinghouse internet.

In a recent conversation with GSD, they indicated that filtering levels only applies to the ASA firewall. Neither the PIX nor the 881W have any options.

Thanks. I talked to the help desk today and due to outdated information they couldn't identify which firewall was in which building, but they did confirm that 2 of our 4 firewalls are on extended access and the other two have general access (all 4 are ASA's). I will talk to our Stake Pres. about having all switched to general, which is what all the new ones have if I'm correct, and I'll stop by other buildings and try Yahoo mail there.

Yahoo Mail did a big update, and it seems all the graphical design elements of the new version are handled by and served from yimg.com, but if I see an image at all in emails through Yahoo or included in messages in Yahoo Groups, they are stored in the original source document, that being either the email or message depending on which one, and not the Yahoo site servers themselves.

This will explain why Yahoo Groups generally is blocked while genealogical and some other categories of groups are not. This can be done on an allow/block basis on some if not most content filtering services.

So yimg.com should not be a problem, it's individual portions of the Yahoo service or even individual pages within the Yahoo service that may be the issue, and almost always it's third party stuff that may be stored there, not anything that Yahoo uses on their end and that includes yimg.com

Great, thanks, that seems to match what the clerk thought. I'll test it out tomorrow but hopefully it'll work.

I just ran into this today. A patron needed to recover his FamilySearch username and password. The info was sent to his Yahoo mail account. However, parts of the Yahoo mail interface were blocked, so he could see the message in a list, but he could not open the message.

Our FHC and stake center use an ASA with general filtering.

Dana in Council Bluffs

Not seeing issues here.

Typically, we've used Yahoo Mail to get something over to the printer from a laptop, and the laptop was on the wireless while the main PC where we needed to print from was the clerk desktop, we simply emailed the document from the sender to the sender, opened Yahoo Mail, and opened the PDF and printed it. It was a high priest report I was working on as the secretary, we just did it in word (that's why the personal laptop) then created a PDF then printed it after reopening Yahoo Mail on the clerk computer to retrieve the same report. Saw no filtering issues.

We're on an ASA 5505 in a standalone FHC nearby and I had to open my personal account to check a genealogical email out related to something I was doing, and had no problems, so it's the old access levels more than likely. This is even with the big updates in October and earlier this month at Yahoo Mail.

For the record, Yahoo is number 1 in the US, number 3 in the world for personal email, Google and Hotmail are the others in the top 3.

I'm thinking as Dana is, that it's old filtering level settings that are involved with the blocking of some needed sites when wanting to use them at differing locations on the network.