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Yahoo retiring user IDs: why you shouldn't worry

A couple weeks ago, Yahoo announced that they were retiring abandoned user IDs. This has been causing quite a bit of concern among email marketers because they’re not sure how this is going to affect email delivery. This is a valid concern, but more recent information suggests that Yahoo! isn’t actually retiring abandoned email addresses.
You have to remember, there are Yahoo! userIDs that are unconnected to email addresses. People have been able to register all sorts of Yahoo! accounts without activating an associated email account: Flickr accounts, Yahoo groups accounts, Yahoo sports accounts, Yahoo news accounts, etc,. Last week, a Yahoo spokesperson told the press that only 7% of the inactive accounts had associated email addresses.
Turning that around, 93% of the accounts currently being deactivated and returned to the user pool have never accepted an email. Those addresses will have hard bounced every time a sender tried to send mail to that address.
What about the other 7%? The other 7% will have been inactive for at least a year. That’s a year’s worth of mail that had the opportunity to hard bounce with a 550 “user unknown.”
If you’re still concerned about recycled Yahoo userIDs then take action.

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Yahoo releases user names

According to TechCrunch, Yahoo has started notifying people if their desired username is available. For users who asked for names that aren’t available now, Yahoo has a solution. They will be keeping wishlists for users for the next 3 years. If those usernames are abandoned and expire, Yahoo will notify people by email.
Any sender using email as an account key (either for resetting passwords or granting access) should be careful about releasing accounts to Yahoo users. Yahoo has established a new header type (Require-recipient-valid-since, currently going through the IETF standards process) to minimize the chance that the wrong people get access to other accounts tied to a recycled mailbox.
For those of us who didn’t put in some addresses we, too, can create username wishlists, we’re just going to pay $1.99 for the privilege.

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Yahoo and Goodmail

The industry has been abuzz the last few days with the news that of Feb 1, Yahoo will no longer be supporting Goodmail in their interface. I did get a chance to get a response from someone at Yahoo, but didn’t get a chance to talk to anyone from Goodmail. Look for a post next week discussing the breakup, what impact it has on the industry and what this may mean for other ISPs.

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