Vague reports of Yahoo problems

A number of people, on different forums, have been asking if anyone is seeing a higher bounce rate than usual with Yahoo. Not sure exactly what’s going on here. As I understand it, folks are talking with Yahoo about it. If I hear anything more, I’ll share.
For now, though, if you’re seeing a small increase in Yahoo bounces (or other weirdnesses) others are seeing something odd, too.

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Deliverability at Yahoo

We have multiple measures of deliverability. Ones that we don’t even let in the door, and then we have ones that customers indicated that they don’t want to be delivered.

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Things you need to read: 2/5/16

gearheadAsk the Expert: How Can Email Marketers Stay Out of Gmail Jail and in the Inbox? The expert in question is an old friend of mine, Andrew Barrett. I met Andrew online in the late 90s, and we worked together (briefly) at MAPS. He was out of email for a while, but I’m pleased he came back to share his talents with us. The information in the article is valuable for anyone who struggles with getting to the Gmail inbox.
Unclutter Your Inbox, Archive & Keep Your Messages. Shiv Shankar talks about some new features at Yahoo Mail. With a simple click, you can archive email so it’s available to search, but not cluttering up your inbox. One of the things that jumped out at me from that article is that Yahoo is providing 1 TB of storage. That’s more than Google!
The EEC is doing a survey on the impact of CASL and want to hear from marketers. Go check out their blog post and take their survey.
Sparkpost has a guest blog from Alex Garcia-Tobar, co-founder of Valimail about common DKIM failures. I’ve met Alex a few times and I’ve always found him a pleasure to talk to. Alex is somewhat new in the email space, but he really gets some of the challenges in the authentication space. A lot of the issues he mentions in that blog post like lack of key rotation and shared keys are some of the technical debt I was talking about in my predictions for 2016 post.
What links have you read this week that are worth sharing?

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Bounce handling is hard

Sometimes I find it hard to find a new topic to write about. I decide I’m going to write about X and then realize I did, often more than once. Other times I think I can blog about some issue only to realize that it’s too complex to handle in a quick post. There are concepts or issues that need background or I have to work a little harder to explain them.
One thing I haven’t blogged about before is bounce handling. That particular topic falls into the other category of posts that take a lot of time to write and need a significant amount of work to make sense. I was even joking with my fellow panel members at EEC a few months ago about how that’s a post that so needs to be written but I’m avoiding it because it’s so hard. There’s so much to be conceptualized and explained and I realize it’s not a blog post but multiple blog posts, or a white paper or even a book.
Bounce Rate words on a thermometer or gauge measuring the rate of abandonment as visitors or audience leaves your website or online page or resource
So let’s start with some simple definitions.  Those of you who work at ISPs are probably thinking of bounces in terms of accept than reject, that’s not exactly what I’m talking about here. I’m writing these for senders, who usually call rejects during the SMTP transaction bounces.

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