Zombies are real but less of a problem

A few years ago I wrote a series of blog posts about zombie email addresses. Zombie addresses are those that someone owned and used and interacted with, but for whatever reason stopped logging into and checking. This series started with the time before the zombies, and moved on to the zombie uprising. Then discussed how they don’t eat brains, but they do love to take a bite out of deliverability. Smart marketers, however, can defeat zombies by the judicious application of the double tap.
portrait of a Zombie computer maniac looking camera from side
Since that series of blog posts a few things have changed. The biggest thing is that the webmail providers are being much more aggressive about disabling email reception at addresses where folks don’t log in. I have a few addresses on different providers I use for testing purposes. I have to remember, though, that I need to log into them before sending test messages. If I don’t, they generally bounce.
This doesn’t completely remove the challenge of zombie addresses but it does make it easier for regular senders to purge their lists of zombies just through their normal bounce handling. No double-taps needed.

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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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Delivery implications of Yahoo releasing usernames

Yahoo announced a few weeks ago it would be releasing account names back into the general pool. This, understandably, caused a lot of concern among marketers about how this would affect email delivery at Yahoo. I had the opportunity to talk with a Yahoo employee last week, and ask some questions about how this might affect delivery.
Q: How many email addresses are affected?

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Data hygiene

I talk about data hygiene with clients a lot. In my experience, poor data hygiene is the number one reason that legitimate, permission based marketing ends up in the junk folder. Too many marketers don’t remove abandoned addresses from their mailing lists. As the abandoned addresses build up, eventually the list accumulates enough zombie addresses that it looks similar to a spammer’s list.
I’ve talked in depth about zombie accounts previously (part 1, part 2, part 3, apocalypse) and they talk a lot more about why we have zombies accounts and why they’re just starting to be a bigger issue for marketers. Not only are we just starting to hit critical mass with zombie accounts, but ISPs are really starting to weigh engagement in their delivery decisions. Zombie accounts are not engaged with mail. Heck, they’re not even engaged with their own email addresses.
Many marketers, though, hate the idea of data hygiene. They hate thinking about losing a potential customer. They can show me numbers that say someone didn’t open an email for 18 months and then spent hundreds of dollars on a purchase. Or they can tell me that 10% of their revenue came from people who hadn’t opened an email in more than 12 months.
I don’t want to take those subscribers away from you, the ones who are engaged with your brand or your mail in some un-trackable way. But I do want to stop the zombies from eating your delivery.

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