Dead addresses tell us things

There was confirmation this week that the increase in “user unknown” messages from Yahoo is actually Yahoo cleaning out abandoned accounts. At the same time a Yahoo is sending out notifications to folks to log into mail.

The first thing every sender should do is remove all these Yahoo addresses from their lists. They’re done, kaput. Gone.

There are some other things worth doing with them, though. Some of these things are informative, they will help help you understand your subscribers and list lifecycle better. Others are protective, they will improve your data hygiene over the long term.

We know that Yahoo disabled a bunch of email addresses that have not been in use for at least a year. There are some other bits of information we have that give us a broader picture of what is happening.

  1. About a year ago, this same thing happened. There was an increase in the number of user unknowns at Yahoo (Thanks, Tara, for noticing I wrote about it last year). It’s possible that they’re scheduling address purges on a yearly basis.
  2. I mentioned reports of an increase in user unknowns from Yahoo in April 2013.
  3. Yahoo is sending mail to users alerting them that if they don’t log into their mail accounts they’ll lose access to mail – I got one of these to the address tied to my flickr account.

Based on this information, I presuppose the following.

  1. Yahoo has an process for reviewing and disabling accounts that happens in the early spring and has done for at least 5 years.
  2. The addresses that started bouncing recently are accounts that have been not logged into for between 12 and 23 months. 12 because this is what the re-engagement campaigns are indicating. 23 because we can assume that some addresses were at 11 months for the disabling a year ago.

We have a known population of yahoo.com addresses that we can assume were abandoned between April 2017 and March 2018. Now you know how many Yahoo addresses go bad in a 11 – 12 month period.

We can ask questions about those addresses that will give us more insight into our subscriber list and how we should handle expiring addresses and data hygiene.

  1. When did those addresses join your list?
  2. When was the last open? click?
  3. Is that address associated with an active login or purchasing account?

With a known population of freemail addresses and some certainty on when the recipients stopped logging into their accounts we can develop data hygiene rules that make sense for our business. It’s not just picking a certain period of time to stop mailing. We can model the behaviour of freemail users knowing when they abandoned their accounts and make sensible policies.

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Increase in bounces at Y!

I’ve been seeing reports over the last few days about an increase in bounces at Yahoo. Reliable people are telling me they’re seeing some increase in “invalid user” bounces.
You may remember Yahoo announced an overhaul of their mail product back in December. Reliable sources tell me that this is more than just interface revamp. In the back end, Yahoo! is removing older products with few users and security problems. This fits in with the changes CEO Mayer has been making with the company: slim down and stop supporting unprofitable products.
It makes sense that while engineers are looking at the guts of the email program and cleaning up the cruft, they will also disable long unused email addresses. This will result in higher unknown users for some senders.
What’s interesting to me is that the reports are somewhat sporadic. Some senders are seeing a huge percentage of bounces, some are seeing the normal percentage. I expect this difference isn’t anything more than how actively a sender purges based on engagement. Senders that purge unengaged addresses are going to have already removed a lot of the addresses Yahoo! is now purging from their database. Senders that keep sending to their whole list, are going to see a lot of unknown user bounces.
I’ve asked a few folks and people who’ve responded told me that spot checks showed all the addresses turning up as invalid had no engagement for long periods of time.
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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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