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...
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...
One of the big deliverability vs. marketing arguments has to do with data hygiene and dropping inactive users. Marketers hate that deliverability people tell them to let subscribers go after a long time of no activity from the subscriber. Data hygiene is good. Email is not permanent and not forever, and the requirements for data hygiene in the email space are very different than the requirements...
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...
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? Yahoo is not providing...
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...
The Return Path In the Know blog listed 4 reasons mailing those old addresses is a bad idea. Ashley, the author, is completely right and I endorse everything she said. (Although I’d really like to hear what happened to the customer that added back all those addresses. What was the effect on that campaign and future email marketing?) As I was reading the article though, I realized how many...
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...
There’s a great post over on CircleID from John Levine and his experience with a marketer sending mail to a spam trap. Apparently, some time back in 2002 someone opted in an address that didn’t belong to them to a marketing database. It may have been a hard to read scribble that was misread when the data was scanned (or typed) into the database. It could be that the person...
It’d be nice to have a tool to uncover the zombie email addys, but until then, read this from @wise_laura: Kelly Lorenz There’s currently not a programmatic way to make those determinations, but this is where the relationship between senders and receivers comes in. All you have to do is ask recipients what they want. I know, I know, most marketers have a low opinion of the ability or...
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