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...
We’ve returned from London, where I spoke at the Email Innovations Summit and enjoyed a bit of vacation. My wrap-up post also mentions an article I wrote for the Only Influencers site, which looks at questions I get asked frequently: “Why does spam make it to the inbox and our legitimate marketing email doesn’t? Should we just copy their tactics?” In industry news, Yahoo caught our attention for...
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...
Nothing is impossible to kill. It’s just that sometimes after you kill something you have to keep shooting it until it stops moving.Mira Grant, Feed It’s getting to the time of year when I can get away with some horror movie metaphors. Today, things that are dead. 1. ADSP ADSP was a domain repudiation scheme that should never really have lived, but thankfully it’s now dead. If...
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...
I’m working on a blog post about the new Gmail tabbed inbox and the messages Gmail is inserting into the promotions tab. The messages aren’t showing up on most of my accounts, so I logged into an infrequently used account of mine. Ads are there, I got my screenshots and some data about the behaviour of the messages. So far so good. I also discovered that at least two other women are...
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...
RSS - Posts