Yahoo retiring user IDs: why you shouldn't worry

A couple weeks ago, Yahoo announced that they were retiring abandoned user IDs. This has been causing quite a bit of concern among email marketers because they’re not sure how this is going to affect email delivery. This is a valid concern, but more recent information suggests that Yahoo! isn’t actually retiring abandoned email addresses.
You have to remember, there are Yahoo! userIDs that are unconnected to email addresses. People have been able to register all sorts of Yahoo! accounts without activating an associated email account: Flickr accounts, Yahoo groups accounts, Yahoo sports accounts, Yahoo news accounts, etc,. Last week, a Yahoo spokesperson told the press that only 7% of the inactive accounts had associated email addresses.
Turning that around, 93% of the accounts currently being deactivated and returned to the user pool have never accepted an email. Those addresses will have hard bounced every time a sender tried to send mail to that address.
What about the other 7%? The other 7% will have been inactive for at least a year. That’s a year’s worth of mail that had the opportunity to hard bounce with a 550 “user unknown.”
If you’re still concerned about recycled Yahoo userIDs then take action.

  1. Go through your customer database and identify Yahoo IDs that bounced over the last 12 months with “user unknown.” Permanently disable those addresses in your database. This is particularly important if you have any reason to think you may need to email your whole database (like legal notices).
  2. Consider setting up internal processes that if those addresses show up on your list in the future, you actually send out confirmation messages and get the recipient to double opt-in.
  3. If you have accounts tied to those usernames, disable the accounts and do not let new users of those addresses see the old data. Remember, these are addresses that have been inactive for at least 12 months, and have been returned to the pool. The new user is probably not the same as the old user.

What Yahoo! is doing is not unusual. Many ISPs recycle unused and abandoned addresses back into the pool regularly. The difference here is that Yahoo announced it beforehand. For email marketers, there really is nothing new here and they shouldn’t worry.
Carlo at Exacttarget has more to say from a delivery standpoint. 

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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.
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