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?

Yahoo is not providing any numbers for how many usernames are being returned to the “available” pool. However, most of these addresses were never associated with an email account. The Yahoo rep told me that the number of accounts with email addresses was “miniscule.” What’s more, the vast majority of these email addresses have been bouncing for a long time. As of July 15th, all the email addresses going back into the pool are bouncing and will be until someone claims the username and activates the email address.

Q: What bounce message are senders receiving when they try to send mail to affected email addresses?

All addresses returned to the pool will bounce with a message indicating that the mailbox doesn’t exist. And most of these addresses have been bouncing with that message for months or years.

Q: Are any of these addresses going to be turned into spamtraps?

Yahoo won’t discuss any specifics of their spam filtering. However, there is always the chance that abandoned addresses will be reactivated to spam traps at any time after they are abandoned. This is on reason bounce handling is so critical.

Q: Is Yahoo going to make exceptions for senders who are opt-in, but may send mail to someone who picked up a reclaimed address?

No. These are old, abandoned email addresses and Yahoo expects senders to bounce handle their lists.

Q: Will sending mail to these non-existent addresses affect Yahoo! reputation?

Most of these addresses have been inactive for a long time, so senders with good bounce handling polices should not be concerned.

Q: What do you recommend to opt-in senders who don’t want to send mail to the wrong person?

Make use of the Require-Recipient-Valid-Since header.

Q: Anything else we should know?

This is a normal process for most ISPs. Usernames and addresses don’t stick around forever and most ISPs recycle addresses.

Overall, I don’t think there are many changes from my previous advice not to worry too much about this. There aren’t going to be huge delivery implications to the username recycling. But I do have some suggestions for senders.
If you haven’t mailed a Yahoo account in more than 6 months, mail it now to make sure it’s deliverable. Most of these accounts have been long term bouncing, and regular mailers should have already removed the address. But, I know some senders segment to the extent that some accounts don’t get mail for months or years. Mail them now.
Remove Yahoo addresses that bounce with “user unknown” “mailbox unavailable” and “mailbox unknown” messages on the first bounce. We know that Yahoo will be releasing some portion of these addresses back into the available pool. You could keep mailing those users and hope that the address starts working, and it might. But that recipient may not be who you think it is. Yahoo is not known for sending fake or incorrect mailbox unavailable messages, so trust their bounces and remove addresses promptly.
If you use email as a “key” for access to an online account, consider implementing the proposed “Require-recipient-valid-since” header. Require-recipient-valid-since is a new header going through the IETF standardization process. This header lets a sender, say a social networking site sending a password reset notification, tell the receiving ISP when the address was originally collected. The receiving ISP can bounce the mail if the account has been recycled since it was collected. I’ll be talking more about this in another post.
 

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Zombie email: Part 3

Last week, in Zombie email: part 1 and part 2 I talked a little about the history of email addresses and how changes in the ISP industry in the early to mid 2000’s brought about the rise of zombie email addresses. Today we’ll look at the effect zombie addresses have on email stats and why ISPs are starting to monitor zombie addresses.
A zombie address, despite the fervent belief of some email marketers, doesn’t come back to life. The person who initially registered that address has decided to stop using that email address.  The defining factor of a zombie address is that there isn’t now and won’t be anyone in the future reading email sent to that address. There is no human there to read or react to any email sent to that address.
A zombie address does not represent an actual recipient, they’re just remnants of a recipient that once was present.
Having a list containing any significant number of zombie addresses can throw off metrics enough to mislead a sender about the effectiveness of their email marketing program. Sometimes, the zombie addresses make the metrics look worse, sometimes they make metrics look better. In either case, the metrics don’t accurately represent the performance of a marketing program.
Zombie email addresses do bulk out a mailing list, making lists look bigger. They’re not real addresses, so they don’t reflect quality, but they do impress marketers that think bigger is always better. But, in reality, you may as well add thousands of addresses at non-existent domains for the real value these addresses bring to your list.
Zombie email addresses on a list depresses any metric that use “number of emails sent” or “number of emails accepted” as a denominator.  If 10% of a list is zombie addresses, then an open rate reported as 15% will actually be an open rate of 16.7%. The more zombie addresses on a list, the more the statistics will be depressed.
In addition to having lower open rates, lists with more zombie addresses also have a lower complaint rate. In fact, in the recent past spammers have padded their lists with zombie addresses as a way to artificially lower their complaint rates.
Spammers using addresses created just to bulk up the denominator and lower complaint rates have led ISPs to start monitoring the types of addresses on a particular list. I first heard about ISPs looking at recipient profiles at a meeting in 2006, so it is not, in any way, a new technique for ISPs. What is new is the number of zombie addresses on legitimate, well maintained lists, and the fact that they are present in high enough volume to affect reputation and delivery.
ISPs use zombie addresses to monitor the reputation of a sender because it is a more accurate way to measure what the recipients think about an email and that sender. Senders ignore zombie addresses because they make some stats look bigger (total list size) and better (lower complaint rates). Many senders also believe that addresses come back to life, despite all evidence to the contrary, and will not purge an address for any reason other than it bounces. They’d rather live with inaccurate and misleading metrics than removing non-performing addresses.
Tomorrow, in the final post of this series, we’ll examine how senders can identify potential zombie addresses and what steps they can take protect themselves from the negative reputation hit from zombie addresses. (Zombie Apocalypse)

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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.

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TWSD: Mail known spam trap addresses

One of the things we all “know” is that if spammers get their hands on spamtrap addresses then they’ll stop sending mail to those addresses. This is true for a lot of spammers, but sadly it’s not true for all.
I don’t think it’s any secret that I consult for all types of mailers, from those who just need a little tune up to those who want me to help them avoid filters and blocking. During some of these consulting projects, I use my own spam folder as research and provide information on the spam that I am receiving from them.
A few years ago I was working with a company who hires a lot of different affiliates to send acquisition email. A few of their affiliates had really poor practices and they were trying to figure out which affiliates were the problem. I handed over a number of mails from my personal spam traps, in order to help them identify the problem affiliate.
I told them, and their affiliate, what my spamtrap addresses were. And, for many years I stopped receiving that particular spam. But, over the last few weeks I’ve seen a significant uptick in spam advertising my former client.
I’m certainly not trying to convince anyone that handing over spamtraps is a good thing. But there is at least some evidence out there that they’re not even competent enough to permanently remove traps. I really have to wonder at how sloppy some marketers are, too, that they’ll hire spammers and not at least hand over a list of addresses they know are bad addresses to mail.
I really thought spammers were smarter than that. I am, apparently, wrong.
EDIT: Of course, mailing this spamtrap gets them nothing but a little ranty blog post here. It doesn’t result in blocking, or disconnection from their ISP or their ESP or anything else. I suspect if there was actually an affect, like, say, I started forwarding this mail to Spamhaus or other filtering companies, they might stop mailing this address. Anyone want a 20 year old, slightly used spam trap?
 

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