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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Dear Email Address Occupant

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 didn’t actually know their email address. There are a lot of ways spamtraps can end up on lists that don’t involve malice on the part of the sender.
But I can’t help thinking that mailing an address for 10 years, where the person has never ever responded might be a sign that the address isn’t valid. Or that the recipient might not want what you’re selling or, is not actually a potential customer.
I wrote a few weeks back about the difference between delivery and marketing. That has sparked conversations, including one where I discovered there are a lot of marketers out there that loathe and despise delivery people. But it’s delivery people who understand that not every email address is a potential purchaser. Our job is to make sure that mail to non-existent “customers” doesn’t stop mail from actually getting to actual potential customers.
Email doesn’t have an equivalent of “occupant” or “resident.” Email marketers need to pay attention to their data quality and hygiene. In the snail mail world, that isn’t true. My parents still get marketing mail addressed to me, and I’ve not lived in that house for 20+ years. Sure, it’s possible an 18 year old interested in virginia slims might move into that house at some point, and maybe that 20 years of marketing will pay off. It only costs a few cents to keep that address on their list and the potential return is there.
In email, though, sending mail to addresses that don’t have a real recipient there has the potential to hurt delivery to all other recipients on your list. Is one or two bad addresses going to be the difference between blocked and inbox? No, but the more abandoned addresses and non-existent recipients on a list there are on a list, the more likely filters will decide the mail isn’t really important or wanted.
The cost of keeping that address, one that will never, ever convert on a list may mean losing access to the inbox of actual, real, converting customers.
 

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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.
If you are seeing a lot of bounces at Yahoo! over the last few days, you need to remove those addresses from your lists. I also recommend looking at the engagement statistics of these newly purged recipients. This will tell you, approximately, what an abandoned address profile looks like. You can use that information to make good decisions about purging unengaged users at other ISPs as well. Not only does this lower costs, because you’ll be sending to less non-responsive email addresses, it will also improve delivery at many ISPs.

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Broken record…

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 times this has been said and how depressing it is that we have to say it again. And again. And again.
A number of folks have told me that the reason they don’t pay any attention to delivery professionals is because we don’t provide enough real data. They can show that sending mail to old addresses costs them nothing, and makes them real money.
That’s not really true, though. We do provide data, they just don’t like it so they don’t listen to it. Return Path publishes lots of numbers showing that mailing unengaged recipients lowers overall delivery. I can provide case studies and data but companies that are committed to sending as much mail as possible throw up many reasons why our data isn’t good or valid.
The biggest argument is that they want hard numbers. I do understand this. Numbers are great. Direct and clear answers are wonderful. But delivery is a squishy science. There are a lot of inputs and a lot of modifiers and sometimes we can’t get exactly one answer. The data is noisy, and difficult to replicate. One of the reasons is that filtering is a moving target. Filters are not, and cannot be, fixed. They are adaptive and are changing even between one hour and the next.
Delivery experts are about risk management. They are the parents requiring everyone in the car wear seat belts, even though the driver has never had an accident. They are the fire department enforcing fire codes, even though it’s the rainy season.
Risk management isn’t about the idea that bad things will absolutely happen but rather that it is more likely that a bad thing will happen in some cases.
In this case, it’s more likely that delivery problems will happen when mailing old addresses. And if those addresses aren’t actively contributing to revenue, it’s hard to argue that their presence on a list is more beneficial than their absence.
But I repeat myself. Again.

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