Yahoo mail turns 16 today, and in celebration Yahoo is giving all their mail users presents.
The screenshots of the new interface look modern and useable. We’ll see how this plays out.
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 passwords or granting access) should be careful about releasing accounts to Yahoo users. Yahoo has established a new header type (Require-recipient-valid-since, currently going through the IETF standards process) to minimize the chance that the wrong people get access to other accounts tied to a recycled mailbox.
For those of us who didn’t put in some addresses we, too, can create username wishlists, we’re just going to pay $1.99 for the privilege.
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?
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.