Yahoo FBL confirmation problems

yahoo_en-US_f_p_142x37Over the last few months I’ve seen people complaining about losing the Yahoo FBL emails with verification codes. This seems to be intermittent and no one could really explain what was going on.
Dale Lopez, VP of operations for V12 group, shared that their operations group discovered that one issue with the missing verification emails has to do with the length of the From: address and a port25 default settings.
In Dale’s words:

We figured it out and have confirmed via test. . .  If you are a PowerMTA user (Port25 Solutions), the default from line that PMTA accepts is set to 64. The from line that Yahoo has in the verification code message, is much longer. If you increase the length of the maximum characters to 254, you should receive the verification email.

So if you’re having problems receiving the Yahoo verification emails, check with your IT department to make sure you’re not restricting the path length. The “path” in this case is the return-path address. RFC 5321 says “the maximum total length of a reverse-path or forward-path is 256 octets (including the punctuation and element separators).” Reverse-Path in this case is the address in the envelope from, Forward-Path is the address in the To: line.
So if you’re one of the companies having problems receiving the Y! verification email, check you incoming mail settings and make sure you’re not blocking long email addresses.
 

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May 2015: The Month in Email

Greetings from Dublin, where we’re gearing up for M3AAWG adventures.
In the blog this month, we did a post on purchased lists that got a lot of attention. If you’ve been reading the blog for any length of time, you know how I feel about purchased lists — they perform poorly and cause delivery problems, and we always advise clients to steer clear. With your help, we’ve now compiled a list of the ESPs that have a clearly stated policy that they will not tolerate purchased lists. This should be valuable ammunition both for ESPs and for email program managers when they asked to use purchased lists. Let us know if we’re missing any ESPs by commenting directly on that post. We also shared an example of what we saw when we worked with a client using a list that had been collected by a third party.
In other best practices around addresses, we discussed all the problems that arise when people use what they think are fake addresses to fill out web forms, and gave a nod to a marketer trying an alternate contact method to let customers know their email is bouncing.
We also shared some of the things we advise our clients to do when they are setting up a mailing or optimizing an existing program. You might consider trying them before your own next send. In the “what not to do” category, we highlighted four things that spammers do that set them apart from legitimate senders.
In industry news, we talked about mergers, acquisitions and the resulting business changes: Verizon is buying AOL, Aurea is buying Lyris, Microsoft will converge Office365/EOP and Outlook.com/Hotmail, and Sprint will no longer support clear.net and clearwire.net addresses.
Josh posted about Yahoo’s updated deliverability FAQ, which is interesting reading if you’re keeping up on deliverability and ESP best practices. He also wrote about a new development in the land of DMARC: BestGuessPass. Josh also wrote a really useful post about the differences between the Mail From and the Display From addresses, which is a handy reference if you ever need to explain it to someone.
And finally, I contributed a few “meta” posts this month that you might enjoy:

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Yahoo Mail Deliverability FAQ Updated

Yahoo has updated their FAQ and listed out a number of factors they use to determine if a mail message is spam.

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Yahoo Feedback Loop

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If you are utilizing the Yahoo Complaint Feedback Loop, you should have received an email today about an upcoming change to the CFL.
The message received was:
“On June 29, 2015, we will transition Yahoo Complaint Feedback Loop (CFL) administration from Return Path to Yahoo Customer Care.
We will continue sending spam reports during this transition. However, you will need to save existing CFL information as it will not be available after the transition.
To save the existing CFL information:

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