Verizon changes but no time line

Yesterday there was a lot of talk about Verizon moving out of email and transitioning all their customers over to the AOL backend.  The source was a page in the Verizon help center about transitioning an email address. There is no date on the page, so it’s unclear when this is going to happen or when it started.
I posted about Verizon beginning this transition back in May of 2016: Changes coming to Verizon email. The wording on the AOL page I link to is very similar to the wording on the page that was passed around yesterday.
Without a date it’s hard to really provide any advice, other than to maintain your list hygiene (you do have list hygiene programs, right?) and remove addresses that hard bounce. Quite honestly, I don’t think this will really have any effect on delivery. It doesn’t appear these changes are happening all at once, and Verizon customers have the option to keep their verizon.net address. They’re just going to have to access it differently.
For companies that use an email address as a primary key for logins or accounts, it’s probably a good time to contact customers with a verizon.net address and ask them to update their address. That’s a good idea most of the time, but when we know changes are happening at a domain level, it’s a requirement.

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Setting expectations at the point of sale

In my consulting, I emphasize that senders must set recipient expectations correctly. Receiver sites spend a lot of time listening to their users and design filters to let wanted and expected mail through. Senders that treat recipients as partners in their success usually have much better email delivery than those senders that treat recipients as targets or marks.
Over the years I’ve heard just about every excuse as to why a particular client can’t set expectations well. One of the most common is that no one does it. My experience this weekend at a PetSmart indicates otherwise.
As I was checking out I showed my loyalty card to the cashier. He ran it through the machine and then started talking about the program.
Cashier: Did you give us your email address when you signed up for the program?
Me: I’m not sure, probably not. I get a lot of email already.
Cashier: Well, if you do give us an email address associated with the card every purchase will trigger coupons sent to your email address. These aren’t random, they’re based on your purchase. So if you purchase cat stuff we won’t send you coupons for horse supplies.
I have to admit, I was impressed. PetSmart has email address processes that I recommend to clients on a regular basis. No, they’re not a client so I can’t directly take credit. But whoever runs their email program knows recipients are an important part of email delivery. They’re investing time and training into making sure their floor staff communicate what the email address will be used for, what the emails will offer and how often they’ll arrive.
It’s certainly possible PetSmart has the occasional email delivery problem despite this, but I expect they’re as close to 100% inbox delivery as anyone else out there.

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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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Congestion at Verizon

Yahoo! finally found their broken cable (I had no idea Yahoo had fiber) and fixed it. Now, I’m seeing a lot of reports that Verizon is accepting mail very, very slowly. Some folks are reporting no more than 20 messages a minute. This could be due to congestion, and just an underpowered system, or it could be some purposeful throttling on Verizon’s end.
In any case, this is affecting a lot of senders and not just the marketing end of things.
Updates as I get them.

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