Yahoo List-Unsub header
Last week some folks were mentioning a spike in unsubscribes from Yahoo. This is being investigated.
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AOL Changes
We’ve known for a while that AOL email infrastructure is going to be merging with Yahoo’s, but apparently it’s happening sooner than anyone expected.
The MXes for aol.com will be migrated to Yahoo infrastructure around February 1st. Reading between the lines I expect that this isn’t a flag day, and much of the rest of the AOL email infrastructure will be in use for a while yet, but primary delivery decisions will be made on Yahoo infrastructure.
The AOL and Yahoo postmaster teams are pretty smart so I assume they’ll have made sure that their reputation data is consistent, and be doing everything else they can do to make the migration as painless as possible. But it’s a major change affecting a lot of email, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some bumpiness.
If you’ve done anything … unwise … with delivery to AOL addresses, such as hard-wiring MXes for delivery to aol.com, you should probably look at undoing that in the next week or so. I’m guessing the changeover will happen at the DNS level, so if you’ve nailed down delivery IPs for aol.com you might end up trying – and probably failing – to deliver to the old AOL infrastructure.
Spike in Yahoo error codes
A number of people have mentioned over the last couple weeks that they’re seeing a spike in Yahoo rejecting mail with
554 delivery error: dd Requested mail action aborted
Discussions on various mailing lists indicate these messages are related to inactive accounts. Addresses that bounce at Yahoo with these codes should be handled as inactive addresses and removed from future mailings.
Yahoo disabled forwarding
Al posted about this over on his blog earlier this week. Yahoo has disabled the ability to forward email from one Yahoo account to an email account on a different system.
There is, of course, all sorts of speculation as to why forwarding has been disabled including speculation this has to do with holding on to accounts during the Verizon purchase. It’s certainly possible this is the case.
However, forwarding email is hard. Forwarding email on a large scale can result in spam blocks and delivery problems. It’s such an issue M3AAWG published a forwarding best practices document. It’s possible that Yahoo is making some changes on the back end to better implement the best practice recommendations. I don’t know, but it’s possible that Yahoo is telling the truth that they’re improving technology.