False 550 responses from Verizon

This week there was a reported uptick in user unknown responses for verizon email addresses. The specific response folks were seeing was:

554 delivery error: dd xx@verizon.net is no longer valid. [-20] -mta4047.aol.mail.bf1.yahoo.com

This appears to be a problem with their require-recipient-valid-since header checking. They are aware and are working on a fix.

What this means for senders is if you’re seeing Verizon addresses hard bounce, then you shouldn’t necessarily drop them from your list. They are likely still valid. You can continue to retry mail to those addresses. This does seem to have just affected the verizon.net addresses, not other addresses across the properties.

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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.
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