Yahoo reaches new highs and lows in email standards
Yahoo email addresses have often been more challenging than others to validate.
A few years ago, one of the first questions people would ask us was when they rocked up to our service was; ‘do you do Yahoo?’ It was a USP for us, and for a while we were the only email validators who had figured out how to reach Yahoo servers and make sense of the way they responded to email validation enquiries.
Then things changed. We could still reach the servers at high volumes when other email validation companies couldn’t, but the responses got whacky. We ended up creating a result just for Yahoo, which we referred to as ‘server does not conform’ and we decided that every single Yahoo email address was unverifiable. There was no way we could tell our customers whether or not they could trust Yahoo, as the responses we got broke all standards. Basically, we’d get a response to say an email was good when in fact it would hard bounce. We’d get bad responses about 3% of the time, which is enough to have a huge impact in deliverability rates and sender rating, which is why we called them out and made our standard public.
Yahoo moves in the right direction as it adopts SMTP standards
Recently, things at Yahoo started moving in the right direction. Now that Yahoo is owned by the same company that owns AOL, (Verizion - with the Yahoo and AOL services coming out under a new name of Oath) the email servers have started to work within the rules of SMTP. SMTP is Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and it was created way back when emails were becoming mainstream and some rules were needed to help everyone understand the system.
As far as email validation goes, Yahoo is now behaving reliably and we’re happy that the results we get conform to standards and enable us to deliver results within our guaranteed rate of 99% accuracy.
Learn more about why email verification is essential for your business
However, Yahoo mailboxes are often left to gather dust. Yahoo is the go-to email domain for a free account to receive shopping receipts and unwanted emails. If you have Yahoo email addresses in your mailing lists, try sending a campaign to them separately and compare deliverability and open rates. You may find that your sender reputation is being dragged down by the poor quality interaction of Yahoo addresses.
Yahoo moves back to a bad place again
Final thought. Although Yahoo is now conforming to SMTP standards, announcements this week that it’s been reading delivered emails to grab some value from the data and attract more value from adverts has left us, once again, feeling that Yahoo represents the trashy end of email marketing.
If you have Yahoo email addresses on your list you can check it using CORE
MORE delivers deeper results, so you can identify Yahoo domains
To read more about domains and deliverability, read this article
