yahoo
Yahoo (as far as Yahoo Mail is concerned) was once called Yahoo, then it absorbed AOL and became Oath, then Verizon Media, and now it is just called Yahoo again. Throughout this time there has been some form of ISP feedback loop — you know, that thing that sends complaint reports back to the sender or sender’s ESP platform when a Yahoo user clicks the “report spam” button. But the URL and process to sign up for the Yahoo CFL or FBL has changed over the years, and it’s easy to stumble across outdated guidance when Googling. So, here’s my try at providing updated guidance.A note on terminology: Yahoo calls this spam reporting process a CFL (Complaint Feedback Loop). I and most others call it an ISP (Internet Service Provider) FBL (Feedback Loop). I consider the terms CFL and FBL to be interchangeable in this context.What is it? The Yahoo…
From Yahoo’s Lili Crowley, an announcement of their new “Senders Hub” postmaster website, where “you will now find our sending best practices and our postmaster FAQs alongside our BIMI and AMP requirements as well as more information about our Yahoo Mail Image Proxy and other valuable information and documentation.” This also includes new contact forms for complaint feedback loop (CFL/FBL) signup, requesting help for deliverability issues, and reporting abuse.Read the announcement here and find the new site here.[ H/T: Kent McGovern and Marcel Becker ]
By Lili Crowley, Lead PostmasterWhen we launched our new developer and sender focused portal last year, it was not just a step towards creating a better home for those tools and features. We also laid the foundation to eventually move our postmaster tools and information under the same roof – to truly create a single home for anything our senders and partners might be looking for. Now we did just that. We are calling it The Sender Hub. You will now find our sending best practices and our postmaster FAQs alongside our BIMI and AMP requirements as well as more information about our Yahoo Mail Image Proxy and other valuable information and documentation.We also sent our old support forms into retirement. They showed signs of old age and once in a while forgot who was talking to them. The shiny new ones should connect trusted senders much faster with the…
By Elizabeth ZwickyThis all started out as a question we received. Well, it’s more like a FAQ really. Because of that and because the answer turned out to be a bit longer, we thought we might as well post this here. And so we did. If you do need to send large, one-time email campaigns, be it because you are legally required to do so or because certain business needs arose, there are certain things you need to keep in mind and certain best practices to follow.These steps are roughly in order of importance. Have a valid reason for sending the mail to the accounts you’re sending to, like “They asked for it” or “We are legally required to send this mail to these accounts”.Distinguish the sending from your normal sending with a new From: address; you don’t need to change the domain, although many senders have other practical considerations…
It’s time for your periodic BIMI adoption status update. A quick overview of what this is all about: BIMI is a standard being adopted by multiple internet services providers (ISPs) to allow the display of a sender’s logo along side email messages, when displayed on a mobile device or in a webmail client. Some ISPs and mail clients have had a sender logo display function for a while now (one example is Gravatar), but BIMI is an attempt to standardize and regulate this mechanism across the email ecosystem.Adoption by senders seems a bit slow; but the spec only went public in 2019, which isn’t that long ago. Also, it suffers a bit from the “chicken and egg” problem — it’s hard to convince senders to adopt the standard if receivers haven’t adopted support for the standard. But now with two of the top three B2C mailbox providers (Yahoo and Gmail) having BIMI support, I’m…
By Kaivalya Gandhi, Senior Product ManagerThe holiday season is upon us, and with that comes the annual tradition of nabbing the latest deals for items on our wishlist. Whether it be Black Friday or Cyber Monday, these once single-day events have morphed into weeks of shopping. Brands invest billions in marketing campaigns to reach consumers digitally and remain top of mind during purchasing decisions. However, inboxes are inundated with emails trying to get our attention, induce FOMO, and win a share of our wallets.At Yahoo, we’re passionate about building an inbox that helps our users focus on what matters to them. Today, we’re launching a new Shopping view to help users save time staying on top of communications from the brands they love. We’re transforming mail into a mall made for you.Yahoo Mail users will see the brands they engage with most automatically organized in a carousel, with the ability…
Yahoo announced a shutdown of Yahoo Mail in China (yahoo.com.cn and yahoo.cn) to take place back in 2015. In 2019, the domains seemed to be resurrected, but they’ve since gone dead again, as the MX records for each domain point at nothing.And since Yahoo just announced that they are fully pulling out of China, you can consider that the final answer. That, as they say, is that.I’m guessing that the resurrection I stumbled across in 2019 might have had something to do with the transition of Yahoo Mail’s Chinese users to Alibaba? But I don’t have an easy way to confirm it, and at at this point, it doesn’t really matter, as there’s not much a sender can do about it today. (Were the Yahoo domains ever that big in China, anyway? I was always more concerned with delivery to qq.com, 163.com, 126.com, and a handful of others. Yahoo was…
By Marcel Becker, Sr Director Product ManagementThe first ever email sent over a network – the beginning of email as we use it today – was sent 50 years ago, in October 1971 by MIT graduate Ray Tomlinson.Ray Tomlinson (April 23, 1941 – March 5, 2016) introduced the convention of the ‘@’ symbol to identify a message recipient on a remote computer system, and using this ‘@’ symbol format, Ray was the first person to send an email between two computers.Ray sent the first email to himself, with the email travelling 10 feet between two computers he was testing on in a building in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ray has stated when interviewed that the first email was “something like QWERTYUIOP”.Creating email was a side project at work for Ray, and when he showed email to another employee for the first time, he reportedly said: “Don’t tell anyone! This isn’t what we’re…
You did it! You got Yahoo or Microsoft to unblock you. Perhaps you even figured out why they “hate” you. Perhaps your friendly neighborhood deliverability consultant just closed the ticket you submitted, letting you know that the ISP has unblocked your sending IP address and telling you that you should now be “good to go.”So…now what? What should you do next? What should you send, how much, in what order? What’s the best way to ramp things back up? This seems something that is missing from a lot of deliverability consultation — the “now what?” after getting you unblocked. I sense an opportunity! Allow me to share my take on what you should do next, after getting unblocked by an ISP like Yahoo or Microsoft.WAIT. Wait a period of time — 24 hours if Yahoo, 48 hours if Microsoft, before doing any significant sending. (For other ISPs, wait until the…
(You might notice that this is a slightly-modified repost of previous content. It was necessary to deal with Blogger suddenly taking issue with a post containing a giant list of domains. Whoops.)Looking to segment your email database based on ISP? Want to break out separate content or timing for Yahoo Mail versus Microsoft OLC versus Gmail subscribers? I’ve got you covered. Click here to download the full “MAGY” (Microsoft, AOL, Gmail, Yahoo) domain list, and feel free to use it for email segmentation. (And please don’t use it for spammy purposes.)