In April we blogged about a sharp increase in the number of hard bounces occurring with email addresses at Yahoo! Mail.  The increased error rates were attributed to Yahoo reducing the period of dormancy before closing down an account.  Yesterday, Yahoo!’s SVP of Platforms, Jay Rossiter, came forth with new plans to make closed and dormant accounts available again for sign-up.  This should have little impact on organizations that keep their address lists clean, and contact their users on a regular basis.

Organizations that infrequently contact their users/subscribers and have not updated their address list may see a spike in SPAM complaints.  Receiving a message that had a different intended recipient may be perceived as an unsolicited contact attempt and is more likely to be marked as SPAM.

The SocketLabs On-Demand Suppression List Feature, which prevents delivery attempts to addresses who mark your messages as SPAM, or that have encountered a previous hard bounce, will help protect your email sending reputation.  Regardless, SocketLabs highly recommends that all customers take a close look at their list engagement with special attention to Yahoo! addresses, and make adjustments so that delivery is not affected.