The following is a summary of best practices for sending email to Yahoo users. Yahoo recommends following their best practice guidelines to help avoid deliverability issues.
Resources
Best practices
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Sending guidelines
- Respect Yahoo's resources and configure appropriate connection and throughput limits.
- Use these guidelines as a starting point and adjust as necessary based on performance. Your sending reputation can affect these limits, so pay close attention to your SMTP error codes for signs of throttling.
- Simultaneous connections: 150
- Throughput: 20 messages per connection
- Use these guidelines as a starting point and adjust as necessary based on performance. Your sending reputation can affect these limits, so pay close attention to your SMTP error codes for signs of throttling.
- Split up your send volume over a longer period of time and avoid sending all of your email at the top of the hour. Your email will encounter less traffic and reduced Yahoo server loads when spread out across time.
- Message limitations: Yahoo Mail accounts can send and receive emails up to 25 MB, so most marketing email will have no issues with size.
- Respect Yahoo's resources and configure appropriate connection and throughput limits.
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Infrastructure
- Ensure your IP address (IPv4 or IPv6) has a valid, non-generic rDNS (PTR) record. IPv4 is the most common format for sending IP addresses at this time. Sending IP addresses without an rDNS record will be marked as spam or rejected.
- Use Forward Confirmed Reverse DNS (FCrDNS) for sending IP addresses and their corresponding hostnames.
- Ensure your email servers are secure to prevent unauthorized access to your sending IPs.
- Follow all Internet and SMTP standards.
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Opt-in consent
- Subscribers that opt-in are more likely to engage with your email and less likely to complain, which can improve your chances of reaching the inbox.
- Do not purchase email lists or engage in list harvesting techniques.
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List Hygiene
- Verify all email addresses are valid using BriteVerify or Everest's List Validation.
- Ensure you have good list hygiene practices and remove inactive subscribers regularly.
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Identify when subscribers typically stop engaging with your email and send them a win-back email.
- If subscribers continue to be unengaged with your email, consider sending them a re-confirmation email before adding them to your suppression list.
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Complaints
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Ensure you are signed up for their Complaint Feedback Loop program and suppress subscribers that complain.
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This program helps you to:
- Understand what email subscribers think of your messages
- Take corrective action to minimize the complaints
- Improve your sending reputation
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This program helps you to:
- Check your complaint rate and strive to keep it below 0.2% for an IP address. IPs with a complaint rate higher than 0.2% are more likely to have mail sent to the spam folder.
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Ensure you are signed up for their Complaint Feedback Loop program and suppress subscribers that complain.
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Authentication
- Make sure you are properly authenticating your email with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These authentication standards help you establish a consistent domain reputation and prevent domain spoofing.
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Implement Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI)
- Implement BIMI as it allows you to display your logo within a supporting email client.
- Yahoo displays a verified checkmark next to the sender's address and logo, so recipients have confidence the email is from your brand.
- BIMI can improve engagement because recipients have more trust that your email is coming from you and not from a spammer impersonating your brand.
- Higher engagement improves sending reputation and can help you reach the inbox.
- BIMI builds on DMARC authentication and requires a quarantine or reject policy.
- Additional information:
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Engagement
- Send to people that want to receive your email. Highly engaged subscribers improves your sending reputation and can lead to higher inbox placement.
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Segmentation: Target your subscribers with relevant content based on demographics and other attributes such as past purchase history, buying frequency, and industry. This helps increase engagement which can improve inbox placement.
- Yahoo caches images using a proxy server, so location based targeting may need to be adjusted. Image caching also can distort (undercount) open rate data.
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Unsubscribe
- Honor all unsubscribe requests within 24 hours. Sending email to people that have unsubscribed can harm your sending reputation because they are more likely to mark futures messages as spam.
- Implement the list-unsubscribe email header using the one-click unsubscribe method.
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IP segmentation
- Segmenting your email traffic flows by IP can help improve deliverability as well as make it easier to troubleshoot deliverability problems. Most senders segment marketing and transactional email, but you should determine what works best for your business.
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Review your SMTP error codes frequently
- Ask your ESP or email administrator for access to the files or reports that contain this information. The error codes can provide insights into potential problems, so reviewing them on a regular basis can help you identify small problems before they become big problems.
- Retry sending for 4XX bounces, but look for signs of throttling. If your IP is being throttled, reduce your volume.
- Retry sending if the servers are temporarily busy.
- Do not retry sending email with a 5XX code until you have identified and fixed the problem.
- Unknown users with a 5XX code should be suppressed after one bounce.
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Onboarding new IP addresses or domains
- Validity recommends warming up new IPs and domains over time to build your sending reputation. Mismanaging or rushing the warming process can cause email to go to the spam folder and adversely affect your business.
- To start, send only five messages per connection (open a connection, send five messages, close the connection, then repeat). Increase the number of messages per connection over time.
- Monitor the SMTP codes for signs of throttling. If you receive an error indicating throttling, adjust your connection and throughput settings and slow down the volume until the throttling messages subside.
