Yandex has fairly strict sending requirements in order for your email to reach the inbox. Following all sending requirements at Yandex gives your email the best chance of reaching the inbox.
Best practices
- Use a confirmed opt-in consent method for acquiring subscribers. Do not use any form of automatic opt-in for subscribers or purchasing lists containing Yandex customers.
- Sign up with the Yandex complaint feedback loop. A high complaint rate is one of the primary reasons for email filtered to the spam folder or getting blocked.
- Yandex heavily redacts personal identifiable information from complaint messages sent back to you through the feedback loop, so it can't be used to suppress individual subscribers that complain.
- You can use the complaint information, along with their sender statistics program, to identify complaint trends with your email program. Look at possible complaint factors related to consent, send frequency, date and time, and list segmentation.
- Do not send reminder emails about an incomplete registration more than once.
- Use a list-unsubscribe header in all emails with both the mailto: and URL options.
- Include an unsubscribe link in all emails and use a simple, one-click process to unsubscribe Yandex users.
- Do not require a user to login to a website or perform multiple tasks to unsubscribe.
- Immediately honor all unsubscribe requests.
- Use Inbox Preview to ensure an optimal viewing experience for Yandex subscribers. Email containing numerous HTML errors may be filtered into the spam folder. Yandex recommends testing emails against its desktop and mobile interfaces before sending to ensure proper rendering of content.
- Ensure you send relevant email to Yandex subscribers. Yandex considers engagement a good indicator of the relevance of sender email and uses it when making decisions to block or throttle.
- Ensure your subject line is clear and accurately reflects the content of the message.
- Authenticate all email with Sender Policy Framework (SPF); DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM); and Domain-based Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC). Yandex relies on these authentication methods to help identify you and record your sending history.
- For SPF, use ~all or -all in your DNS record. Messages using +all will likely be placed in the spam folder.
- Ensure you do not send email containing viruses or links to websites containing malware.
- Remove or suppress all unknown users after one bounce.
- Do not use a dynamic IP address.
- Ensure your IP address has a valid, non-generic reverse DNS (PTR) record. Using ‘in-addr.arpa’ is not acceptable to Yandex.
- Publish your contact information for all sending domains with WHOIS. Do not use a domain privacy service.
- Use different sending subdomains for different email streams. Use a subdomain name that is descriptive of the email you are sending, such as: newsletter.domain.com, marketing.domain.com, and notifications.domain.com.
- Use a From: address that is clearly associated with your brand.
- Do not use a link shortening service such as bit.ly.
- Do not place potentially harmful objects in your email such as ActiveX or Javascript.
- Have good list hygiene practices in place to reduce the likelihood of sending to spam traps.
