Can not send email newsletters to Yahoo

gamepipe

New Email
Hi there,
I was wondering if you could help us out. We have been using an ESP for the last 4 years to help us with our mail delivery. We have worked very hard for these last four years working on our reputation. The ESP has a FBL in place with Yahoo.

Problems started happening right on June 8. All 10 of our whitelisted IPs which usually delivered aout 80%-90% into the inbox are now delivering 35-50% across the board. We thought it might be the spamhaus issue that occured but that was reportedly fixed, we just learned tonight, last week.

We watch our complaints careful, and always are under the 1 per 1000 threshold. Hard bounces are barely there. We are taking our optins right off our website. Total volume is about 150,000-200,000 per account (we have 4 accounts, for our 4 different newsletters)

The one thing we are doing which might be wrong is using the same message template for each drop. Some people advised us to change it around, we never felt the need to have to do that, we figured only spammers do something like that.

I'm at a total loss as to what to do at this point, any advice you can offer would help. Our ESP suggested we remove data from our lists up until the point where the delivery began to fail, perhaps we added a bad name, but for it to happen to ALL our accounts at the same data tells me its possibly something more.

Because our newsletter's delivery is critical to the success of our business I would be willing to try anything you suggest as well as cooperate in any way possible to get this resolved.
Thanks in advance for any help,
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
Hello,

Are you getting any error messages from Yahoo?

Is your email still being accepted and delivered but going to the junk folder instead of the inbox?

Here is more information on the intermittent spamhaus errors from Yahoo mail servers.

Have you previously completed the Yahoo email bulk senders request form?

What do you mean by different templates? Personalizing the emails with greeting such as "Hello $firstname," ?

Is the ESP seeing a drop in delivery rates across all of their lists or just yours?

How many IP addresses are sending the email lists?

Is it possible to spread the email sending across more IP addresses with known good reputations?

I separate my mail to Yahoo into two main groups, a pool of servers that handles email from end users one at a time, and a pool of servers that handles email lists and other bulk mailings. Letting Yahoo know what kinds of email to expect from which IP addresses, keeping the complaint rates low as you are already doing, and spreading the email out across several IP addresses (in a row seems to be fine) has worked well for me over the years.

You can also contact the Yahoo Postmaster Team directly with your concerns using the Contact Us link at the Yahoo Postmaster site.

-Raymond
 

gamepipe

New Email
>>Are you getting any error messages from Yahoo?

Just the typical EMAIL DEFERRED one.

>>Is your email still being accepted and delivered but going to the junk folder >>instead of the inbox?

Still going into the inbox but delivery dropped down to like 30-50% over the last 10 days. I know many others who also mail Yahoo who have experienced the same issue. This isnt related to the SpamHaus incident, we've confirmed this isnt the case. I'm thinking something changed with their filters?

>>Have you previously completed the Yahoo email bulk senders request

These are whitelisted IPs, have been for the last 2 years. Our reputation was fine until 10 days ago. We've backed out the recent data we added up to a week before the problems began.

>>What do you mean by different templates? Personalizing the emails
>>with greeting such as "Hello $firstname," ?

We mail 3rd party offers to our optins, these are people requesting to receive specific verticals. So lets say we send an offer to those who check a box on our site saying "I want to receive info on work at home jobs", we will send them that particular offer. But if we send that offer again in 2 weeks, we wont change the text inside, we'll mail it as it was.

>>Is the ESP seeing a drop in delivery rates across all of their lists or just yours?

They claim everybody else is fine but I have my doubts, since everyone I talk to has said something changed for them in the past 10 days as well.

>>How many IP addresses are sending the email lists?

1 IP address. Whats very odd is we have 2 domains sharing that IP. Domain #1 mailing list #1 gets great delivery (no issues). Domain #2 mailing list #2 has issues.

One thing we noticed list #1 has < 100,000 subscribers from Yahoo, and list #2 has > 200,000. Perhaps theres been a limit on the amount/volume we can send, so thinking of segmenting the data into 100K slices and trying that?

I assumed Yahoo bases reputation on IP alone but apparently domain is more important?

>>Is it possible to spread the email sending across more IP addresses with >>known good reputations?
Not really, this is an ESP and we have been using the domains for 2 years, this is why Im surprised, youd think Yahoo would see the fact we've been here awhile and playing by the rules.

>>I separate my mail to Yahoo into two main groups, a pool of servers that
>>handles email from end users one at a time, and a pool of servers that >>handles email lists and other bulk mailings.

Are there any links to threads you can share that show what steps to take in order to mail to Yahoo directly? I'd like to try mailing on my own server in house, but have heard its very hard. Any help would be appreciated.
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
For the volume of mail you are doing you'll likely have some problems at least for a short time while you build up the reputation for the new mail server IP address if you switch to an in-house mail server. Either way, staying with the current service, or moving to a new mail server, do you have control over how fast the emails are sent? Try slowing down the rate of sending emails to something around 1 per second or less. Myself and some others have had success with limiting how fast we send email to Yahoo when there are larger batches of email to be sent. If you try this please let us know which rate had the best success rate for you.

Have you recently started sending the emails more frequently? I don't know the exact formula that Yahoo uses but it's should be safe to figure that they use all of the message content including source IP, headers, other mail servers involved, message content, the quality of other mail coming from the IP address, and feedback reports from Yahoo members when determining what to do with incoming email from you.

As for contacting Yahoo, go to the link I posted above (Postmaster), click contact us, and then click the link for the bulk senders form. That's the best way to get in touch with the Yahoo Postmaster Team and start working with them to resolve the problem.

-Raymond
 

gamepipe

New Email
Raymond,
Do you mean the fact that we were mailing Template A on all 10 whitelisted IPs (not the same day, but rotated daily). e.g. We offers offers A-J, and we'd mail Offer A on IP 1 Monday, then Offer A on IP2 Tuesday, etc.

So using this method the SAME template was being sent across all IPs. Sounds like youre saying this is a no no.

We will try the throttling and see if the reduction helps, thanks.

Our ESP told us our volume has been cut back. I guess Yahoo 2 weeks ago added some type of change that is curbing volume, i guess something happened with our reputation? Not sure HOW or why, as i said, complaints were always low. It has to be because of the templates we used, theyre 3rd party offers, and perhaps they look a bit spammy. Any tips on verbiage or words to use inside the body to thwart this?

Also any idea WHY 2 of the IPs are still mailing fine? They do the SAME exact thing as the other IPs and templates, so the Template A i mentioned above hits the same 2 IPs, and their delivery is fine.. makes no sense.

What also makes no sense is 2 domains share one IP and one domain does great, the other doesnt.

I dont really understand how reputation works. We've been mailing for 2 years now on these IPs, but i guess new spam filters are sensing our mails are 3rd party type offers and we're getting whacked.

Would love to learn how to make a template more yahoo friendly, let me know if there is anything proactive we can do, thanks again for the help!
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
Of all the things I mentioned I think reducing the rate at which you are connecting to the Yahoo mail servers will help the most.

I'm a little confused reviewing your previous comments. In one post you mention you have one IP, in another you seem to have several.

If you do have several, or at least more than one, is the same amount of email going out all of them?

Did you try contacting the Yahoo Postmaster Team yet to see if they can review your email and do something to help it get accepted and delivered?

-Raymond
 
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