Deliverability insights from Yahoo! Mail

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on August 05, 2008

A recent post floated a few ideas on the criteria that might be used to define spam in the future. Criteria that consider how people interact with your emails.

If you rejected those concepts as the mad ramblings of a man who left his bag of reality on the bus...think again.

A couple of deliverability experts (example) have confirmed that webmail services are indeed taking a closer look at such "measures of email engagement" as a way of distinguishing between "good" and "bad" email.

But let's go straight to the source and take a closer look at public comments made by Yahoo! Mail's Anti-Spam Czar at a recent workshop (see here for access to the transcript).

1. Marking email in the junk folder as "not spam" gets noticed:

"The effect of clicking "not spam" on a message is that it sends a powerful signal to our systems that we've made a mistake. That's one of the best ways we can learn, both to ensure that we don't block messages from that sender in the future, and that our systems shouldn't block similar messages next time."

Would your readers bother to look for and then "unspam" your messages if they landed in the junk folder?

2. Adding the sender's email to their address book gets noticed:

"If you add a sender to your address book we'll try to ensure that those messages always go to your inbox."

If your users aren't email marketing experts, do you encourage them to add you to their address book?

3. Not paying attention to your email gets noticed:

"We recommend commercial e-mail senders ensure they're sending mail that Yahoo! Mail users want to receive. This means following recommended practices like confirming - and even periodically re-confirming - that users want to be on their mailing lists and proactively removing anyone who doesn't read their mail." (my emphasis)

Do you have a strategy in place for inactive addresses?

The underlying trend seems clear...

Sending valuable, quality, engaging email used to be seen as the way to improve email responses.

It still is.

But it's also becoming a precondition for getting your emails delivered in the first place.

More on deliverability | Tags: yahoo mail, email deliverability, spam, anti-spam

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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