More Yahoo! delivery tips

Recently, Yahoo! changed some of its anti-spam protocols, affecting a large number of legitimate email marketers. Yahoo subsequently claims the problems that surfaced with this change were corrected, but by mid-April most people were still having difficulties with slow delivery times to Yahoo! addresses.

Yahoo! is a well-established leader in the Email Provider industry, having been in business since 1995. Being a major email provider naturally means that Yahoo! has a problem with spammers. As a result, there are several restrictions on sending to Yahoo! email accounts. Here some considerations for sending to these accounts (these are also good habits to apply when sending to other clients that will optimize your overall deliverability rate):

Segregate IP addresses
Many companies will have different types of email messages that they send to email accounts. An email customer receipt for a purchase is one example. Another message might be an email discount offer, or a weekly announcement of new products. Yahoo! recommends sending these two types of emails from separate IP addresses. Here's why: Yahoo! obtains data from each IP and builds a reputation for that IP. If several complaints resulting from your email marketing campaigns decrease deliverability, separating your IP addresses may help prevent problems with your other email messaging functions.

Keep your lists clean
This rule applies to all domains to which you are sending email messages. If you get a hard bounce, you don't want to retry sending to that email account again. Continuously sending multiple email messages that hard bounce (meaning they are no good or non-existent email accounts) is one of the quickest ways to get on an ISP's email blacklist.

Use standard ports for tracking message activity
If nonstandard ports or links to an IP address are being used for your campaigns, Yahoo! warns users that your email message may be a phishing attempt. Help avoid this by running your copy of Campaign Enterprise off of a separate domain and use port 80 when possible. For details on doing this using Campaign Enterprise, visit this page in Arial Software's Forums.

Use same From address headers
Yahoo! likes senders to use consistent "From" header addresses. Using the same address consistently helps Yahoo! to verify who you are and distinguish your email from spam.

Adopt an authentication protocol
Using email authentication protocol such as Domain Keys verifies that mail sent is coming from you and is legitimate. It also helps Yahoo! to verify a forgery if someone pretends to be sending from you.

Use clean DNS records
Check the DNS records of all the IP addresses that you send from. They should be up to date and correct. If it appears that a dynamic IP is being used, Yahoo! may decrease your reputation. Make sure you are using a static IP address.

Other common sense practices
Being a professional, legitimate email marketer, you should be familiar with most of these common sense practices:

• Message is Can-Spam compliant
• Email servers are secure (no open relays or proxies)
• Don't retry 5XX messages; do retry 4xx messages
• Regulate connections to Yahoo! servers (Note: Yahoo! has not published how many concurrent connections can be made to its servers. However, Yahoo! has hinted that restrictions are in place and asks for your respect to their resources or they will de-prioritize your connections.

Following the rules listed above will be helpful in ensuring optimal delivery to Yahoo! clients. As always, you should test your message in Yahoo! and several other emails clients before sending your campaign, to make sure everything is set as planned.

If you continue experiencing trouble sending to Yahoo! after following these guidelines, you can contact the Yahoo! postmaster by visiting http://postmaster.yahoo.com — Arial Software

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