I sit on the DMA Email Marketing Council and each month we discuss all the topics which are currently hitting the headlines in the email world and our last meeting was no exception. One of the top subjects we discussed was Yahoo! and their plan to re-release unused email addresses into the public. You can see the summary here.
So what’s happening then? Unless you’ve been living under a stone, you will have heard the announcement back in June that Yahoo! intended to begin recycling email addresses which haven’t been accessed for more than a year. Users were contacted and asked to log into their account before 15th July if they wanted to keep their accounts. Then from 15th July – 15th August potential new users can go onto wishlist.yahoo.com. Here, you enter your desired Yahoo! username, your current contact information and sit back and wait. You can identify as many as five email addresses that they would like and if this is all done by 7th August and you could be in with a chance of securing a new (old!) email address. If an account becomes available, interested users will be given 48 hours to claim the account. If one user on the list doesn’t claim the address, Yahoo will offer it to the next one and so on.
OK so how does this impact me as an email marketer? Firstly, Yahoo! is about to get bouncy! They will be hard bouncing any Yahoo! address on the recycle list between 15th July and 15th August which means you as marketers will undoubtedly experience higher bounce rates than usual. This blog from Skip Fidura, Chair of the DMA Email Council sums it up brilliantly.
So what should I do now? Firstly you should use this opportunity to tidy up your email addresses, otherwise come August, your messages might not be reaching the originally intended recipient. The quickest win for you is to ensure your bounce settings are set up correctly so that bounced addresses are removed immediately from your database. Be aware that some of these recycled email addresses could be converted into spam trap addresses, which will be used to identify senders with poor mailing practices, therefore an activity-based system that removes addresses which have been inactive for 12+months is advised.
The moral of the story is that if you are a good email marketer and you’re following best practice advice, you’re likely to be clearing out these email addresses naturally anyway, but it doesn’t hurt to be vigilant.
