Hi Cris, Yahoo is defering

saezbaldo — Thu, 21 May 2009 19:54:00 +0000

Hi Cris,

Yahoo is defering (their main greylisting technique) your email, your MTA software (whatever it is) is retrying that same email (since it's default to be done after a 421 or 451 response code), then Yahoo is accepting some of those retries (and sending them to the junk folder) and, if all the retry attempts your MTA is doing are failing, then the email doesn't get delivered at all.

The problem is that, statistically, contact lists have a 30% of bogus email addresses in it. Either because they are too old, or they got shut down by inactivity. So it's crucial to have in place two things:

1- Segmentation
2- Feedback control

Segmentation basically consists in sending different type of traffic through different IPs. So this way you can send emails to those contact lists that are imported for the first time through a specific IP. This IP will "take the heat" of those 30% of bogus addresses, and this way you wont compromise the integrity / reputation of your "known-recipients" IPs. When you attempt to send emails to invalid / unexistant email addresses, the reputation of your IP drops on the recipient server, given the fact that it usually means that your list's "health" is not good and that you don't purge invalid recipients (given the fact that this translates into unnecesary traffic / costs to the recipient MTAs).

That being said, then you realize the importance of segmentation, specially when you want to prevent your known recipients to filter your emails to them.

Secondly, feedback control is related to the segmentation, yet adds a couple more variables to the equation (such as complaints and unsubscribe requests). It's very important for you to maintain a suppression list generated by:

1- The email addresses that bounce
2- The email addreses that complains about your mailings (Google for Feedback Loops and you'll find the signup pages for MSN, AOL, Yahoo, and a few others)
3- The unsubscribe requests

There are several companies out there that offer to do everything for you, from setting up the IP, the MTA, the server, the feedback loops signup, the complaints parsers, bounces parsers, suppression lists, etc... We currently use [MOD EDIT: OUR OWN COMPANY] since after some research we realized they do offer the best service for companies, including an API that makes our lives easier. Many others out there are more marketers oriented.

I hope it helps, and let me know if you need more information.

Cheers.

Hi!! thanks for your fast

Hades — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 03:00:47 +0000

Hi!! thanks for your fast response

I understand that it might be a Yahoo problem, but my client wants to get the best possible deliverability, that's why I'm looking for some company who offers email experts.

I tried to solve the problem myself a few times and we keep getting bad results, so now we search for somebody who can improve things and build a good server infrastructure. Even if our Yahoo accounts will still work bad, at least we'll obtain the best chances of having our emails delivered to any server.

If you know any company/person who we can contact please refer it to me.

Thanks again!

Cris.

Cris, You are not likely to

decibel.places — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 23:06:47 +0000

Cris,

You are not likely to correct problems if they are on the Yahoo mail server. I have observed occasional delays of up to a few hours receiving mail at Yahoo.

I have observed other situations where the mail to Yahoo vanishes - not in spam or trash, nowhere.

I have seen some sites that disallow use of Yahoo mail accounts, but this may have an adverse effect on your membership.

I had a situation with a website called "ratemybutt.com" and we sanitized the "from" on the emails but examining the full header, I still saw "ratemybutt" in the server identification.

You should examine your full headers to make sure you are not inadvertently sending a spam tripping message.