By Clea Moore, Principal Product Manager

As part of our efforts to enable senders to send emails that our users want and help us to improve the experience for our mutual customers, we have been busy working on some new and improved tools for managing their email programs and complying with the new sending requirements. 

Earlier this week, we updated the main page of our Sender Hub with a sneak peak of what’s to come… A new platform to sign up for and manage services associated with the domains you control; all linked to an account. Senders can expect a new and improved Complaint Feedback Loop (CFL) sign-up flow and management page in this first iteration.

Before you get too excited, this is currently a limited beta only. More to come soon! Keep an eye on the site and our blog for updates and, as always, reach out to us if you have questions at mail-questions@yahooinc.com.

By Clea Moore, Principal Product Manager

As we have shared in the past, our mission is to deliver messages that our users want to receive and filter out the messages they don’t. We have received a lot of questions and listened to a lot of feedback. So today we released some updates to our documentation on the Sender Hub regarding the upcoming changes in 2024. Check out our updated “Sender Requirements & Recommendations” and “FAQs” pages for more information.

As a reminder, beginning in February 2024, we will be enforcing certain standards for all senders, including: 

• Properly authenticating your mail
• Keeping complaint rates low

The requirements for “bulk” senders will be more strict, including:

• Enabling easy, one-click unsubscribe (starting June 2024)
• Authenticating with both SPF and DKIM
• Publishing a DMARC policy 

Please make sure you are following these new guidelines, which are designed to improve the experience of our users and fight abuse. Enforcement will be gradually rolled out, as we monitor compliance through the first half of the year.  

Still have questions after reviewing the new documentation? Reach out to us at mail-questions@yahooinc.com.

By Marcel Becker, Sr Director Product Management

A key mission of Yahoo is to deliver messages that consumers want to receive and filter out the messages they don’t. 

To guide and help senders support us in that mission, we have documented our sending best practices on our Sender Hub. In addition, our postmaster teams have assisted the sending community to achieve the best results for them and ultimately for our users.

Yet, numerous bulk senders fail to secure and set up their systems correctly, allowing malicious actors to exploit their resources without detection. A pivotal aspect of addressing these concerns involves sender validation, leveraging email authentication standards to guarantee the verification of the email sender’s identity. 

Sending properly authenticated messages helps us to better identify and block billions of malicious messages and declutter our users’ inboxes. 

But we believe we can do even more to improve the quality of the emails our users receive as well as fight abuse and ultimately improve the experience for email users everywhere. 

In the first quarter of 2024, we will require that all bulk senders:

• Authenticate their email: To help our users to be more confident about an email’s source, we will require senders to implement stronger email authentication leveraging industry standards such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC. 
  
• Enable Easy Unsubscription: Our users should be able to unsubscribe from unwanted emails without any hassle. It should just take one click. While we have promoted solutions for some time, adoption of these common sense standards have been low. We will require senders to support one-click unsubscribe and honor our users requests within two days. 
  
• Only send emails our users want: True to our key mission, we want to ensure our users’ inboxes are not cluttered with unsolicited or irrelevant emails. While we have measured user reported spam rates for some time and even exposed some of that data for trusted senders, we will start enforcing a threshold to ensure our users can continue to enjoy a spam free mailbox. 
  

While we are announcing these changes for all domains and consumer email brands hosted by Yahoo Mail, we are not alone in our quest to improve the email experience for users anywhere, keeping emails safe, user friendly and spam free. Our industry peers like Google agree with us: 

“We firmly believe that users worldwide deserve a more secure email environment, with fewer unwanted messages for an improved overall experience. We look forward to working with peers across the industry to boost the adoption of these email standards that benefit everyone.” - Neil Kumaran, Group Product Manager, Gmail Security & Trust

In the coming months we will provide more details on our Sender Hub and we can also be reached at mail-questions@yahooinc.com to provide more information or assist with any questions you might have. 

By Clea Moore, Principal Product Manager

A few weeks ago we launched a major update for Yahoo Mail on iOS and Android . (If you don’t like reading too much, we made a nice video too!) The redesigned apps are the latest in our quest to help our users to save time and money. Key features we offer help with managing digital receipts, gift cards, subscriptions, and packaging tracking, allowing our users to find what they need even faster. With new organizational features that filter consumers’ inboxes, attachments, and even travel itineraries, the updated Yahoo Mail app offers users quick and easy access to the information that matters most while keeping them and their data safe and secure.

A lot of these features are made possible through machine learning and our mail intelligence services. But we believe that working together with brands and sending platforms, and offering tools and guidance for how to best leverage and influence those features, will help our users to have an even better experience 

We want to highlight some of those features and tools and over the coming weeks and months provide additional guidance and tools to leverage them as best as possible. 

Receipts & Package Tracking

The newly introduced Receipts View is a view that allows you to see receipts from all of your orders in one place. It makes returns faster and provides a handy view of spending patterns. 

In addition we launched updated Package Tracking Alerts: automatic alerts that pop up and stay at the top of your inbox to inform you where your package is in transit or ready at the store for pick-up.

Senders can help us and our mutual customers improve their experience by leveraging a standard called “Schema”. It allows senders to add additional structured data to their emails to annotate the content and make it understandable for machines, so they can show the most relevant and actionable information for that particular email – even outside of the email canvas. 

You can learn more about that and how we leverage schema at https://senders.yahooinc.com/promotions-and-schema

One-Tap Unsubscribe 

While our users receive a lot of emails from brands they love, their interests change over time and there might be that one email which is just too much. We want to help our users get rid of those emails as easily as possible. For a lot of users, the “Mark as Spam” button is not very far away. So it makes more sense to allow users to safely and securely unsubscribe from unwanted emails with just a single tap. No extra hoops or clicks. And no reputation hit for senders. 

How your emails can benefit from one-click unsubscribe and what you need to implement is documented at https://senders.yahooinc.com/subhub

BIMI

Most emails our users receive are from businesses or brands. Being able to easily spot who an email is from when glancing over the message list after opening the email app is key to the decision of what to open or what to delete. BIMI, which is short for Brand Indicators for Message Identification, is a simple way for brands sending authenticated mail to display their logo across some of the top email clients, including Gmail, Apple Mail, and Yahoo Mail. 

While we have supported BIMI logos since 2018, we are now taking our implementation one step further. We want our users to be able to identify logos which have been verified through BIMI vs. other logos or avatars which might show up in Yahoo Mail, to increase user trust in addition to brand impressions.

Starting in our iOS and Android apps we will now display a “verified checkmark” next to the sending address and logo to indicate that Yahoo has verified that the email was sent by the brand owning the logo being shown. 

You can learn more about BIMI and how to implement it at https://senders.yahooinc.com/bimi.

We are excited about these new features for our users. We are working on more tools to help connect our users to brands and businesses they love and care about. If you want to help or if you have questions, reach out to us via our SenderHub.

By Marcel Becker, Sr Director Product Management

So this happened. The machines tasked with processing new feedback loop requests seem to have gone on a summer break. And now the set up forms don’t have anybody to talk to anymore.

We are luring those machines back though! Stay tuned!

Really sorry for the inconvenience and all the forms you might have submitted without getting proper responses.

We found them lounging at some beach! But they happily came back and are working again! If you do spot any issues, please do not hesitate and reach out to us.

By Marcel Becker, Sr Director Product Management

We are proud to announce that we now fully support AMP across all Yahoo Mail applications. That includes our mobile apps on iOS and Android in addition to the existing webmail experiences.

What I wrote when we launched AMP support on Yahoo Webmail is now even more important than ever: 

When our customers’ favorite brands send them an email, it should be a great experience. Email should no longer come in the form of a flyer – static, boring and stale – but rather, an interactive and dynamic way for consumers to do what they want and need to do as quickly and conveniently as possible. 

We’re seeing this echoed throughout the industry with more and more marketing platforms and email service providers supporting AMP for email for their customers.

“AMP based emails have driven significantly higher response rates and conversions for our clients.” said Matthew Vernhout, VP Deliverability for Netcore Cloud. “We are excited to see the continued development and support for AMP by the Yahoo Mail team. We are looking forward to seeing how these enhancements will continue to help marketers engage with their subscribers.”

We’re not done yet. We want to make AMP for email even more accessible to trusted senders, so we’ve made it easier to register entire sending platforms and ESPs to be able to send AMP emails for all their customers, effectively eliminating the need to register each and every sender address or DKIM domain. You can read more about our updated requirements on our AMP for Email page over at our SenderHub. 

“Thanks to the support of Yahoo, small business owners who send AMP emails with AWeber will be auto approved on Yahoo’s platform.” said Tom Kulzer, CEO and Founder of AWeber. “This will allow any small business owner’s subscribers to receive AMP emails on Yahoo’s platform.

Email marketers can create an entire experience within an email: from polls and interactive “like buttons”. Subscribers will be able to search products, read descriptions and product reviews. AMP for email is an exciting evolution and it’s great to have a partner like Yahoo to work closely with as email continues to evolve.“

We encourage you to take advantage of the latest in email technology and our recent changes so we can create a better experience for our mutual customers. To experience AMP for email – or Dynamic Messages as we call them – make sure to download the latest Yahoo Mail application on either iOS or Android. If you don’t immediately see it, don’t worry: We will fully ramp up that feature within those apps over the next few weeks. Support in our mobile AOL applications (iOS and Android) will follow closely.

We’re excited to be able to bring AMP for email to more of our customers and we’re eager to see what senders will do with it. And be assured that we are working on even more exciting features and tools around AMP for email! So stay tuned and watch this space and our SenderHub. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, head over there as well.

By Lili Crowley, Lead Postmaster

When we launched our new developer and sender focused portal last year, it was not just a step towards creating a better home for those tools and features. We also laid the foundation to eventually move our postmaster tools and information under the same roof – to truly create a single home for anything our senders and partners might be looking for.

Now we did just that. We are calling it The Sender Hub.

You will now find our sending best practices and our postmaster FAQs alongside our BIMI and AMP requirements as well as more information about our Yahoo Mail Image Proxy and other valuable information and documentation.

We also sent our old support forms into retirement. They showed signs of old age and once in a while forgot who was talking to them. The shiny new ones should connect trusted senders much faster with the help they seek.

Update your old bookmarks and make sure you hop over to https://senders.yahooinc.com (No worries though: If your muscle memory just wants you to type postmaster.yahoo.com or postmaster.aol.com – we’ll get you to the right place.)

If you have further questions, comments or suggestions on how we can make this site even better, you can reach out to us over here.

By Elizabeth Zwicky

This all started out as a question we received. Well, it’s more like a FAQ really. Because of that and because the answer turned out to be a bit longer, we thought we might as well post this here. And so we did.

If you do need to send large, one-time email campaigns, be it because you are legally required to do so or because certain business needs arose, there are certain things you need to keep in mind and certain best practices to follow.

These steps are roughly in order of importance.

1. Have a valid reason for sending the mail to the accounts you’re sending to, like “They asked for it” or “We are legally required to send this mail to these accounts”.
2. Distinguish the sending from your normal sending with a new From: address; you don’t need to change the domain, although many senders have other practical considerations for using a different domain name, but you should use a novel mailbox name.
3. Harmonize the content with your day-to-day sending; use your normal branding, logos, content style and tone. Consider explaining that valid reason clearly at the beginning of your content.
4. Send the mail from correctly registered domains. If at all possible, use a subdomain of a longstanding domain you usually use. “legalnotice.mydomain.com” is infinitely better than “legalnotice-mydomain.com”. If you do register an entirely new domain, do your best to register it like your existing domains. It absolutely might be cheaper to buy a one-off from whoever is cheapest today! Do not.
5. Send the mail fully authenticated; with an SPF pass and a unique DKIM signature at a minimum, preferably with a DMARC p=reject pass (and therefore a From-aligned SPF pass and a From-aligned DKIM signature)..
6. Send the mail from an existing high-volume sending platform and if possible from IPs already sending at high volume. It does not need to be your usual sending platform.
7. If you cannot use IPs already at volume and/or you know that the mail is likely to be more controversial than the usual sending on IPs (all legal notices annoy people), ask for reputation support and provide the IPs, the From: you will be using, the DKIM signature you will be using, and a rough idea of volume per day.
8. Avoid sending on the hour or the half hour; ideally, divide your sending per day by 24 x 55 = 1,320 and send that much every minute that is not :00, :01, :02, :30, :31. Or just divide by 24 and send an hour’s worth on some minute other than those. Anything is better than sending an hour’s worth or half-hour’s worth at :00 or :30.

If you have time and energy remaining, there are optimizations available around the types of accounts you send to. You may well have internal reasons for choosing the order in which you send the mail, and that’s fine. Otherwise, roughly speaking, email addresses will fall into three categories: the mail delivers and the user doesn’t care, the mail delivers and the user cares, the mail doesn’t deliver. Ideally, you’d want to either evenly spread the three categories out or deliver to them in that order.

Why on earth in that order? Because users who care are also users who mark things as spam and generate other kinds of noise. It’s not required to go in that order, particularly if you already have reputation support to help you ride out the spam votes. But if you choose to put the users who care first, you may still want probable failures at the end. Mailboxes that don’t deliver tend to be the most expensive. They may fail immediately or sit in a queue. Either way, they’re also going to create noise. If you lump them together, you want them to go last where dealing with them won’t interfere with dealing with real people.

Unverified email addresses, old email addresses, and email addresses with known failures are going to trend toward undeliverable. Recent spam voters or people with other recent interactions (particularly ones other than verifying an email address) will trend towards being users who care. (Obviously you’re not going to send to recent spam voters if you have a choice, but you may not have a choice.) Old verified addresses are going to trend towards being users who don’t care.

M3AAWG has (overlapping) advice for legally mandated notices available here.

If you have further questions or want to read through more FAQs and Sending Best Practices, please hop over to our postmaster site.

By Kaivalya Gandhi, Senior Product Manager

The holiday season is upon us, and with that comes the annual tradition of nabbing the latest deals for items on our wishlist. Whether it be Black Friday or Cyber Monday, these once single-day events have morphed into weeks of shopping. Brands invest billions in marketing campaigns to reach consumers digitally and remain top of mind during purchasing decisions. However, inboxes are inundated with emails trying to get our attention, induce FOMO, and win a share of our wallets.

At Yahoo, we’re passionate about building an inbox that helps our users focus on what matters to them. Today, we’re launching a new Shopping view to help users save time staying on top of communications from the brands they love. We’re transforming mail into a mall made for you.

Yahoo Mail users will see the brands they engage with most automatically organized in a carousel, with the ability to favorite certain brands and see updates from them first. Clicking into these “shortcuts” will allow consumers to access virtual “storefronts”: a curated, convenient and organized retail experience to see emails, deals, receipts and products from a brand. This provides 1-click access to important communications from the brand, like receipts for returning something in-store or promotional emails for redeeming an exclusive offer.

They will also have the ability to quickly narrow down recent emails from their favorite brands or browse recent emails by shopping categories such as Dining, Clothing, & Home. With these category filters, you can easily find that pizza deal buried in your email that you always seem to miss out on. And to support “window shopping” online, visual previews go beyond the subject line to provide context of the email’s content to help inspire a purchase without going back-and-forth between messages. Finally, for the Marie Kondo in all of us, reaching the end of the feed surfaces the ability to mark these messages as read in one click, helping people feel a sense of accomplishment and be more in control of their inbox.

The vast majority of emails we all receive are from businesses, not people. And over 50% of the content that our users engage with in their inboxes is commercial in nature, from receipts to promotions to delivery updates. [1] The new Shopping view addresses pain points we’ve heard from months of consumer research and the industry overall [2] - people want actionable features to overcome email fatigue and help them better engage with relevant content from brands. We believe this will also help brands achieve better visibility with the consumers who care about them.

What’s more, according to the 2021 Consumer Email Tracker report by DMA & Validity [3], email remains the preferred communication channel to connect with brands for over 2/3rds of surveyed Gen X, Y and Z consumers globally. 1 in 4 surveyed consumers have an additional email address where they consume some or all marketing from brands. And with 1 in 3 Yahoo Mail users falling into the Gen-Z or Millennial demographic, we can help today’s digital consumers as their commerce identity online.

The Shopping view provides novel ways to organize, visualize and get value from communications by brands in a way that’s not possible anywhere else. These features will initially roll out to all Yahoo Mail users on Android and iOS in the United States, with plans to support additional markets and user segments in the coming months. We hope you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think! Reach out to us with suggestions or questions: mail-questions@yahooinc.com.

[1] “If a person is emailing you, it just doesn’t make sense”: Exploring Changing Consumer Behaviors in Email
[2] Why Stores Send You So Many Emails
[3] Consumer Email Tracker 2021 | DMA

By Marcel Becker, Sr Director Product Management

The first ever email sent over a network – the beginning of email as we use it today – was sent 50 years ago, in October 1971 by MIT graduate Ray Tomlinson.

Ray Tomlinson (April 23, 1941 – March 5, 2016) introduced the convention of the ‘@’ symbol to identify a message recipient on a remote computer system, and using this ‘@’ symbol format, Ray was the first person to send an email between two computers.

Ray sent the first email to himself, with the email travelling 10 feet between two computers he was testing on in a building in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ray has stated when interviewed that the first email was “something like QWERTYUIOP”.

Creating email was a side project at work for Ray, and when he showed email to another employee for the first time, he reportedly said: “Don’t tell anyone! This isn’t what we’re supposed to be working on.”

That Friday in October 1971, I am certain Ray had no idea that 50 years later email would be at the core of the internet, helping people to communicate across borders, connecting them to their loved ones, friends, and family. It defined how we communicate at work and with other companies. And with the digital acceleration in commerce, it’s how retailers keep in touch with their customers.

I was first introduced to the concept of email when I got hold of a CompuServe disk. I fell in love with the idea and was curious about the technology which was enabling that magic, allowing me to communicate with people in far away countries — and almost instantly receive a reply. So I eventually set up my own email server and service in 1995, allowing friends and family to participate in that wonderful new world.

But that was already a whopping 16 years after CompuServe began to offer “Email”. Then in 1993 AOL launched their internet email service, enabling their customers to send and receive digital communication from other internet users. Yahoo Mail followed in October 1997, offering free mailboxes to anybody.

These days, more than 300 billion emails are sent and received by more than 4 billion users around the world every day. Ensuring a safe and secure user experience for them has become the full time job of many of our employees as well as companies across the globe. AOL and Yahoo invented solutions and collaborated on technology such as the spam folder, the “mark as spam” button or fun acronyms such as ARF, FBL, BIMI, DKIM and DMARC. For the latter one of our own, Elizabeth Zwicky, even recently received a lifetime achievement award from the ISSA.

We are proud to be serving hundreds of millions of AOL and Yahoo customers every day. Now even more so that we are officially called Yahoo again.

Today we can do things in email which Ray most likely couldn’t even imagine. Technology like AMP4EMAIL allows us to not just communicate but get things done faster — still across borders and boundaries. I am still excited by this every day, I still geek out, play around with new technology on my own email server and I am still curious to see where the next years will take email.

If you have your own stories to share, if you are as passionate about email as we are or if you just want to chat with us: Reach out to mail-questions@yahooinc.com or follow us on social @yahoomail.