Why Yahoo emails are bouncing?

Great tidings at Yahoo

Yahoo has decided to disable, delete and then release email accounts that were inactive in more than 12 months. Once an account would be marked as inactive and later deleted, after 30 days the ID could be reused by someone else. This was advertised by Senior Vice President of the company, Jay Rossiter, as a great opportunity for their users to open an account with their desired ID, that was previously taken by someone else.

What does it mean to you?

Since March 2019, Yahoo has increased the amount of disabled dormant accounts, and because of that many email marketers have noticed a higher number of hard bounces within yahoo emails. It is a great struggle for most, as this affects email reputation of senders account and email deliverability is being lowered. It means that your emails might not even reach the inbox of your other legitimate subscribers or prospects!

What can you do to secure your sender reputation?

First of all, you must keep your email list verified and clean from undeliverable emails. To do so, use email verifier like Bouncer, as a mandatory step before sending your next campaign. This is the easiest and most effective method to eliminate hard bounces of your lists and to secure your email deliverability. You might also implement our real-time verification, that will protect your forms from sign-ups with mistyped, invalid or temporary emails. This will keep your database clean from the moment of capturing an email.

Pain of false positives

Unfortunately, Yahoo accounts that are marked as disabled are almost impossible to verify by email verification services or Email Service Providers. When yahoo account is in ‘disabled’ state, it means that the owner has been inactive for a while, however it could be reactivated once the user logs back in. The mailbox does actually exist, but emails sent to it bounce back. That is why such addresses, once scanned through with email verifier, might return a ‘deliverable’ statuses, when in fact they are undeliverable. This is what we call at Bouncer a ‘false positive’ result. The industry standard for Yahoo accounts is set at around 96% accuracy (within deliverable emails). However, it is dependable on the overall quality of the data and the source of it. Generally, the poorer the quality of the list, the higher the risk of false positive of the results.

Unengaged recipients – potential risk!

You might reduce such risk, by measuring the engagement of your list and removing unengaged subscribers of your lists. If the particular recipient hasn’t opened your emails in the past 90 days (to a maximum of 180), delete them from your databases. They are not active readers of your content, therefore you are not losing a potential lead, but actually, decreasing the risk of potential bounces in the future. It is crucial to spot those before their statuses are changed to disabled by Yahoo, and become undeliverable.
Not only bounces are risky for your email deliverability, but also possible SPAM complains. Once the account has been disabled and then released to be reused by someone else, the new owner might not be pleased to receive your content. If you are lucky, the user might only unsubscribe from your campaigns, but if your not, your email might be marked as SPAM. This can impact your deliverability very negatively, because you could be now portrayed as an illegitimate sender by Internet Service Providers, which will destroy your reputation, and in the end, your emails will land in SPAM folders instead of inboxes of your audience.

There is no simple solution to prevent bounces from Yahoo emails. To reduce the risks you must pay great attention to your engagement rates, instantly delete accounts with no activity, and regularly clean your email list!