About a week ago we started to get reports from some publishers that a lot of Yahoo addresses were bouncing out. They were concerned at the up tick, but looking at the deliverability analyses we saw here there was nothing wrong – FeedBlitz was responding correctly to bounces (aka NDRs) from Yahoo. Yahoo does periodically purge what it considers to be abandoned or junk accounts, and it just seemed to us that this was perhaps an extreme example of that.
As it turns out, however, not so much.
Email marketing industry experts Return Path had heard about the problems with Yahoo bounces from a wide number of email services, and had gone on to discover that the cause was a bug over at Yahoo. Evidently, Yahoo had been misreporting hard bounces between (roughly) August 11th and August 14th, 2012. (Intriguingly, the post that alerted the industry to this is no longer on the Return Path blog, even though its title is visible in the right side bar at ESP reputation site https://senderscore.org/ - Hmmm).
So, this week, we’ve brought the affected addresses back – there’s nothing you need to do yourself, FeedBlitz has made the required fix for you in your lists. You may see a large number than usual of Yahoo accounts back in your weekly subscriber summaries this morning, and that reflects our bringing the readers back for you. Since Yahoo has corrected the issue, future Yahoo bounces are real. You may see a bunch of them bounce back out after your next mailing, as there may be some overlap between the buggy reports and properly dead accounts.
We also took advantage of this work to deal with a small number of AOL accounts that had incorrectly been marked as persistently undeliverable; that was our issue and not AOL’s (or Yahoo’s, obviously!).
