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.

By Marcel Becker, Sr Director Product Management

Our mission is to deliver the best consumer email experience. That means investing in our applications we build and offer to our users. But it also means working with the email sender and developer community and offering unique features and tools which will further enhance emails and the experience for our mutual customers.

Today, we are delighted to unveil the new sender focused portal at https://developer.verizonmedia.com/mail. It highlights features like AMP for email, BIMI, Promotions and others. It’s a place to find documentation and examples but also get support and questions answered.

This is only the beginning.

We’d love to hear what you think about the new portal! Reach out to us with suggestions or questions: mail-questions@verizonmedia.com.

By Marcel Becker, Director Product Management

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 are now proud to announce the launch of AMP for Email in Yahoo Mail - an email experience that is only the best for our customers.

It will deliver on that promise as it will allow our users to get things done within the inbox, making email truly actionable without the need to click links and navigate or sign into other websites or apps on the web or mobile devices.

While we currently limit AMP support to Yahoo Mail on the web, we are excited to share our learnings to make the AMP for Email ecosystem even stronger. We look forward to rolling out further AMP support for AOL Mail and our mobile platforms in the near future.

More information is available on our developer portal or you can reach out to us directly at amp-email@verizonmedia.com.

By Marcel Becker, Director Product

In these unprecedented times email is one of the crucial tools used by people, companies, organizations, and governments to stay connected, share updates, and provide critical information.  Unfortunately, criminals are exploiting consumers’ uncertainty during this pandemic and leveraging email as a tool for malicious attacks.

One especially pervasive method we’ve seen bad actors use lately is phishing. Criminals are sending communications from email addresses that appear to come from trusted domains - particularly government and health organizations.  Determined malicious actors can readily spoof the identities of those organizations, particularly the ones which the public relies upon as a trusted source of information.  The consequences of these attacks can be damaging, from identity fraud to theft.

As a 15-year member of the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG), we believe that just like solving the pandemic crisis itself requires collaboration and cooperation, we need to work together as email service providers, mailbox providers, security vendors, and industry organizations to protect those targeted institutions and consumers.

Today, we are proud to support M3AAWG in its commitment to enforcing email authentication policies, outlined in this blog post that urges all senders to be more vigilant in protecting consumers against abuse.

By Lili Crowley, Lead Postmaster

If you are sending a lot of mails to us, you probably already have noticed that our MTA calls itself something else: Atlas.

That’s just us rolling out updated technology. How you deliver mail or what you should expect will not change. If you see anything weird, please reach out to our team at https://postmaster.verizonmedia.com.

By Marcel Becker, Director Product

A couple of weeks ago, Verizon Media announced a new delivery capability for trusted senders and brands called View Time Optimization (VTO), and we wanted to address a few questions about how it works.

What is VTO?

VTO helps organize the inbox, increases relevance, and improves the consumer email experience by elevating the email messages that users have opted into and actually want to engage with.

How does VTO work?

VTO takes the emails that consumers have subscribed to, and delivers those messages when users are actively engaging with their inbox. These are emails that users would regularly receive from trusted brands, not ads that companies pay to place. The content remains the same, and the only thing that’s adjusted is the time the email is delivered.

When users access their inbox, they access our server. Now, with VTO, we can queue email messages, automatically triggering their delivery once our server is accessed.

How does VTO help consumers?

VTO allows us to cut down on the email noise, reduce non-relevant emails and deliver an overall better experience for our mutual customers. VTO helps customers engage with relevant emails they’ve opted into right away, making it easier for them to organize and manage their inbox.

How does VTO deal with user data and privacy?

VTO doesn’t use tracking and doesn’t share or sell any personal data with either the sender or the brand. Nobody is manually tracking when users access their inboxes, nor is the data used for ad targeting. Instead, VTO allows us to deliver permission-based emails right when Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail customers check their inbox via a simple, automated queuing mechanism. Neither those signals nor any personal data is shared with either the sender or the brand.

Does VTO help brands place ads in email?

No. VTO optimizes the delivery of emails to a brand’s subscriber - emails from existing email campaigns that would have been delivered with or without VTO. We don’t sell access to our users’ inboxes and VTO does not help brands place ads or send spam. All anti spam and anti abuse methods remain in effect. Users can still block or unsubscribe from unwanted communications. This is about helping the brands you’ve subscribed to (retailers, nonprofits, etc.) reach you more effectively.

How is VTO different from Send Time Optimization? 

VTO is a privacy-minded evolution of Send Time Optimization (STO). Traditionally, with STO, senders have relied on tracking user behavior to understand when someone might open an email. STO is supposed to give the sender enough data to know what the optimal delivery time is for their marketing messages. Unfortunately, STO is challenged in a number of ways.

1. Privacy – At Verizon Media, we believe that tracking email users is wrong, which is why we’ve taken proactive steps to prevent it, making certain forms of tracking a violation of our Terms of Service. While we’re one of the first major email providers to do this, and have been an innovator in this regard, we believe it will become the norm in the future. This will limit STO’s effectiveness and create the need for privacy-friendly alternatives for marketers.
   
2. Timing – STO is designed to increase the chance that users will discover and engage with an email in the ever-growing and overwhelming stream of information available to them. Unfortunately, STO doesn’t ensure that an email is delivered at the exact moment a user is checking their inbox. This means that many STO-delivered campaigns are still unseen and ignored.
   

We are proud to bring this solution to the market, giving trusted senders and brands a better path forward. We abide by and define email sender best practices which has been a long standing approach of ours.

If you want to know more about this program, reach out to us.