By Marcel Becker, Director Product

At the core of the mail team’s mission at Verizon Media is to build the best consumer email applications for our Yahoo, AOL and Verizon users. Period.

We genuinely believe that our mutual customers deserve a unique experience which connects them to their passions. We want to enable them to discover the things which matter to them. We want to enable them to get the most out of their inbox.

Part of that quest is breaking down walls and collaborating with trusted senders and brands. We believe that together we can create a truly exceptional environment and deliver on the vision to reduce clutter and increase relevance.

We recognize that traditionally senders relied on tracking our customers’ behavior to understand when they open their email to inform existing features like “Send Time Optimization”. The goal of which is to increase the chance that our mutual customers will discover and engage with that email in the ever-growing and overwhelming stream of information available to them.

We believe that tracking our customers is wrong. But we also believe in the idea that they should be able to discover what is the most relevant to them.

That’s why we created “View Time Optimization”. This takes the guesswork out of “Send Time Optimization”. It allows us to deliver an email when users are actively engaging with their inbox. It ensures emails appear close to the top of the inbox and thus it’s improving the sender’s open rates, click-through rates, and overall ROI of their email marketing campaign. Email senders who have used VTO with their email campaigns saw increases in opens by 4x and clicks by 2x.

But it also allows us to cut down on the email noise, reduce non-relevant emails and deliver an overall better experience for our mutual customers.

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

By Sean McWilliams, Data Enthusiast

We want to provide the greatest email experience for our users. But we also understand the importance of providing the right tools for the sending community to help create that experience. We know senders need signals to help make their emails better and we believe in working with trusted partners to create more relevant content for our mutual customers.

In our view, the way these signals are provided to senders today is simply not working. Traditional panel and pixel-based tracking solutions can compromise the privacy and security of our users and risk violating our terms and policies. In addition to these important concerns, current solutions aren’t even all that accurate.

This is why we are announcing new email deliverability and performance feeds to help ensure reputable senders can get the trustworthy, aggregated insights they need to continue improving their emails but in a way that first and foremost protects our users. No more skirting privacy guidelines and embedding trackers just to end up with unreliable data. Our solution provides meaningful and actionable metrics while still keeping our users safe and their data protected.

Let’s work together to move the industry forward, away from tracking pixels and towards more accurate reporting that guarantees user safety and helps you understand your campaign performance even better. At the end of the day we all want the same thing - for our customers to receive the best emails possible!

Trusted senders who want to learn more about this program, please head over to our postmaster page.

By Lili Crowley, Lead Postmaster

What once was broken is now fixed. That is all. 

If you still run into issues or have questions, reach out to us directly at mail-questions@verizonmedia.com.

By Lili Crowley, Lead Postmaster

It seems when you build stuff, you also break things. Sometimes that’s a good thing as you are able to replace the broken things with something better.

But sometimes that thing you broke is really, really important.

It seems we broke our feedback request forms. That’s not a good thing.

The team is working frantically to get that back up and running so they can continue building the awesome new postmaster site.

We are very sorry for the inconvenience. In the meantime you can reach us at mail-questions@verizonmedia.com with urgent issues.

By Lily, Elizabeth, John & Marcel; Yahoo & AOL mail enthusiasts.

We are well into the new year and it is time to provide another update on merging the Yahoo and AOL Mail infrastructure. This one is short, and in a way bittersweet: It’s done.

We completed one of the biggest consumer mail migrations in a record time. And with (almost) no impact to all of our users and partners.

We want to raise a toast to all the team members who made that happen. And we want to raise a toast to all who came before us at AOL and Yahoo. The ones who pioneered the technology and solutions which are still alive and essential in our new mail system: ARF, FBL, the Spam Button, DKIM, DMARC — and the spam folder itself.

We continue to build on that legacy and provide even better experiences and solutions for our users and senders alike.

Thank you.

By Marcel Becker, Director Product Management

Our mission is to provide the best email experience for consumers. That means when our customer’s favorite brands send them 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 working with the sending community to help us achieve those goals and provide a great experience for our mutual customers.

Therefore, we are excited to be one of the first providers to participate in the AMP for email program, enabling fast, responsive and high-performing dynamic experiences from right within an email, and are working on bringing full support to our core applications soon.

You can reach out to us directly at mail-questions@verizonmedia.com with any questions you might have about this exciting new development to our email products.

By Lili Crowley, Lead Postmaster

On our quest to provide better tools and services for the sending community we are one step closer to our goal of a new postmaster site which supports all our consumer brands: Yahoo, AOL and Verizon.

We are proud to announce our new Verizon Media Postmaster Site. It’s still in early beta so look out for further updates as we continue to work on bringing you new tools and helpful information.

As one of the next steps we will shut down the AOL Postmaster Site and start redirecting it to the new experience.

If you have any comments, suggestions or questions about the new site, don’t hesitate and reach out to us at mail-questions@verizonmedia.com.

By Marcel Becker, Director Product Management

We are on the final leg of migrating AOL and Yahoo mail to the Verizon Media infrastructure and one great thing about that is we can leverage features from each platform and introduce them to a larger audience. One of them is one-click-unsubscribe.  

Our mission is to provide the best consumer email experience. That means making sure spam and other unwanted mail is out of our users’ mailboxes, while also giving them the best tools to help communicate their changing needs to senders.

One of those features is the ability to unsubscribe from emails that users no longer want in a simple, hassle-free and secure way. We do that in part by leveraging standards like list-unsubscribe headers. To increase coverage and to push those standards further in the industry, all Verizon Media based mailboxes now support one-click-unsubscribe, otherwise known as RFC8058.

This basically means that senders should add headers to their mails which look like this:

List-Unsubscribe-Post: List-Unsubscribe=One-Click
List-Unsubscribe: <https://example.com/unsubscribe/opaquepart>

Once a user unsubscribes, the sender will get a POST request which looks like this:

POST /unsubscribe/opaquepart HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 26

List-Unsubscribe=One-Click

Of course we continue to support “mailto:” unsubscribe headers as well.

Check out more about how we expose this feature to our users over at our Yahoo Mail Blog.

We strongly recommend senders to adopt this technology and include those headers as we believe that it will further improve the experience, trust & satisfaction of our mutual customers.

If you have specific questions about how this might affect your email campaigns, don’t hesitate and reach out to us at mail-questions@verizonmedia.com.

By Marcel Becker, Director Product Management

It’s a new year and we feel we owe everybody a little update. The first thing you will have noticed reading this blog is our new name and branding. We are now Verizon Media. While this will further align us with our parent, it will not affect how you send to our consumers at Yahoo, AOL or Verizon and it certainly will not affect how we work with the sending community. And on that front we are moving ahead to provide better tools and services to help you and our mutual customers. Our new postmaster site went to internal alpha and we are looking forward to sharing an early beta version with “friends & family” very soon.

We also wanted to address some questions we are still getting about how to treat AOL versus Yahoo recipients. While we are at the very, very tail end of moving the last AOL mailboxes to our common infrastructure, those recipients shouldn’t be treated differently since last summer. As always feel free to get in touch with us directly at mail-questions@verizonmedia.com if you have questions or comments.

By Marcel Becker, Director Product Management

Summer is upon us and we have made a lot of progress merging the AOL and Yahoo mail infrastructure under the OATH umbrella. We wanted to share an update and address some questions we have been receiving over the past months.

All mail sent to any of our OATH mail brands is now handled by our OATH MTAs. This means you should not treat recipients at AOL differently than recipients at Yahoo or expect us to handle or treat you differently depending on who you send mail to.

As indicated earlier this also means that all DMARC reports come from a single source covering all our brand domains.

We have started to actively migrate AOL mailboxes to the common infrastructure.  As such you will see a decrease in AOL’s FBL volume — and a matching increase in Yahoo’s FBL/CFL numbers. So if you do rely on the AOL FBL data and haven’t signed up for Yahoo’s FBL/CFL we suggest you do so. Please note that you need to DKIM sign your mail to be eligible for receiving FBL data going forward, and that issues with multiple DKIM signing and CFL have been resolved.

Please continue to use https://postmaster.yahoo.com and https://postmaster.aol.com while we work on a new OATH postmaster site. The best one ever.

If you do have questions feel free to reach out to us at mail-questions@oath.com.